Digital Project Management Training for Agencies with Ben Aston

Hello, welcome into the Agency Journey podcast today. This is me, Gray, and I've got the pleasure of bringing on Ben Astin from the digital Project Manager onto the Agency Journey podcast. Ben, how you doing, man?

Good. Thanks for having me today.

Well, I'm excited to have you in. So you've got a cool story of being in the agency world, no longer working in an agency, specifically being focused on the project management space, which is one of the main pain points obviously that we run into that every agency listening is going to have experienced, but that we run into all the time in the agencies that we work with. So I'd love to, just by way of context, as we're jumping in here, maybe hit on your agency background and what got you interested in project management to begin with.

Yeah, so I actually began my career in above the line agencies in London in the uk. So I started off my career actually working on the Stella Artois account, producing print and TV ads. And that was a summer internship that was kind of a bit like Pop Idol. And actually, as it turned out, one of the things, similarly to Pop Idol, at the end of the internship, at the end of the summer, I didn't get the, I didn't get the job. And I didn't get the job because they asked me one question which was, if you were going to do anything, if you could be anything, if you could be anyone and not work in advertising, what would you be? What would you do? And so I said, I think maybe I want to be in a boy band. And apparently the feedback I got was that that wasn't an appropriate answer. So after that failure, I, yeah, I went to Wonderment Interactive and it was there that I discovered that, hey, there are some agents out there who marry my interest in digital and technology. I've been making websites since I was about 13 and I found there were agencies that were doing this professionally. It was advertising and it was technology and digital and I started off in account management there, but soon realized that my kind of hands on knowledge of how to build things and how things were put together, how things worked, really lent itself to, to managing the projects themselves. So I started, I made that transition into project management and actually for me that transition into project management was a bit of an accident because when I started off my career in project management, I was kind of, it was a producer role and I was told, oh, it's kind of the same as account management, which is what I had been doing, but it was totally different. I was all of a sudden expected to create a timeline an estimate, a statement of work and a project plan that, you know, to deliver a project. And I hadn't really been given any training to do that. And so really, that was my baptism by fire. It was, it was really tough, but I got through it eventually and that really began my transition into project management. And. Yeah. Have spent the last 15 years working in different agencies in the UK, in London, in Vancouver in Canada, and also down in the States. Most recently an agency called 3rd and Grove.

Wow, that's. It's kind of ironic to hear you describe the transition and the challenges associated with going from account management to a PM role, but in a ton of especially smaller agencies, that's super common to see that happen or to see people just conflate account management with project management. It's all the same thing. This person can run the relationship and also run the details of the project and internal team at the same time. I'd imagine you probably see that a lot.

Yeah. And, you know, I think they can, but I think they need to be equipped and trained to do that.

Right.

And I think the challenge is as account managers, we, you know, we're. We're passionate about the client, we're passionate about their brand, we're really interested in retaining them and keeping them happy. In repeat business, those kind of things are really important. And that is at odds with the reality of project management, where you're trying to deliver something and you're trying to work within a client's budget and their timeline and you're trying to deliver success, but within certain parameters. And the challenge of wearing those two hats of account and project management is that those, those hats don't often work well together. So the reality is with project management, we have to say no to the client. Sometimes you can't have that, but this is what you can have. Whereas an account manager would just want to say, of course you can have that. I don't need to talk to the team first or I don't need to consult anyone. We're going to make you happy. And I think that's where the challenges lie, particularly with people who make that transition from account management to project management. We're used to saying yes and then figuring it out later, whereas the project manager in us needs to think, okay, let me talk to the team first and let's work out some options that are viable within your budget, within the timeline that we've got, within the tech stack that we're working with, and make something that works for you and delivers results. But it's also viable within the parameters of the project.

Right. How did. So right now, as you're associated with the Digital Project Manager, which is just the digital project manager dot com, how did that all come about? And what's the story of. I know you're working with agencies now and leveraging some of that experience, but how did that all get started? And what does that look like today?

Yeah, so, you know, it started off as an ebook idea. And I thought when I was making the transition from moving to the UK to Vancouver in Canada, I thought, hey, I'm going to move to a new country. There's going to be long dark nights where I'll have nothing to do. Why don't I write an ebook? I started off on this mission to write 100 tips for digital project management based really on my experience of making that transition from account to project management. Then I figured out, hey, well, after I've written this ebook, what's going to happen to it? Nothing. No one's going to know about it. So I started the blog and that's how the digitalprojectmanager.com started, as a series of tips that I released. And really what was interesting was that over time it began to get more traffic and more traction. We now get about 300,000 visitors each month, about 30,000 email subscribers. And it's become a thing. And it's become a thing because it's a useful resource for people who are learning to manage and deliver projects. So we've expanded it to include how to guides, thought leadership pieces, we've got a podcast of our own, we've got an online training school called the DPM School. And also we've also recently launched membership as well. So we're giving people the templates and ongoing professional development through monthly workshops so people can get better at what they do easily. And that's really what kind of our passion is. It's equipping people to deliver projects better.

So, and I assume that the school was the school component of it, the online training piece, was that the first attempt to monetize this side project, passive project?

No, it wasn't actually. So what I realized a few years back was that because we had a captive audience of project managers and decision makers made decisions about tools, project management tools, project management tools started contacting me and saying, hey, can I be featured on your website? And to start with, I said, yes. And then I realized, hold on, why aren't I charging people for this? So actually, the first monetization of that was through advertising, so. So, yeah, we feature project management tools on the site and now we've extended that with a whole media kit of a whole load of different options. But yeah, we started off monetizing it through advertising and then introduced the DPM School and most recently monetizing it through membership. And the beauty of monetizing it through membership, obviously it's more grassroots and it allows us to create the content that our members really need and want. So yeah, that's a pivot that I'm really excited about.

That makes sense. The project management side of things, which is a part of our story. Having built a PM software and then ultimately realizing the root problem that we were trying to solve, like project management was kind of a symptom of a root problem that we were trying to solve, but a crucial piece. That question is like non stop. There's the agency fascination with, we've got a bunch of people who are into marketing and who are into tech and tools and so the fascination with the latest shiny thing out there and constantly want to know like, what tool should I use? What tool should I use? And the reality as you know and you guys teach is like, it's not the tool, is not the core problem. Certainly need the right tool for the problem that you're trying to solve, but your approach to it is so impactful. How do you deal with that question when you get asked by an agency saying, what, what tool should I use for project management?

Do you know? Is it? Yeah, it's a, it's that million dollar question, isn't it? So, and I think even when people come on our DPM school course, one of the things they want to know is, well, what tool should I be using? And everybody hates the answer. Well, it depends. And you could probably use 20 different tools and they probably work just as well for you. So that's what I try and encourage people to think about, is not really about the tool. Because the maturity of project management tools now is such that there is a lot of parity between tools and lots of different tools can help us manage projects. But more fundamentally, we've got to think about how that tool aligns with our process and the way that we like to work. It's got to be a tool that's accepted through the departments. I think often agencies default to JIRA because someone, they think, oh well, this is a tech decision and the tech lead says we should use jira. So everyone kind of jumps on jira and then you realize that no one in strategy, UX or design wants to use jira or you have someone From Business Development, who says we can just use Trello with a load of Power UPS or something like that. So I think it's got to be something that the whole agency is bought into. And I think that adoption process is important as well. Helping once you have decided on a tool or transitioning into a new tool, test driving it on a few different projects, types of projects that your agency does before committing wholesale to a new tool.

Right, right. Are you allowed to disclose what tool you guys run to use? The Digital Project Manager?

We actually use Trello. We have a bit of a joke and that is that when things start getting out of hand, the joke is that we just create a new board. So reset. The challenge with Trello is that you can have too many boards. And I love the fact that it's simple and that it's not too complicated. But yeah, it has its limitations. It certainly has its limitations. It's very limited. But for what we're doing, which is, you know, basically we're producing lots of content. We're. We're running projects in a more Kanban way where we've got a backlog of things and we're moving them through a process. And Trello is a Kanban tool and it's a great way to run, keep track of projects.

So, and this might be, I'm sure this is covered inside the school piece and the membership piece in a lot of detail. But at a high level, what is your process for walking people through, kind of getting up to speed on what they ought to be doing at their agency in terms of project management? Are you looking at the types of work that they're like assuming there's some sort of assessment piece and then kind of implementing a prioritized plan from there. But what are some of the common steps that you guys take?

Yeah, so I think the important thing first is to understand the big picture of what is going on here. So understanding that complete project life cycle. So from project initiation right through to project delivery, how do you get from A to B? What are the steps that you go through and helping people codify that process? So let's just write this down. What are the 10 steps at a high level? And then how can we drill down off those 10 steps and think about the kind of the activities that happen in each of those steps? And I think sometimes people get kind of lost in thinking, well, is this agile, is this waterfall, what is this? And they want to put a name on it, on their process of how they get from A to B, but it really is Just how you get from A to B. And I think sometimes we can make that more complex than it needs to be. So I think first thing is understanding how you currently operate, how you get from A to B, and then thinking about how you do optimize that journey. So what are the things that you can think about running in parallel? What are the things that you can front load? What are the things that you can do earlier on in the process to give you more flexibility later in the process? But really when we're talking about kind of process and the project lifecycle and we tackle this in the first week of our DPM school is thinking about, okay, how can we optimize our process to make, to give it more agility so that we can deliver results sooner, so that the client can see some value earlier on in the process, so we can get something shipped so that the client gets value earlier on in the process, so that the client's involved throughout the process and there's less misalignment so that we can get the team engaged in solving the problem rather than just prescribing what the solution is necessarily. So those are all kind of agile themes, but I'm not for a moment saying that, hey, let's all follow Scrum. And I think there's a misunderstanding that Scrum, because they've got a two day course, have kind of got the solution to how we should deliver projects. I don't think they have. I think it's great for software development, but I think people think, oh well, we want to be agile, how can we be agile? Let's follow scrum. I think that's a really bad idea. So I think what we do in the DPM school is take a really good look at people's overall, the project lifecycle, how we deliver projects, think about the current process and then providing more agility in that process. And then through the rest of the DPM school, what we're doing is walking through that project lifecycle. So project initiation is really important. How we define projects right at the beginning, how we think about what success looks like, both for the client, also for the agency and the team. We've got to get everybody engaged in the project. So we talk about how we can kick off projects properly with proper briefs, proper engagement of the team and go through a discovery process to really get to the, to the best solution possible and then we go through the planning process. So I think that there's a huge amount of value in trying to plan the project. Now some people would say, hey, we don't need project plans, let's just do this agile, whatever that means. But I think there's a lot of value in saying hey, we're trying to get to B, so how might we get there? And the reality is that we will change and pivot on the journey along the way. But if there's a plan, we can then adapt that plan rather than having no plan at all and be more definitive really with the clients about how long it's going to take, how much it's going to cost and what exactly we're going to deliver. Teach people how to create timelines, estimates and statements of work in such a way that it covers their ass. We don't want to over commit to things and we want to manage our clients expectations. And then in the course we also talk about managing and controlling projects. So the bulk of a project is that manage and control phase where we've gone through initiation, we've planned the project, we're now in, you know, we've set sail and obviously things go wrong, things go off the rails. So how do we prevent them from going off the rails in the first place? And then how do we get them back on track when they've gone wrong? And then the final kind of component of the course is really all about, is all about leadership. And I think my kind of perspective on project management, particularly within digital agencies, is that the PMs can play a really pivotal role in leading the team, in leading the project. And I think sometimes project managers can be relegated to an administrator role where they're the ones pulling a report from the project management tool, they're the ones kind of just giving admin updates or assigning tasks or taking notes. But what I'm proposing is a more leadership role where the project manager is the guardian of the project, delivering results. And that's why we do projects in the first place, is because we're making an investment, because we're expecting some earned value, we're expecting a return on that investment. And so what we talk about in the final week of the course is really all about how we lead ourselves. And I think that self leadership is really important and then how we can lead our teams by creating a vision, setting a vision for the team, motivating the team and helping them, facilitating them, serving them so that they can deliver the best project possible.

That's a pretty comprehensive overview. That first piece that you were talking about, about like first me to define what the journey is just reminds me of the experience of working with so many agencies who say Kind of the common answer is like, well, we don't have, we don't have a process. Every client is different. Which is true. And it is a huge problem. You need to define the client journey. But the part that's not true about it is like, whether you have it documented or not, there is some process, there is some way that you go about doing this. And if we just took the time to identify what exactly are you doing. So many things start to become clear as you realize this piece is out of order or this piece is extraneous, or this piece is repetitive of something that we did earlier. But because we don't have a document or don't have it somewhere, we, we don't have it down. There's so much that can be streamlined once you start to put it down and start to look at what are the commonalities, it might all be custom now, what are the commonalities and the core pieces that we need to have? And what sticks out to me too is all the agencies who like Agile. Among marketing agencies right now is a huge buzzword and a huge direction that people want to pursue. And many of the times the honest answer for, well, why do you want to be an agile shop? Is, well, this agency who I perceive as being bigger and farther along in their journey, they're agile. So obviously it must be working. It's like, yeah, that's not the right reason, it's not the right motivation. Starting with that assessment piece makes a ton of sense as far as just trying to understand what are you actually trying to do? What does a project look like?

Yeah, and I think the reality that many people fail to recognize when they decide, okay, let's be agile is that the amount of client engagement that it requires and client trust is massive. Because, okay, let's say, let's define Agile as being a Scrum process. So who's the product owner? Is it someone on the agency side or is it the client? If it's the client, they need to be really engaged and they need to be grooming the backlog that all of the, all of the tasks that need to be done to deliver the project. And most often if we're working on marketing with a marketing client, they haven't got the technical expertise or know how to groom the backlog to define what needs to be done properly. So then you say, okay, well it's a split role and then, okay, well, who's making the decisions? So there's that challenge with the product owner role with Scrum that I have an issue with and also just that idea of trust. Like the whole, the whole idea with Agile is you deliver something better because you don't define it fully and then you just iterate on it and improve and make it better, which is a great idea. The challenge is if you'll say working on a website for a client and you say, okay, well let's work on this for four sprints. What if at the end of four sprints you haven't got a website yet? So you need to have the knowledge of how long these things take and be able to manage the client's expectations. But I think sometimes in a biz dev or sales environment, it can be tempting to sell an agile approach through to a client. It's a quick win because you're like, hey, this sounds good, we're not committing to anything. But actually the client's expecting something for their money. The client at the end of the, at the end of the 4 sprints and the 100k the client has spent, they're expecting a website. Because that's what you talked about at the beginning. It doesn't matter that you describe the process as agile. We've got to manage their expectations and that expectation management and doing it through documentation. And I'm not a big fan of loads of heavy documentation, but we need to have a timeline and an estimate and there needs to be a plan, there needs to be a something that says, hey, this is what we're doing and this is what we're not doing and we might be able to do more, but as it stands right now, this is what we know we can deliver, this is what we hope we.

Might be able off on pet peeves or for us to nerd out and talk about project management and for it to come off to an agency owner as overwhelming. And look, I'm a five to eight person agency. I'm really, for the first time running into a situation where we don't know everything that's going on with every project for the first time. That's where this transition point trips up an awful lot of people is they need to hand off the project management piece. And so there's this common question of like, well, do I need to know all the project management stuff first? Do I just hire someone? Do I transition someone in my agency to become that project manager? Like, how does this whole thing come together for. And I realize some of this relates to what you guys are doing with the DPM school and then the membership program, but do you have advice for an agency owner who's at that point now where there's not a dedicated, there's no one sitting in the DM role and they don't know whether I need to learn it first or do I hand it off to someone else and just trust that they're going to know the right things to do or learn the right things to do. How would you advise that agency?

Yeah, yeah. So yeah, I've had this situation recently actually with one of our agencies we work with called Turtle, who they're a product design shop and yeah, they have this exact challenge. It's hey, we're getting bigger, we don't have time to do this. What level of person should we hire? And I think the first thing I'd recommend is the agency owner needs to have an understanding of project management to begin with. And I think that is really important. And we've had lots of people, lots of agency owners take our DPM school course just to get that, just so that they're talking the same language with project managers and also with clients as well. So having that shared terminology and understanding and really value around project planning and project delivery I think is really important. So I think getting, having that baseline understanding of hey, this is how we should deliver projects is the most important thing because even if you don't then hire someone else, I think you'd be in a better spot to manage the projects yourself. But then when it comes to hiring someone. So yeah, I think there are two options, I think, I think, and both work. I think hiring someone who's an experienced person, project manager, is a good idea. Who has delivered projects at an agency before, who can come to you with some ideas on what they've seen working and not working. I think that can work really well. And equally, we've had lots of people who've, the founder of the agency has taken our course and then said to one of their team, hey, I think you'd be a really good project manager. Because then they understand what being a project manager is all about. It's being the leader, it's being detail orientated, it's facilitating the team to do their best work and they cherry pick someone and say, hey, I'm going to send you on the DPM school course and you're going to learn a bit about project management and at the end of that they're going to be confident in delivering a project and then they can work with the founder of the agency to work through. Okay, well, what does this look like in our agency? How can we define that process that we're talking about minute ago. And how can we ensure that we're improving our delivery process? And with the agencies that I've worked with before, what I think people see as they begin to apply more project management to their projects is that they begin to become more efficient. And they become more efficient because they start estimating their projects properly. They become more efficient because they start managing their resources and their team more effectively, because they're actually thinking about, okay, well, what's our team capacity? How much can we actually deliver? And there's less stress because people are thinking about timelines better and actually planning them out so that people aren't having to stay late and work at the weekends because someone thought of creating a project plan and worked out how many resources there were and how to stop them overlapping. So I think there's a massive benefit not just to freeing up time, but also increasing efficiency and managing more profitable projects as well. I think sometimes without project management in place, we can kind of have this big picture view of agency that profit and loss and it's like, hey, well, overall we're making some money, we're all getting paid. And at the end of the year there's some, you know, there's a bit of change left over, which is great. Rather than looking at it at a more granular level on a project by project basis, on a department by department basis, on a phase of the project by phase of the project basis. And as we begin to uncover. Okay, well, and explore. Okay, well, let's look at how much time we estimated for design. Are we coming in budget on that or are we going way over on that? And if we're going way over, why is that? Should we change our estimate or change our process? And it's those kind of questions that without a project management focus, we kind of just forget about them because, you know, they're not sexy, they're not exciting. But ultimately, when you think about what's going to deliver results to the bottom line is it's becoming more efficient in the way that you deliver projects.

Right. Most agencies have no idea what their profitability by client is. And if you ask them, for the most part, at least in my experience, it corresponds perfectly to revenue. So whatever the highest revenue client is, the assumption is that's also my highest profit client. How could it not be? They're paying the most money. So even if we, I know we do a little extra, they demand some stuff that's out of scope, but we go along with it because they pay us a lot of money. And if you actually Dive into it. You'll see how rarely those things line up nearly the way that they organize them first once you get them on a system. And it's really hard to take action until you understand what those pieces look like. So I want to throw one last objection or question at you and then I want to get info on the course and membership and I'll finally stop bugging you here. But is there a project size or a retainer size where project management doesn't make sense? And the core objection here is our retainers are $1,500, $2,000 a month. Like we don't really have enough margin in here to do full scale project management. We can pretty much keep track of what's going on. Like when does having someone serve in kind of a formal PM role, does it always make sense? Is there a time where it's too small or, you know, I'm doing a $3,000 website build. Do I need to estimate how the project is going to go? Is there a point, is there a cutoff point that you've seen?

Yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't necessarily prescribe a number because people charge different amounts for different things. Right. So I'm working with another agency that, a performance marketing agency, similar kind of situation. They work with retainer clients and yeah, that, you know, the clients pay a monthly fee. That's not, that's not significant. So yes, there isn't a, in that situation, there's not a dedicated project manager. But what there is is a process that's in place and the, in, in their situation, what the strategist takes on the role as. Or yeah of the role of project management. So the process has been defined and someone takes ownership for how, you know, being accountable for how much time is allocated to do tasks and how much time is actually spent, what's being delivered. So yeah, you might not need a dedicated project manager, but you certainly need someone being responsible for the numbers. And yeah, with those small retained clients, that is business as usual. Like that is, that's not a project, but somebody needs to own that and the team needs to be equipped to think about how they're gonna deliver value to the client for that retainer. So they keep paying that retainer and make sure that you're not over servicing. And I think that can often happen with retainers on. You know, if you've got a whole bunch of clients paying a couple of grand each month, what typically happens is that you overservice those clients and they get, that's just what happens unless you're keeping a really good eye on how much time you're spending because you want to keep the clients happy. But if you're not creating weekly status reports and saying to the clients, okay, this week we spent eight hours and those eight, in those eight hours we did X, Y and Z. Next week we're going to spend four hours because we spent eight hours this week. And managing their expectations around that is really important. So now it doesn't need a dedicated project manager, but it needs someone to think about project management and managing the budgets.

Either way, you still need, I think it probably boils down to leadership. You need someone to lead what's going on and you also need the leadership to have defined what the process is to deliver what we set out to deliver. So that's a great answer. Okay, so for folks who want to learn more about the way that you can support agencies in their growth either through the course of membership, where would you point people to find more about those resources?

Yeah, so you can head to thedigitalprojectmanager.com to check out our website, which is really a platform stacked full of resources. In there as well you will find our training offering which is called the DPM School. You can also go to dpmschool.com and find out more about the Digital Project Manager School and our seven week course. We run them regularly throughout the year, so you can check out that. And also you'll find on the digitalprojectmanager. Com all about our membership which is stacked full of templates and our monthly workshops. And yeah, check out the site.