Running your own shop is great, but no one does it forever. As an owner, you may have thought about selling your company. Perhaps you’re actively exploring the idea now. So how do you best prepare your business for sale, and what should you expect in the process? Gabe Levine and Josh Barrett, Principals and Attorneys at Matchstick, join us to offer insights on mergers and acquisitions for digital agencies.
As a digital project manager at Viget, Ryan Schaefer has led a variety of projects including custom CMS builds, conversion analytics sprints, iterative design systems and native app design and development. In this guest post, he shares tips for successfully managing a native app build. Read on for insights, and catch his session at the 2019 Digital PM Summit in Orlando, this October 21–22, for a better understanding of best practices, responsibilities and core duties.
Project management is probably one of the more difficult roles in this industry to define. Which can make it equally tough to determine a career development plan or support strategy for the DPMs in your organization. Lina Calin, Project Manager at Sparkbox and a Digital PM Summit speaker/alum, has some ideas to help. In this guest post, she shares five ways to invest in your DPMs to boost your team, organization and bottom line.
Summer is here and many within the Bureau community are taking the time to pick up a new book, plug into a fresh podcast or tidy up tools and operations. This month, we have recommendations on services, tools and reads to help improve the way you work and offer inspiration.
How do digital services firms compensate their employees and owners, and how does that compensation relate to overall profitability and revenue growth? To establish usable data and surface insights, we partnered with Promethean Research to survey digital shops across North America and beyond. Crunching through the numbers, we found common themes across firm size, firm age, specialization, location and turnover rate. Read on for key findings.
What is the most important design skill? The answer may surprise you. Aarron Walter, VP of Design Education at InVision, shares what the research tells us, as well as six tips to make the greatest impact possible.
The little things seem so basic, yet they’re vital to the success of our projects, teams and organizations. Looking forward to this year’s Digital PM Summit, we were reminded of a thought-provoking session delivered by Sam Barnes, Senior Development Manager at Marks and Spence. As Sam illustrated, the little things make all the difference. Here are 10 basics that every effective leader gets right.
Are there challenges for design leadership? Absolutely. Is it about qualified talent and experience and proper education in both business and design? Yes. But the biggest challenge to design leadership may be realizing that the fight for acceptance is over. Now it’s time to shift our mindsets to one of integrating design in with the other established business disciplines while maintaining a touch of disruption.
Looking for insider intel on the latest and greatest tools, services and resources in the industry? Look no further, it’s the monthly resource roundup! Each month, we pull together top recommendations shared by the Bureau community. This edition, you’ll find project management books, invoicing tools, accessibility guides, productivity hacks and much, much more. Get in here, get up to speed and keep a good thing going by sharing favorites with your team and friends.
Need help convincing your boss to send you to the Digital PM Summit? We’ve got you covered with reasons why you need to be there, and sample verbiage to tailor to your own role, team and organization.
“As PMs, we are downplaying our soft skills and stifling our personalities. It’s time to take up space.” Jenna Trunzo, Globant project manager and a Digital PM Summit speaker alum, shares her story of becoming a project manager by accident, embracing personality over process and protocol and five BIG tricks to get better at your job without feeling like you’re two different people in and out of work.
If you’re a fan of hands-on classroom-style training, you’re in luck. We’re hosting a series of workshops this year to help you improve how you run your operations, process, projects, team collaboration and more. Join us to uncover best practices and tried-and-true tactics. You’ll leave with new strategies and ideas to implement right away.
We’ve partnered with Promethean Research to put together the most complete salary survey for digital services that we’re aware of. Like all good things, it’s gonna take a little work, but the reward is gonna be worth it! With your help in providing this data, we hope to identify links between employee composition, pay rates, benefits, experience, etc. and revenue growth and profitability. Initially, the only way to get this data will be to participate in the survey, so please share it with others you think would benefit. The more shops participating the better.
Spring has sprung and things are busy, busy in the Bureau community. This past month, there were plenty of conversations focused on agency operations, new business development, pricing, negotiations and teams. We also saw a flurry of recommended tool and resource trading. Check out all the hand-picked favorites below and join us at an upcoming event or workshop.
As the “leadership” part of the design leadership equation grows, many are grappling with new roles, responsibilities and challenges. Design leaders are pressed to prove the business value of design, determine organizational structures, manage DesignOps and much more. Join us for our first-ever Design Leadership Days, an opportunity to connect with fellow design leaders to share, network and grow together.
After months of review and scouting game-changing speakers and content, we’re excited to release this year’s agenda. With workshops, keynotes, presentations, breakout discussions, interactive sessions, lightning talks, networking and more, this year’s summit offers inspiration, actionable tactics and hands-on learning to help DPMs working at both agencies and in-house teams. So what can you expect to gain by joining us in October? Let’s walk through six DPM truths and some can’t-miss sessions from the agenda.
Are you experiencing missed expectations, poor communication, missed deliveries or worse yet, unhappy clients? If that’s the case, you’re probably losing profit and team morale is running low. But worry not, you can fix that! Brett Harned will show you how, as he walks through project process from sales to delivery. Founder of the Digital PM Summit, Director of Education at TeamGantt and author of Project Management for Humans, Brett shares real-world advice gained from wrangling projects and working with many different organizations of all shapes and sizes.
On the heels of Design Leadership Camp Santa Fe and Biz Dev Camp at Viget, this month’s resource roundup is full of recommended resources for design, leadership, business development and sales. We also have a long list of articles and podcasts to work through as you find a few minutes here or there, or to while away your commute.
No matter the size of your organization—big, small…Huge—everyone encounters process problems. Robert Sfeir, Group Director, Delivery – Global at Huge, Inc., took the stage at this year’s Owner Summit to speak to common challenges, and share insights to help solve them. The big idea: How you deliver is the most important factor in the success of what you deliver. Tune into Robert’s session for tips and strategies to remove process waste, lower project costs and increase margins.
In digital project management, there’s no shortage of ways to go about organizing your teams, priorities and projects, and just as many tools to help you do it. Jira is becoming increasingly popular as DPMs discover its flexibility, usefulness and reporting capabilities. David Harned, Director, PMO at Monotype, is a leading Agile thinker who wrote the book on Jira—literally. Looking forward to his DPM Summit session, we caught up with David to learn more about his background and the content of his session, “Managing Internal Projects & Agile Teams using JIRA.”
