Marketing project management is a cross-competency role that requires a blend of the abilities that would make either a marketer or a project manager successful. Regardless of which background you’re coming from, being effective in the position means learning specific marketing project manager skills that will allow you to plan, execute, coordinate and deliver on marketing projects.
Much like any role, experience is a great teacher, but magically having the benefit of ten years in the position isn’t feasible for most people. So, if you’re looking for ideas about the job and the most important marketing project manager skills to learn, here are the essential requirements for excelling in the role.
- Becoming Agile
Most modern marketing departments employ Agile methodologies to maximize the productivity and speed of teams containing multiple competencies. As Agile looks to be here to stay, this means that to be an effective marketing PM, it’s nearly guaranteed that you must become adept at Agile practices and understanding the basic conceptual approach of the methodology.
- Mastering collaboration
One of the major features of modern marketing teams, no matter how large, is the drive for successful collaboration. It has long been recognized that simply siloing teams off – though it might improve very specific competencies – doesn’t deliver the same range of department-wide benefits and knowledge that successful collaboration does. To get various teams working better together requires an ability to listen to various points of view and also to be assertive in keeping teams aligned and working towards common objectives.
- Defining and clarifying goals
Making communication as concise and easy to understand as possible is essential when dealing with people across a variety of competencies. To do this, keep goals as precise as possible, to allow for their easy communication. It is also important for teams to be constantly aware of what these goals are to ensure all efforts are moving towards the same destination.
- Finding the right project management tools
There is a wealth of resources available that aim to help project managers of all stripes do their jobs, but how does a marketing PM sort the wheat from the chaff without wasting time and goodwill attempting to road test a number of solutions? Project management tools need to be able to improve communication, clarity and insight, not just move management from Excel to another location.
That’s why at Planview AdaptiveWork, our suite of products is constantly evolving according to our customers’ needs, centered on the basic concept of constantly improving our users’ ability to collaborate and gain insight into how their teams are working.
- Recognizing and appreciating talent
A manager can be a lot of things, but at the end of the day it’s the team they’re working with that will decide the success or failure of a project. That’s why one of the most important marketing project manager skills to learn is how to gauge talent and how to help people achieve their potential.
For those with the possibility, connecting with individual team members is the best way to do this, but even on larger scales it’s important to liaise with team leaders to ensure that there is a philosophy of support and recognition all the way through the department. It’s often said that an organization’s greatest asset is its personnel, and as a manager, it’s up to you to get the most value from it.
In sum, marketing project managers need a balance of hard and soft skills from two different fields, plus well-designed tools to help them put it all together. Learn more about what Planview AdaptiveWork can do for marketing managers today.
