 All right. Welcome everybody. And thanks so much for joining us today. We're really looking forward to this conversation. And we are here today to talk about digital project management, which I am really excited about because we've got a fantastic panel of folks from all different perspectives, folks who are doing project management from the consulting side, in-house nonprofits and different sorts of roles. So I think we're going to get a really great set of perspectives on this topic and looking forward to hearing input from our audience today as well. My name is Patty DeBoe. I'm the president of Parsons TKO. And I come from a long background in consulting, doing strategy consulting with nonprofits, government agencies and commercial organizations for a number of years. And it was trained as a project manager through that, received my PMP, and was leading projects large and small and through my whole consulting career. And so this topic is near and dear to my heart. I think project management is something that's really critical to anyone, no matter what your role is on the team, you always have an opportunity to sort of apply some of these principles. If you're not familiar with us, Parsons TKO is a consulting firm that works with fundraising, outreach, marketing, other sorts of engagement professionals in the mission-driven space. We help folks with our philosophy that we call engagement architecture, which takes a kind of broad look at the people process and technologies that power your outreach. And so we're happy to have you joining us today and we'll certainly be sharing a lot of our other content along the way and with you afterwards. With that, I am very excited to introduce you all to the fantastic panel of folks that we have with us today. And I'm going to ask them to introduce themselves and as they're giving an intro to talk a little bit about the types of projects that they oversee in their current role and or have experienced within the past. So we'll just go right down the line here and start with Lizzie. Hey, thanks Patty. I'm Lizzie Reese. I do project management at Urban Land Institute currently, where I manage a variety of web-based digital projects as well as the maintenance and new enhancements on one of our key member tools. And previously I was working at a marketing agency overseeing website projects for our clients and technical SEO projects as well. Hi everybody, I'm Saskia Pelorge. I am currently a training manager at moveon.org, which is a digital first rapid response organization, working for community change across the country. I currently support with creating content to train our members on tactics to mobilize communities around issue and electoral issues. In the past I've done some international project management as well, and have just generally done project management for nonprofit organizations, but specifically in the political realm. Hi everyone, my name is Courtney Matherly and I am a senior project manager with Parsons TKO. My background spans communications, marketing and media agency work. I've managed clients, customers and accounts and multiple roles, but I've been with PTQ for just over five years and have experienced running both agile and traditional projects during that time in partnership with now over 25 organizations and I'm spending over 60 different engagements. So I'm excited to be here today to talk to you all about my experience. Hi everyone, my name is Devin Beswick. I am a senior project coordinator here at PTKO. I oversee an array of different projects, technical, all the way to just some digital consulting projects as well. My background is in social work and I have a different background is particularly in managing implementation of mental health programs, as well as consulting and evaluation projects as well. Excited to be on this panel with this group and to speak with you all. Thank you. Great. So hopefully I'll can tell we've got folks with a really wide range of experiences and backgrounds here. You know, project management is applicable to just about anything one might do in their job. But we're here today to talk specifically about digital projects, and even more specifically about projects in the nonprofit space and so I wanted to sort of ask folks that are here with us today to answer a poll. And I will stop my screen share and we'll get that poll popped up for you on the screen but about why, why is digital project management so hard in the nonprofit space. I think most mission driven organizations are dealing with budget constraints, time constraints. People are doing project management, even though it's not their job, you may not have a dedicated project manager or you may not have the luxury of working with external consultants. There's lots of silos there's sort of a rapid pace of work. There's lots of challenges in project management and so I'm curious to hear from those of you that are on the call with us today what are some of the biggest challenges. And it's really interesting just watching these kind of filter in it's sort of a little bit of everything which is what we suspected, but we'll let that roll for a minute if you want to fill that out. Looks like we've got a pretty good number of responses rolling in. So maybe we can share those results out but what's interesting is, it's actually fairly evenly split. So I imagine probably some of you what we should have had maybe as an all of the above option but I was curious to see what the, what the challenges that were your top concerns were. Because these are things that we hear about a lot. So I would love to kick us off by asking the folks on the panels what their perspective is on, you know, why is digital project management so hard, particularly in the nonprofit space. And maybe I'll ask Courtney to kick us off on this one. Sure. Thanks Patty. I think, you know, one of the kind of things that leads into project management being, you know, a little bit did lending itself well to digital products. Digital projects, excuse me, is the importance of it. You know, I think sometimes it can often feel a little bit overlooked, but it's just such an essential part of making sure that time and resources are allocated correctly to make sure that, you know, teams are maximizing their efficiency and increasing the chances of success for the projects. But I think, you know, as Patty kind of alluded to, you know, there's oftentimes no dedicated project manager to a lot of digital projects, and people are doing it on top of their regular jobs and it's an additional piece of their workload. So that also often leads to resource constraints and people, you know, often have to juggle a lot of different hats, and on top of kind of managing the projects themselves. So that can kind of lend itself to some of the challenges encountered around timeline and budgets and things like that. Yeah, I think you make a really interesting point, which is that in resource constrained environments PM can offer often be an overlooked function right like we don't have enough budget to hire a PM or dedicate someone to this so we'll just have whoever owns this product or tool kind of be the project manager, but the flip side of that is if you don't have good project management, there's a lot of inefficiencies so you actually might wind up not spending your resources really well. So I'll throw this out to the group who ever wants to start but you know when you have those resource constraints. What can you do to actually kind of manage your budget stay within your budget and use sort of the limited resources of your organization effectively. Anybody want to dive in on that. I guess I can just stop at this. I find that even as organization as large as move on, we still face a lot of these issues that a lot of smaller organizations are facing and I see in this poll sticking to project timeline and unclear communication are at a tie for the most and that's something that we constantly are facing at move on and something that I've noticed that other organizations that I've worked that as well I think that's one thing I have relied on and that I see make such a difference is templates establishing some sort of template, even if it's just an agenda template or a template that multiple teams can use and they can adjust as need be, I find to be very helpful at move on for any project that we do. One thing that we tried to establish is some type of work plan that clearly establishes who is responsible for what where can you go to for this piece of work. Who is responsible for approving all pieces of work. We refer to refer to it as a more go, which just basically breaks down the manager, the organizer, who was responsible for what who is consulted in the project so maybe not involved but just stakeholders that you're in communication with and then who's approving all of this, all of the materials that are going out. So that's something that's really helpful and I think kind of chucks away at the unclear communication, I think there are so many layers behind that but that's one thing that we find very helpful. And then sticking to project timeline, I'll just say this really quick, working at a rapid response organization, we rarely have a timeline. We can do all of the planning we want to do for six months and then at the last minute, something happens in the news cycle and everything gets tossed out the window and we're starting some scratch. And so I think, even in that scenario, having a plan to refer to, even if you're tossing it out, you know exactly what you're not looking for. And that's a better place than starting in the middle of a field with so many options to go off of. So I think having a plan, even if the plan might be thrown out or it needs adjusting is really important. So jumping off of that point on the importance of templates and planning ahead when you can when it's possible. Something we've been doing at PTKO is we've implemented a task planning template to kind of ground our teams in the goal of the project and the various goals of the project and what value we're hoping to provide our clients. We find that having something to refer back to we're breaking down all of the activities in a project and getting to, okay, what do we need in order to move this forward and how do we get it to a point that we feel good about and that the client is it's the most beneficial for the client as well. It's definitely like Saskia mentioned it's not perfect you won't always come back to it or it when you come back to it maybe a few weeks later that plan might look different, but it's still a great exercise to kind of ground the team in the goal of the work. I like that because it's like knowing exactly what is in your scope is out of your scope having that is one of the major players or one of the major components of like making sure you stay within budget. Are there other tactics folks have used. Not necessarily tactic but just a kind of a quick thought as we're talking about, you know effectively managing and staying within budgets. I think it's important for, you know, within project management and for project managers, obviously to understand the constraints of our project but also the like the resources that they've access access to. Tracking obviously is a particularly important piece of that. But coming in, you know, I think that lends itself to often like the worry and main concern is going over budget and that's a lot of the like usual stress. But I also think, you know, counter thought to that is coming in consistently under budget. And so, you know, generally, you know that can be seen as a win but I also kind of challenge people to think of it as not necessarily always being a good thing. It could be, you know, indicator that you're missing an opportunity, or even like an indicator of risk and making sure that you are delivering, you know, the value to your client or to the team that you're working with. So just, you know, one thing to think about to in terms of success and how we look at and think of budgets is just, you know, also making sure that, you know, you aren't missing places where you can have your project teams dive in more, and maybe coming in under a project budget means you can deliver over deliver in a sense, you know, to secure follow on work or, you know, perhaps you just have the allocation space to do that. Yeah, that's a really interesting point and I think, you know, one of the fundamentals for anyone who's maybe studied pretty much project management is that you know you kind of have your, your budget, your schedule or timeline and your scope right these are sort of the three key pillars. And if any one of those is out of whack, it's going to affect all the others right so whether your budget is way over or way under that either tells you something isn't going right you're either not delivering on the scope or maybe you're getting things done more efficiently but that also means you didn't estimate it correctly at the beginning to have all those things tied together so you know those sort of metrics and things to track they tell you something about how the work is going, where they might tell you something about your underlying data and how accurate that is or not. And which kind of leads me to the next question we had is you know, part of project management I think as a skill is, you know, sort of driving your team to get things done keeping people on track. And a lot of that can be sort of process management right we've talked about task planning and budget tracking and those sorts of things but you really need your whole teams participation to get in on those. So it can be tricky and people can sort of view that as a hassle right when the project managers are always following up on like can you give me updates can you give a status report can you lock your time like those sorts of things. So I want to know what sorts of tips and tricks you all have, you know, to kind of keep folks who are kind of doing the doing of the work, you know, get them to sort of participate in the processes that you want them to. I don't know Lizzie maybe you want to start out on this one. Sure yeah so I mean I think the first step is just communicating at the start what the process was will be to all of the team members so everyone knows exactly what's expected, but if you tend to have an issue with people. They're new to the process maybe they don't they're not following it consistently it can be helpful, especially in newer teams or if you're working with a new client to try to identify a person who can be an advocate with you for the processes. You can identify someone who can sort of speak to their team speak to a larger team and sort of back you up on the processes, and that can help when you're entering sort of a new team or a new realm to to sort of identify those people who can sort of advocate alongside you for those processes and the value that they can bring to the project. Oh sorry. Sorry I was just going to jump in to say I think, you know, because of the nature of the role of a project manager, it's very easy for pms to kind of become the funnel and, and some instances act as a go between for the project or the execution team and the client. And I think, you know, kind of building off of what Lizzie was saying the, you know, the PM team, and the pms should include project team members on communications so they're involved and kept in the loop, and kind of, you know, get out of that he said she said type mode that I think can be an issue. And I think the crux of it and what's really important to remember is that project managers are, you know, there to be the enforcers of process and not, you know, translators between what the project teams are working on in the client. And so it's it's really important to make sure that your teams are participating in that process. Yeah, I think, to that point, communication is a major part of our job as project managers. But it's also a huge part of anyone's role that is working with clients or is just on a project and they have to deliver something. I think oftentimes project teams can get caught up in relying on project managers to be the sole communicator, and that hinders the report that you build with clients that can hinder relationships internally as well. And so kind of exercising that muscle or empowering your teams to exercise that muscle is also very beneficial to the process. Yeah, that's a really good point I think, you know, project management is a skill in a role that I think can sometimes be undervalued by folks of course not anyone on any of our teams, but I think there is always a risk that like PMing is seen as equivalent to admin support right it's the meeting schedule or it's the communications manager. But I really like the points you all are making, particularly about like pms as guardians of process, right, because if that sort of all falls apart, like it really is trickier to keep the project kind of on track and that doesn't mean you have to have a dedicated pm to have process right like anyone can be a sort of guardian of process regardless of what that looks like. And I think that's really important. We did have one question come through in the q amp a and I will say I encourage anyone that's with us today if you've got questions you'd like us to, you know, ask to the panelists please feel free to put them in the chat put them in the q amp a and we will make you to ask that, but the question was, Saskia, to your point about project managing in this really rapid response environment. You know, how do you have kind of governance or process in place that allows you to pivot quickly. Right, because I think sometimes like process can be seen as a thing that hinders agility. So how do you think about that balance of like, we need a process but it needs to be flexible so that if something changes I can like, you know, I don't need like the world's most detailed schedule so that I have to update 100 things every time a timeline changes like, how do you think about those balances. Yeah, this is such a great question. And I think Liz and dev and Courtney have kind of alluded to it. And the last question did too, but I think setting up proper channels for communication is the most important thing. At move on things are constantly changing. And people are always looking for direction, like where to go for what where I a lot of people at move on I think and I'm sure at a lot of other organizations doing similar work. An individual can be holding so much work and not know what to do with it, where to go to be able to move forward. And I think setting up proper channels for people to know where to go. This is a question I think we'll get to later but tools are really important. I think that cuts a lot of the process out that you like to think of, like scheduling meetings and creating tasks and things like that. Tools are really important. If a team is already using a tool that is helpful for them. As a PM I think it's really important for you or whoever's in charge of guarding the processes of an organization or a team. To be able to share. I think that. I'm sorry, I think that one thing I find important is having one link where somebody can click on and know where they can go if they're looking for information on a specific issue or if they need support on something. There are really value slack spaces at move on so one slack space with a pinned message with one link to a document that people can click on and find all the roles for a project and if things change where they can go to something very simple like that can go miles. People don't have the concrete information that they're looking for, but they know where to go to find that information or at least the information that we have at the moment. I think that makes it very easy on the PM. There's, you don't have to go many places to update information, you don't have to chase or heard the cattle as we like to say, you don't have to heard the kitties in. There's information one place and everybody sees it and everybody knows where to go and you can move a lot of work there and change a lot of work as needed. So I hope that answered the question. I love that. Oh, go ahead Courtney. And I was just going to say I'll build upon that a little bit I think. The fact is that uncertainty, like is a fact right so I think we need to plan, but expect the unexpected. And so ensuring project management processes are designed to get flexibility is really important. So, you know, making sure that we consider allowing changes to how things are done, rather than what is done. So I think that just means like staying very pragmatic. And, you know, that often results in finding that tasks can be scaled back and resources can be freed up. And, you know, if some things moving slowly, perhaps like, you know, there can be a team switch into other roles. And so I think, you know, the, it's hard to put in like exact governance. I think, you know, the real takeaways that those formal project management processes are really important. And project managers just need the flexibility to be able to deal with change circumstances. And so, you know, activities need to be done in such a way that they can be scaled up or down to suit the real project needs. And, you know, you both kind of touched on the idea of processes and what tools can support those and how you can adapt to that and there is a question in the chat about what tools you like. I also kind of wanted to get a sense from the group we're going to launch another quick poll about what tools you use. And so you'll see that come up on the screen because one of the things is you may not have like project management tools at your disposal right there are all sorts of kinds of things people use. So maybe we could just do kind of a quick round robin of the panelists of what your favorite PM tools are and sort of the any tips and tricks you have for kind of, you know, kind of leveraging those so let's start with Alrighty, I was watching all those poll responses come through. It's very interesting to see what other folks use. I think oftentimes we PMs we can get wrapped up in using, you know, project management tools like this is the only way we can move work forward and see it in the most organized way but that's not always available to many organizations. I think being able to maximize the use of Google Docs like Sasuke was mentioning creating more cause or creating documents where everyone can live in one spot and people can easily reference information that they need. Additionally, I do enjoy using Otter for like phone calls or zoom meetings and things like that. It's nice to have a transcription to refer back to you rather than needing to carve out time to listen to or watch a recording. You know, being able to just control if something is always a lot easier than maybe listening to it. So I love that tool definitely have been using that more often these days. And as well as teamwork that's a huge tool for us and it's a great way to keep our team organized even if it's our clients are a little bit more reluctant to get in there and use it as well. Thank you. Yeah, I'm at move on. This is a very funny question because I feel like move on has a million tools and project management is something we're definitely working on. So first organization I think that there are so many tools you can think of to have to send out emails to send out text messages to send out peer to peer messages so I think that they all require their own project management around. I personally like to use and anybody that works on a project with me will use a sauna as a tool I think it's a great way to keep track of all of the moving pieces. And it's very easy to sync work with other teams on a sauna to streamline work across organizations. And I want to say this with a disclaimer that a lot of the work that we do is in house. So our project management is less client facing and more like internal stakeholder facing. So a sauna is fine. I think our team values Google Docs Google Drive in general so just spreadsheets and one click docs is what we like to call them so like one document where you can find absolutely everything that you need. And then slack. We live and breathe in slack everything is in slack so I think those are the main tools that we realized over at one. That's great. What about you Lizzie what are your favorite tools that use. Yeah, we also I think teamwork's been mentioned a few times and we use are in our moving a lot in of projects into teamwork. Just because it's very easy to track you have a lot of flexibility you can do sort of con bun boards you can also have in their notebooks all of your project documentation within sort of the larger project planning portal. And also sort of SharePoint and just I think Google Docs and spreadsheets can be really helpful. Even just as the project manager when you're planning things out or drafting things out before they get into a project management tool because once you get them in there you start notifying people people get several emails when you're making changes so I think Google Docs and spreadsheets are also helpful. It's also helpful to keep in mind what the project team you're working with is used to. So you may be working with a team who's very used to SharePoint and it may just be best to work in SharePoint with them for the for now. But knowing the time and the place where it is good to encourage new systems and put those in place when they'll be the most valuable and sort of meeting your team where they're at with those. Yeah, that's a good point. You know a lot of you have mentioned PM specific tools like Asana or teamwork. You know Courtney are there any others that haven't been mentioned or maybe any other like non traditional tools that you like to use and kind of hack your way into good PM process. Yeah, and not to I mean I will my, my personal favorite is teamwork so I will give like one more little thumbs up to that, but tack on to that that one reason I really like it is because I think, you know as was just kind of saying it allows for a lot of flexibility to go with, you know, some of our clients who, you know, maybe a little bit like tool adverse or you know don't want kind of one more thing to have to log into or worry about. It's still really allows us to do all of the like project management and follow our project management process without necessarily having to force the client into the tool. For instance it has aliases that allow you to just like tag on and add to the CC line of a traditional email that will capture communications and the tool you can also like create and send tasks from email. I just think it provides a lot of flexibility that will that's helpful for folks who are, you know, more or less willing to dive into the tool, but outside of, you know, kind of more traditional or structured systems. So like a big pen to paper list girl. So that's kind of how I manage, you know, my day today and my week. So I spend much of my Fridays, which, you know, we at pto kind of have heads downtime so you know I spend a couple hours every Friday just kind of looking ahead and imagining what my next week is going to look like on all my various projects, and just kind of actually like physically writing down what the main priorities are what folks are working on and what's coming up. Yeah, those are all great and the couple themes I heard through what everyone shared is regardless of what tools you're using right meeting people where they are and so making sure that process like isn't adding just one more thing or like a whole other system that people are working on today, and also having everything in one place so there are tools like teamwork that track budget schedule tasks like all in one thing but I think Sasuke you sort of mentioned like it can be a Google Doc right and and if the pm is in charge of keeping that up to date, like, you know, it can just be something super simple that everyone else knows where to go and just have everything in one place so those are all really helpful regardless of what tools someone is using. Moving to a couple of the questions that came in from the folks joining us today. So the first one to me asks, what tips do you all have for thinking about end to end digital transformation process as part of effective pm. For example, do you have suggestions for tasks that could be completed upfront to ensure successful management and launch of a project. Maybe as a more tactical starting place for the convo kind of what are your critical upfront tasks that you think set a project up for success. I think the first thing that's coming to my mind is going back to what I had mentioned earlier about the task planning template. That is an exercise that we typically do before the project begins. And I think that typically when we do that a lot of times the team will say oh we can actually do this before we even kick off like we can get this work done. Maybe in the first week of the project and then we don't have to think about it again like as long as we kind of rallying with the team what do we need in order to drive certain activities forward. And then can we get this ahead of time how how soon can we get this so that we can complete this work, and then it will set us up to be in a different place. Once the project does kick off. I'll also jump in on this question. One thing that comes to mind at in our current role at move on I think that in the various projects that we've had one thing we figured that determines whether our end product will be a success or not is whether a clear scope has been developed so like having like a smaller conversation with immediate stakeholders with people that are owning or managing the project to figure out what your goals are what you want the end product to be what you would like, and then having a wider conversation but maybe not as public but just a wider conversation with the necessary stakeholders and when I think about these people I think about if things hit the fan who are the people that I need to be able to salvage this project who do I absolutely need if I think I have two months to plan this project and then I find out I only have three days to plan this project who do I absolutely need to push this forward. And I find that if I include those people very early on, and I come with them with a clear plan. I know that whatever happens, whatever happens because anything could happen. What we say I move on. If anything happens we know that it'll be okay because the stakeholders that matter are in the conversation and they are just looped in, and they know what's going on. I think just to add to what Sasuke mentioned, it is critical in the beginning of projects to identify, not only those critical players but also any groups that may be affected. And even if they're only going to be affected slightly even if they're going to participate in one workshop or you just need their input on one design revision whatever it will be, making sure that you're going to them early and saying this project exists, I will be coming over the next few months. Please don't be surprised when I contact you in three months for your input. So it's important to get everyone. I mean, even if, if you don't end up needing them or something changes. You can still keep them in the loop and make sure they're, you know, consulted as necessary but it's, it's important to make sure everyone knows it exists and is happening and not to assume that they've been told if you haven't made that contact with them yourself. Yeah, those internal communications are really important. And a couple other things that came to me as you're all are talking one is gathering documentation upfront, like, so often when you're starting down the path of a digital project, like, some piece of this has been talked about before right someone has run a survey or there's internal process documentation or there's the way we already do it or used to do it or the tool has its own documentation and so one of the things we do often is just like a very big like documentation gathering of literally anything that exists related to the project, so that the team can really digest that upfront and sometimes it does like adjust your scope right like, oh we actually don't need to go as deep on this or someone has already sorted through this stuff that we need. And then the other thing that came up for me and maybe I honed in a bit on the word and the question it was about digital transformation projects and sort of the idea of transformation and change in an organization. One of the things we really like to do at the beginning of any large project is a workshop that we call capacity for change and really evaluating what change and transformation looks like at the organization and what makes that a success and so bringing together all the key players who are in the project, as well as those that are going to be impacted by it, and saying, you know, the last time we did a big project like this whether it was a big upgrade to technology or a platform migration or any kind of roll out. How did it go. And what did we learn from that and are there things in our organization that make timing better or worse right like is everybody, you know busy around election time and so we should definitely not roll it out in October or November but really just thinking through what change and transformation looks like at your organization and being, you know, kind of realistic with yourself at the beginning of a project is much better than kind of getting to the end and being like, oh wait, we can't launch this now because the election is next week so those sorts of things I think are really helpful up front also. Another question we've got that says, you know, a lot of the conversations we've had right now can be carried through different types of projects. Are there any tips you all have for digital projects in particular things that are technology web related. You know, like what makes those digital projects different and how do you tackle those. So Courtney, do you want to dive in on that one to get started. I would love to. Yeah, I think, you know, digital projects can be tough. And there's often, you know, a lot of moving parts and it's easy to like, you know, lose track of what's been done or who's doing what and can, you know, be really overwhelming to think about it as a whole. So I think, you know, the first kind of immediate thought that comes to mind when thinking about that specific type of project work is to, you know, make sure you're choosing a project methodology that like really fits the work. And, you know, can be an important kind of factor to think through in terms of the team you're working with as well. And just to make sure that you're in agreement and get input on, you know, making sure everyone's ready to adopt and execute on that. So I also think a big thing that lends itself well to digital projects is, you know, being able to kind of commit to continuous improvement, you know, typically digital projects are, you know, really rapid and iterative. I think, you know, it's really important to be open and committed to, you know, being agile and being ready to kind of, you know, champion things that you're learning along the way and making sure you're bringing those learnings to your team. I think some other things that come to mind, you know, is also kind of building trust, you know, through being very transparent with with your clients and who you're working with. And, you know, making sure you're explaining some of the complexities, you know, when there is an issue, kind of doing the appropriate amount of investigation and prep to, you know, take that to the client. And then I think it also kind of goes back to making sure you've created and kind of standardized, you know, processes for that type of work that can kind of, you know, keep it on track and will kind of help prevent it from spiraling. And, you know, making sure you have procedures for things like project initiation and getting things kicked off. And that you're kind of thinking through each phase of the project. So thinking through, you know, the initial initiation and, you know, as we've already said kind of documentation and preparing resources and thinking through onboarding. And kind of moving into the planning phase of work to create tasks and making sure everyone understands the budget and the schedule. And then, you know, sliding into the execution piece of things where you're managing those tasks and you're collaborating as a team, you're reporting out on progress. And then you wrap, you know, making sure that you've provided the value that you had said that you would and committed to, and then kind of debriefing and retruing to make sure that you're learning from the work. Yeah, I may chime into on the technical and one thing I find is, I really think the PM role is even more critical on technical projects and I think sometimes for folks just starting out in their PM career. It's not intimidating, but I often tell our team and other PMs I've worked with like you serve this really critical role as kind of a technical translator. And I encourage our PMs to internally before they ever meet with clients to ask questions of our technical teams and the folks doing the work, until you understand, because the PMs can really be that person that says like, let's get it explained that makes sense to me, you know, who is typically not a developer may not have that deep of a technical background, and then explaining it to clients becomes so much easier. And so the PMs really serve this function that like, you know, sometimes I mean developers are brilliant brilliant people. But I think sometimes we need a translator to sort of say okay what does that mean in business value terms. What is the impact going to be and PMs are just so critical and playing that role and I really laud you all who are doing that tough work. All right, we've got a whole bunch of other questions that have just poured in so I'm going to try and get through these and just maybe ask one or two of you each to answer them as we are getting to our final minutes here. So the first one is, could you speak about dealing with scope creep from both clients and stakeholders and how do you spot it before it happens or deal with it when it comes up. Anybody want to chime in on that one. Oh, go ahead Lizzie. Sorry, I'll just say quickly just one thing to keep my scope creep is however you handle the first requests will set the tone for others expectations throughout the project. The first request that you know as a little out of scope, it's important that you don't say, we'll take care of it this time, you know no worries we'll just slip it in, because then that person's not going to understand down the line when all of a sudden you're like you know this is extra budget this is extra time here the implications. So it's important that even the very first time you start notice those things come in that you communicate that this could have, you know, budget or timeline implications let me assess this and get back to you and you don't just slip things in to sort of keep people happy at the beginning. So tag on that I think it's, it's important to kind of trust your gut and your intuition and your instinct about what you think those things may be from the offset. What I really like to be in the practice of doing is, you know, kind of identifying those things with the project team as you kind of like internally ready to kick off and then bring that to the kick off with the client. There's a simple slide that kind of says like very clearly like this is what we're going to deliver or this is what we mean by, you know, configuration, and like what that will mean for you and the delivery, and just so you can kind of from the offset make sure you're aligned and on the same page and if there ever is a question about, you know, that component of your project work, you have something to very easily go back and point back to and I think there's such great answers, I think underlying it to is like, don't assume people have read the contract or the project charter or whatever. Saskia did you want to add something there to. Yeah, I just, those are both such great answers. And I just wanted to say that Courtney's point. I just want to start off the first time, keep bringing it up. I find that reiterating it, even if people are annoyed at it. At least they can't say that they didn't know, and I find that to save my butt. So many times because people, you're putting it out there and even if you're putting it out there seven billion times at least it's clear and. There's a lot of confusion about it. Really good point. All right, grace asked us about advice for project management when you only have two people, and because it can be so easy to skip process with smaller teams. Oh my gosh this one resonates a lot because I think in the work that we do at PT KO. Some of the projects are big and have six people working on them and last the whole year and some is like two people. So I don't know anyone want to dive in on that one and how you adapt smaller projects. I can jump in here quickly. The first thing that comes to my mind is trust. There is a level of trust when you're working when you have a team of two that really needs to be there and it needs to be deep. What happens is if trust is not their roles become blurred and project responsibilities get blurred or one person can end up kind of taking over the project and not really the other one is kind of just hanging out on the side and I think that can definitely happen very easily and so it's almost I think even more important to project manage and to have like to be using tools and things like that, when there are only two people, because, as mentioned in the, and Patty's point I think sometimes some of those processes can fall by the wayside when there's only two people. So let's just get ahead of points. I'll let you go. Um, yeah. As mentioned about trust, I think that's very important as well. I think in my experience, working at small, smaller nonprofit that do a lot of work on the national and even international stage. I think that a lot of times people think that there are a lot of people doing the work behind it and realistically there are only like 20 people on the team and those teams are also very small as well. And so yes, a lot of times like processes fall off, and that could be a good thing and that could also not be a good thing. When it starts to sometimes be harmful to yourself as an individual or to the work that you're doing. And in those cases, I would recommend including others where you can or sharing things in public spaces so that even though yes, it is between you two people. At least there's somebody else in there that may not be as directly involved in the work but it has eyes on the work or is aware that the work is moving. And can check in and see how everything is going. I also speaking to the trust thing I really do think that's the most important thing and creating space for feedback with your other counterpart, your other counterpart, especially if it's just the two of you on a team. I think allowing space for constructive feedback, good and bad, whether that be taking time weekly to meet. And during your one on ones you highlight the great stuff that happened and maybe one or two bad things maybe there's never any bad things but I think always creating that space for feedback so that when there is something that happens when a process falls off that you want to bring up there's space already there to do so. Those are all great ideas. All right, we are just coming up on time and we've got one question left that I'm going to ask folks. Maybe we'll do a quick kind of round robin rapid fire so Kevin is asking have two related questions about projects ending so the first is, what happens when a project is completed what's helpful. We've tried to do post mortems with varying degrees of success, you know reviewing what we did closing out. Should we make a new template or process and a related question how do you celebrate a launch or a completion, especially when we're virtual it's kind of hard to celebrate wins, but we want to keep people engaged and rewarded so let's get on the horn here and see if folks have you know what is your favorite practice for either doing a project retro or wrap up or celebrating the end of a project. Courtney, you want to get us started. I think in terms of project close out, you know, we've worked really hard at Parsons the PM team has worked really hard and really did diligently at like defining a series of activities for close out. And I won't, you know, go into all this now the time we have left but Kevin I'd be happy to connect with you and share those in more detail. Speaking to kind of the post mortem or retro specifically, you know, we have had varying degrees of success with those as well. But I found, you know, kind of more recently we've just started to really shift our attention to the action planning portion of it. For a close out of a project, not too long ago, you know, one thing we did was make an action plan to templatize one of the activities that we had done in the project. So what that looked like for us was I scheduled a series of meetings for a portion of that project team, and just for like a few weeks, they met once a week and worked on that specific thing to actually dedicate time. And so I think it's just being very intentional about, you know, creating space for following through on that action item and not just writing it down and kind of leaving it there is like a checkbox for someone to come back to but actually putting, you know, time on the calendar for it to be worked on. And then in terms of celebrating launches or completions. I mean, I think, yeah, it's definitely more challenging being, you know, in a remotely based company but I think, you know, recognizing one another so we do a lot of that over slack and kind of celebrating people and acknowledging people's hard work is super super important. And then just making sure you know if you don't already have opportunities at Parsons you know we have a coffee break that everyone can get together and we have water coolers that we see each other but if you don't have those in place, you know getting kind of intentional about you know getting on a zoom or on a call and just being able to, you know, say cheers and job well done. So what about you, what are your favorite project wrap up things. Yeah I think the main thing that's coming to mind as a tip for sort of retrospectives is I like to send out a survey before we all get to the retrospective that can also be anonymous. And so then I can sort of take the very truthful feedback, put that in a PowerPoint and just have it as a starting off point this is how people were feeling during the survey, who wants to take it from here there other comments, because I think people can sometimes be shy about giving true feedback or constructive feedback so if you sort of take that on us out of people speaking up verbally in the meeting in front of everyone you can sort of have a starting off point to let them. And you get better feedback as well and more honest feedback if you do that. Celebrating. Yeah, of course, I think sort of those virtual non work sessions or happy hours are always good, and also always try to schedule them with normal work hours don't make people stay to 530 for their virtual happy hour that's when people get upset, but get the approval to do a 4pm happy hour so people can really, you know step in and enjoy that time. Love that, Saskia, any thoughts on project wrap ups. Yeah. Again, a lot of the work that move on does is internal in terms of who we are working with. So our project wrap ups, typically look like the project manager, working with whichever stakeholders to kind of digest a lot of the information that we capture at move on we try to capture as much information as we can. And that would. And then we also would do a debrief with stakeholders that were involved in the program. And then all of that information would just be a report back, which would be sent to all of our staff and stakeholders that were involved. So that's what our, the end of a project typically looks like event in terms of celebration I think this is so important. I think in the movement work that move on does people forget to celebrate our wins, even though they're very small wins. So we do a lot of recognition as well internally we do a lot of appreciation posts and emails and in slacks. So many times people are there are many spaces in slack for appreciation. Our members are also so important to us we have millions of members across the country that do incredible incredible work. We have hundreds of volunteers that phone bank with us that send text messages that show up to lobby visits that write letters that call centered they do so much work and so we do like to appreciate them as well. We send out a lot of free swag, and just always find time to create moments for them to celebrate, whether that be in our mobilizer community that we have with a few members and other organization calls that we have for our members so just always trying to be creative. In finding ways to celebrate the work that our members do for us. Great. There have been anything to add from your perspective that ends of projects. Yeah everyone touched on some really great points. Back to what Lizzie was saying about collecting feedback. I think that is an amazing way to close out a project you know to just kind of get a sense of how folks were feeling throughout the process, and being able to kind of move accordingly once look once you have that feedback and maybe adapt your processes or adjust kind of approaches next time around in terms of celebration. And actually this will get back to this is tied together with closing out projects as well. But I think providing like tangible something like evidence to show whether it's like internally or or to clients to say like look what we've done like yes, we might have just implemented a platform or implemented a new CRM but like this is what this thing can do now this is what your organization will be able to do with this work. And it wasn't just like 101215 meetings and you know throughout your days and weeks and it wasn't just a lot of like hard work you know that all amounted to something and I think being able to show that to to everyone is is very valuable and work celebration. Well that is a great note to end on thank you so much for that question, Kevin but I really appreciate everyone giving their insights today. Thanks to Courtney, Lizzie, Saskia and Devin for sharing their expertise, and thanks to all of you for joining us. I hope you found something interesting in the conversation today. If you have questions you didn't get a chance to ask. Please don't hesitate to reach out. You'll be getting a follow up email with some of the resources we talked about today, as well as information if you want to get in touch. We're also sharing, you know, our, our slide that says please take our free content. And we've got lots of other recordings of past webinars blog posts podcasts, other content on our website, you can also find all of our future events. I think we're planning to do a sort of retro on giving Tuesday in December which will be really exciting so talking about wrapping up projects that'll be a great opportunity to do that. Thanks to everyone for joining us today and we hope to see you again sometime soon. Take care.