A common circumstance in creative and technical production environments is that the overall coordination between the various functional teams doing the work usually ranges from haphazard to chaotic. Between account, creative, copy, tech – let alone BA, SEO and other niche specialists – there is often an overall sense that no one really knows what’s going on. Ironically, even teams dedicated to user centered design are often unable to create systems of information sharing and group collaboration that are user friendly and effective for themselves.
Many believe that the harnessing of team chaos is the project manager’s job, and if the team is out of synch, the PM is largely to blame. The underlying premise is “no matter how dysfunctional we are, you need to make it work for all of us.” Admittedly, there is truth to this sentiment – after all, it is what we signed up for. However, there is an underlying factor that often contributes to the original dysfunction, and bringing it to light might help teams solve the issues of low coordination, low productivity and low morale.
The prototypical agency model is a matrix organization that has a warp and a weft of functional and project operations. Team members like art directors and technical developers are pulled side to side by project managers, as well as up and down by their own department managers. This dynamic creates tension and ambiguity in terms of priorities and procedures. Management will often take a top-down approach – speaking to all groups individually, shuttling complaints and issues back and forth, and mandating new “processes” that are disjointed, out of context and only nominally useful.
The key, IMHO, is to recognize the challenge of the agency matrix environment and solve coordination issues as if it were a UX design challenge (which it is…). The project managers can not figure out on their own how everyone else wants to communicate and collaborate, just like a they would not decide where to place information and links on a web page. Determinations of meeting schedules, status updates, project plan formats, etc. should be made with the user (AKA team members) needs in mind, and not just what the PM states is “the process.”
The discovery into the user needs must take into account that the users, in this case, are simultaneously members of a project team and functional department, and sometimes those roles might carry contradictory preferences and requirements. While simpler to do, ignoring this fact only creates more imbalance and disharmony. Getting functional leadership and project management onto the same page to create a holistic salve for agency dynamics is easier said than done, but recognizing the implications of being in a matrix structure is a good place to start.
RightStartPM 