This startup was growing rapidly and the demand for project managers (both employee and contract employees) had grown tremendously in the previous year. The owners of the company realized that they needed someone to put together and lead a project management organization to support its growing staff and to ensure consistency in delivery to external clients. They were finding that all project managers were not running projects in the same manner and in some cases critical steps were being missed or not being managed closely. Customer satisfaction was the utmost of importance for this creative product business. Before the PMO was set up, it was common to have projects go off the rails and create a situation where the owners had to step in and offer concessions to clients and try to rescue or repair the relationship. This was resulting in lost revenue and broken and sometimes irreparable client relationships.

I was asked by the owners to set up a PMO to ensure projects did not go off track and to maintain happy, hopefully repeat customers who would sing our praises. The goal was to have consistent processes so that customers could get the same experience with any project manager and know what to expect from start to end with great communication, detailed project plans and processes, and an experience that made the client’s team feel heard and valued.

I set up standard templates, processes, and workflows that all project managers adhered to and I supported them as needed directly with clients when needed and to fulfill their day-to-day roles. I met with the project managers regularly to keep communication open and to be able to support the project manager in best practices for handling common scenarios with clients and for identifying potential risks. We had a project team that was fairly new to project management and the team needed training and support. I acted as an escalation point for project managers or clients to come to me for resolution. 

When escalations happened, I was able to partner with the clients to come up with the best next steps forward to solve an issue forming while still focusing on the bottom line for my creative product company so that contracts were adhered to and we weren’t overly offering additional services or features free of cost.

Our company received multiple awards for quality products including the Brandon Hall Best Use of Mobile Learning Silver Excellence in Learning and a Silver Addy for Digital Advertising / Online / Interactive--High Quality. Both of those awards came from customers that had reached an escalation point where customer frustration had boiled over. Partnering with the customers and listening to their concerns and reaching common ground was essential to getting to the next step and creating amazing products that both sides were delighted by.