Hi We also don't have Project Managers, per se, but Marketing Managers who manage projects, so their roles aren't typical of a PM like in a big company or ad agency, and they don't necessarily think like a typical PM, which was a big hurdle, just to get them to embrace the switchover from a Word document with deadlines they wrote down from a calendar on the wall, to Workfront. One thing that was helpful to jumpstart our leap into project management software (so late to the game! We did this last year only!) was we had several meetings that included the entire team where we mapped out the "ideal" steps to complete different types of projects (direct mail, email, landing page), very detailed, on post it notes on the wall, and then transcribed that into a list , debated it some more, and everyone signed on. Then, I sat with each team that owned a step/task and had them agree to how long they wanted to do that task, and how many hours of actual work would it take. This enabled me to make templates to launch with – which was slow, we launched with a few projects that we could track and monitor and make sure we understood what we were doing. Since our projects take so long, this was a slow long road. After that, we got together again and cut out about half the tasks because there were way too many and it was annoying to everyone to keep up with. We basically have milestone tasks, and a list of the types of tasks people typically forget to do during a project, so they have a checklist of reminders (update the website, notify xx that this is launching etc) Then, a couple months after that I made iterations of the templates into more realistic timelines. For example, when I added up the "ideal" number of days, a direct mail piece would take us 6 months. What we found was that every task was late every single time and it wasn't going to happen. In the real world we do them in 3 months (ha ha really 2 months but we have a goal of 3-4 months) but with the framework in place we were able to have better insight into where we could cut out days. Since we don't log hours, and there is a very big resistance to doing this ("we are NOT factory workers"), and some people still don't mark their tasks complete with any accuracy, we still haven't been able to prove with charts and graphs where the delays are happening (we know where the delays are happening, we just can't prove them with charts and graphs). All that said, the part everyone embraced very quickly was Proof. Now, if we were to get rid of it, there would be a riot, and when partners email us PDFs to proof everyone sees the difference in time saving and collaboration.
