Ops Cast
Ops Cast, by MarketingOps.com, is a podcast for Marketing Operations Pros by Marketing Ops Pros. Hosted by Michael Hartmann, Mike Rizzo & Naomi Liu
Ops Cast
Practical tips for Project Management with Blaine Tetterton
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Unlock the secrets of effective project management with Blaine Tetterton, who brings her wealth of experience from theater management to marketing and revenue operations. Blaine's journey is nothing short of fascinating, and in this episode, she shares how skills honed from managing the chaos of the stage have seamlessly translated to her current role. Plus, get the inside scoop on an upcoming event in the Raleigh-Durham area where experts will discuss the transformative impact of AI on marketing.
Dive deep into the nitty-gritty of structuring day-to-day workflows and managing workloads efficiently. We go beyond the basics, discussing advanced project management training and the integration of softer skills to elevate overall effectiveness. Blaine sheds light on capacity modeling and resource management, cautioning against the common but flawed assumption that a 40-hour work week equals full capacity. Learn how to use project management tools to better estimate task durations and make a compelling case for additional resources.
Join us as we dissect the balance between setting effective KPIs and managing complexity within varying team sizes and stages of maturity. From the strategic use of project management tools to the debate between Agile and Waterfall methodologies, this episode is packed with practical advice and real-world examples. Blaine and I share our experiences, emphasizing the need for simplicity, adaptability, and the right balance of metrics to ensure your project management approach is both efficient and effective. Don't miss out on this valuable conversation that bridges the worlds of theater and business.
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Hello everyone, Welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by MarketingOpscom, powered by all those MoPros out there. I'm your host, Michael Hartman, joined today by the one and only Mike Rizzo.
Speaker 2:Not the one, and only there's another, mike Rizzo in the community, it's true, and he's in MarketingOps. And he's in MarketingOps. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I forget about that. Okay, one of the two, and only mike rizzo's out there in parking ops. So all right. Well, good, mike, good to have you here. Naomi's uh off wherever she is in canada or somewhere, I don't know what she's doing these days can't keep up with her.
Speaker 1:All right, so excited today to welcome to the podcast blaine tetherton here to talk to us about practical tips for project management. So Blaine is currently head of marketing operations at LeadOp Solutions and senior RevOps manager with Sonray Security. I know you put this in your bio and I forgot to practice pronouncing it, so you can correct me if I'm wrong. She has worked in various roles, from sales to business, in business development to marketing and marketing operations and now in revenue operations. She got her PMP certification in 2018 and is passionate about building clean and effective processes that support growth and efficiency. She is also a leader for the local marketing ops dot com chapter in the Raleigh Durham area. So, blaine, thanks for joining us today.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. Yeah, you got it right. Summary security.
Speaker 1:All right, I'm usually better about planning ahead for that when I'm flying into this, and I will say, as we were getting ready to do this, I think by the time this gets published it'll be after the fact, but you were just telling us about an upcoming event in the Raleigh-Durham area that you're hosting that's now got, would you say, 150 registrants.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we're at 150 registered. It's a really fantastic panel. So I pulled together some local experts to talk about marketing and AI and how it's affecting the industry, how it's changing our daily workflows and things of that nature, and so I have some experts from Pendo, Google, Levitate and RevGen.
Speaker 1:Awesome, all right. Well, I think that's awesome for the community. We were just talking about how I don't think the community is nearly as tight-knit in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, even though there's lots of really good and talented people, it's just hard to get them all together. I would love to have 150 people registered. Even if half of them showed up, that would be huge. Well, congratulations on that. So let's dive into this a little bit. So, as I was getting ready for a discussion, I did come across something about you that I didn't know not that I was stalking you, but I was stalking you and that is that you went to school for theater and that you worked in that industry for a while.
Speaker 1:So first off, I think it'd be interesting just to hear what that experience was like and how you kind of shifted. But also, are there things from that experience that like, and how you kind of shifted, but also like are there things from that experience that you get?
Speaker 3:to apply in your day-to-day or week-to-week work, in revenue ops or marketing ops? Absolutely so. It's a funny progression. People think, when you say theater, like oh, you were an actor and I was not. I'm actually a terrible actor, but for me it was the behind the scenes stuff that drew me in the technical work.
Speaker 3:And what I did was I was a stage manager and in live productions there's always someone on the back end who is calling the shots and you see this. Anytime you go to a production live cast, sports cast, an event there's somebody you see with a headset running around like an absolute crazy person yelling at everyone. And that's what I did and I loved every minute of it. I don't even really know how I got started. I started in high school and then I went to school for it even really know how I got started. I started in high school and then I went to school for it. So it's actually a theater management degree and I took project management classes as a part of it. Now, long story short, there was no theater management degree when I went to college.
Speaker 3:I created it and my thesis on the way out was here is your major now. Here is all the courses you're going to put together from all the different other programs and what you're going to expect and go forth and train others. That's awesome.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I was the first person from Western Carolina to graduate with a theater management degree and from Western Carolina to graduate with a theater management degree.
Speaker 3:But what I pulled from it was skills that I don't think can be trained, and that is how to handle yourself in pure chaos. I mean, when everything is going wrong, you have to be able to think through okay, what are the immediate things that need to get done. So I mean, I have so many stories of live shows where we did a Sound of Music and one of our kids, one of the Von Trapp kids, was throwing up behind the scenes and it's like, okay, he's got a scene in like 10 minutes, how do we get him out there? Because we have no one who can film for him. And so it's like I, literally in the middle of the show, ran to a CVS, grabbed something like a medicine or something to help stop the nausea, ran back into the show, shoved it down this poor child's throat and pushed him out on stage. And it's like you just kind of got to figure out what you got to do. Where are your priorities, how to hit them hard on what needs to happen first, second, last and go wow, love that.
Speaker 1:That reminds me. So my wife does a lot of um and has done for a long time a lot of volunteer work and does it now his primary vocation, working at non-profits. But you know, events are a big part of it. I mean, there's seems to be a lot of overlap with what you just described, with like putting out events like there's always everybody I know is an event like they all go, like oh yeah, shit just falls apart at the last minute, right? You know just much. As you planned, right, something will go wrong, or, mike, you probably experienced that with mopsa, blizzard, right, a little'm just keeping my mouth shut.
Speaker 3:Well, it's funny because last year at Mopsa I was sitting there and I, because I am trained for this, now I watch the stage managers and so I'm sitting there during I think, one of the keynotes and the stage manager was like coming back and forth from the curtain and I'm like, oh God, someone missed a cue, there's something wrong.
Speaker 2:Like I know exactly what's happening right now. That's so funny. Yeah, they, they did a really nice job of uh, protecting me from the chaos.
Speaker 1:Um, cause I think if I had known some of the things, they weren't major, major, but if I had known I'd be like extra on edge or something right, Cause you know, here I am trying to pull this thing off and I just keep all the chaos away from me well, and my guess is, like, like it helps you recognize you, you kind of learn through trial a little bit, I guess, but like what's, what's really like a big deal and what's not right, and how do you, you know, how do you triage that and that's interesting to you with your?
Speaker 3:own reactions and how do you process things, and so I think there's some natural talent that comes to this. I've always been trial by fire, I gotta just do. I can't do classroom settings. But the ability to really take it and say, okay, I need to calm down. What is the most important thing that needs to happen? Right, this second, and you learn that very quickly in theater.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think it rings true with me if I sort of map that onto any kind of major technology implementation, where I'm thinking about one in particular to you know one of my jobs where we rolled something out and it was gonna could have the potential impact like thousands of people within the company. It's big, biggish company and, uh, we had done all we could to try to plan for it and, sure enough, right, something that we didn't anticipate caused a problem with a client and we just we had done a decent enough job of communicating to the field what was like what we were doing and what could happen and where to go if something went wrong, and they, so we were able to resolve it to the point where I think I actually built a better relationship with that client. But, uh, in the moment, like it was like, okay, what do we do first? Right, first. First, we go, first we go solve this client problem and then, and then we go figure out like, how do we prevent it in the future? Um, so it makes sense. I think that rings true with me a lot. So, um, well, let's, let's jump into into this a little bit.
Speaker 1:The topic project management. I was. I was actually been looking at some of our uh, the performance of our, our podcast over the last few years and what I noticed is that project management is one of the most popular topics. When I look at that, some of our biggest episodes in terms of downloads are there. So I'm glad we're going to get to cover it again, because I don't think we've covered it nearly as much as we probably could have. But you recently and so we're recording this in late August of 2024, right, you recently, and maybe in the last couple of months, done a workshop with the marketingopscom community around I think it was SmartShades, but in project management. Can you maybe talk a little bit about what you covered in that workshop and what some of the big takeaways were from that? If people and Mike maybe I don't know if Mike maybe this I don't know if this is available on demand or whatever but if people were- interested in that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we do have it. Members can access it in the basically the conference vault. We put all that content into our repository to go back to and look at. But you know, when they're live and run by the community, they're just accessible to anybody at the moment when they're live. I was just looking at it today, because I just ran a session this morning on the fun topic of is MarketingOps marketing or not? You were the one right before me, blaine, I saw your name.
Speaker 3:I wanted to attend that today, but I have a very crazy schedule at work right now.
Speaker 1:That's okay, makes sense, so anyway. So on that session, what can you tell us about it?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think it was a great session.
Speaker 3:I actually got a lot of messages afterwards of people who wanted to know more, had additional questions on how I did certain things, and so it really brought some nice conversations after the fact.
Speaker 3:But what I did was really just show, from a project management perspective, how I go about to manage my systems and teams, whether it be when I'm a solo MOPSs person in the company or have a team. How can I structure the day-to-day workflow in a way that makes it easy for me to manage my workload and know that I'm getting what I need to get done, but provide leadership visibility and then also give me some data points on the back end to use to get more resources or whatever it is that I need from the company that I'm working for. So we really walked into how to set up certain forms, how to add certain fields and then use that to connect to your calendar, how to just process and look at things in a different way. That gives you more of that data piece that we, as as operators, really want to have for our output I think it's a super timely conversation for me today.
Speaker 2:so, um, this, this just broad topic of project management and resource management, those two always, like kind of you know, intersect really rapidly but they do have distinctly different you know skill sets and sort of practice areas for sure. But I was on with the managing director of the RMI this morning actually resource management Institute, and we were talking a lot about just broad topic around sort of certification, education in the category, what they do, because we're really working hard on that here in the community. So I was just trying to learn from him. And then I posited to him I was like hey, what can we do together? Because we don't need to create educational content around project management and resource management and all of the things. We should just lean on what already exists in the market.
Speaker 2:That's high quality and I think this is probably one of the hottest topics in our in our space is like how do you manage, measure and sort of maintain a structure for running this like crazy backlog of stuff that you constantly have to deal with? Um, and so hopefully, hopefully we'll end up doing something more with with the RMI at some point. Um, but I think in general I don't know, like my question, my statement and question here is, like Blaine, do you think that all MOPS people should get some basic level of like, project and resource management education, like what like is it? And do you think it has to be tool specific or is it just like principles that we should be like learning Um?
Speaker 3:yeah.
Speaker 2:I just love your sort of thoughts on that stuff.
Speaker 1:I'm just going to say there's a right answer to this question.
Speaker 3:It kind of is Uh yeah, everyone should absolutely get some stuff, and it doesn't need to be formal training, just getting a concept of what are those foundational pieces that are there that you can use to adapt. And it's interesting because when I did go through the Project Management Institute's program, a lot of it I already conceptually knew, but it was when they started to go into detail on okay, this is how you implement it, this is how you take it one step further that I was like this totally makes sense, and so I think that's where that formal training comes in. There's definitely not tool agnostic. I mean, all of the PM tools do ultimately the same thing. It's how you use it. It's always been my stance. The tool is only as good as what you're putting in. So it doesn't matter what tool you're using If you have an understanding from a foundational standpoint of how you want to run things.
Speaker 3:How do you, what is that output you want to see? And then you can make that tool deliberate. And I think that's what you get from some of those additional project management trainings. But you have to know the training you're going into, because there's a lot of like fluff out there, and so that's kind of the hard part is how do you identify the trainings to get those more complex next step pieces that you might be missing? That you might be missing because it's just a high-level project management 101. A lot of us already kind of have that because we've naturally learned it over time with working with other individuals and stuff. So you've got to make sure that you're auditing those programs to get that next level.
Speaker 1:So I'm curious is there?
Speaker 1:Because I'm sort of torn right, because I think you're right, there's a lot of there's probably. If you look for project management training, there's probably a jillion options out there, most of which are going to be not great. But I'm thinking about a book that I talk about a lot with lots of people, including my coaching clients, is a book called Crucial Confrontations, and I think if I had done, if I had read the book and gone through that by myself, it would have been fine. But I think part of the value for me was going through the book and going through training where you actually practically applied it to some real life situation at the same time, and I think I love it. Do you think there's something like that that makes sense with the training for project management? Cause I feel like I've known other people not you, blaine, of course who have certifications for PMI who actually are not very good at project management or some of the some of the in quotes, right, softer skills that come that are, I think, make effective project managers. Yeah, and I do.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I do think that there is a nuanced difference when it comes to the type of project you're managing. You know, if it's a software development, that's going to be very different skill set than what I am doing. There's a lot of different elements and so you know, when I went through the PMI training, I was doing marketing ops at the time and so it was what can I apply to me now versus what are some of these pieces like, some of their calculations and things like that. It's not anything we're necessarily going to put into our day-to-day here, but knowing that and knowing that there are different types of project managers, I think it absolutely makes sense that you would want to combine it with some sort of workshop and say let's break down project management for campaigns, project management for tool implementation and what those elements look like.
Speaker 1:You know tool implementation and what those elements look like. That's a. I think that's a really. That's a really good point about the different types of projects from like a functional standpoint, cause I've I have run into that before. We have project managers who have worked with who are, say, really good at software development. It was probably one of the bigger places. But when you try to get them to to to do that in a in a scenario that is maybe less structured, in general, right A campaign flow is a good one, like part of it is developing the creative and there's review cycles and yada, yada, yada, it's a different kind of project just because of that.
Speaker 1:Not necessarily the principles of the project management may not be different, but the nuances of it are different. I think that's your point. Um, so I do. I want to get into some of the like, some of these things that you talked about, like to make, whether it's the tools or like applying project management things in in general better before mike kind of hinted at this like resource management. I, the way I think about this, having been a manager, you know, team leader, multiple places is one of the challenges I had and I think others have had some more successful than others is understanding their team's capacity and knowing when and how. To then take that along with sort of the backlog of stuff and then build a case for additional resources, whether it's contractors, consultants, full-time people or whatever. How can project management and project management tools help with understanding capacity and then helping to build the case for additional resources?
Speaker 3:Yeah, capacity modeling is actually one of my favorite conversations, which most people avoid, but for me it has such a tie in with project management and the process that you develop and how you can easily garner that information.
Speaker 3:And so if you're using a project management tool to handle, it doesn't have to be tickets, but these tasks that you have. So if you were to look at them almost as tickets a campaign, build, a new website, all of these items if you were to look at them as separate tickets and you had a system that would lay it out. And what's great is these tools have automations in place to avoid the monotony of having to fill out multiple fields and this and that. So if you have it where you say, okay, a website ticket will now auto-generate and say the time estimated to do this is three hours and you're going to assign it to your web developer. And so now, all of a sudden, you have all of these tickets and the estimated time it's going to take that person to do, and you can calculate it in a week based on that due date and say, oh well, the tickets due this week are 60 hours worth of work. That is just not going to happen, and you're able to start to modify.
Speaker 2:Challenge accepted.
Speaker 3:Right, so you're able to start to just, in those few fields, identify the capacity of the team. And then what you want to do and this is always a struggle because no one wants to be micromanaged but you want to be able to make sure that you have the metrics of how long did it actually take, and so you're putting in. Ok, on average, a website page takes two hours, but this one was a clone. It was super easy. It took 30 minutes. You want to put that in so that you can adopt your requests that are coming in to better articulate the time it's going to take.
Speaker 3:And then what I like to do when you look at the capacity modeling is you're mapping it to their calendar and so you have almost like a set amount of working hours. You have your work hours, but you have meetings, you have admin, you have all this other stuff. What is that set working hours any given person has to do? A manager is going to have a lot less working hours because they have so much admin. So now you're looking at the balance between their level and their working hours versus their workload the balance between their level and their working hours versus their workload, and that allows you to give this capacity and then for your backlog, you're logging every single thing that you want to happen. That has come in and has been an ask, and you've got this collection of okay, our team has delivered this much. This is the amount of hours we have any given week of working hours and what we can do and accomplish. Now we have 400 hours of backlog items. You want them done. Here's what I need, and so it's a clear one-to-one.
Speaker 1:Right. Yeah, it's interesting. I think that I feel like I'm being heard here. Right, this idea of working hours is one that I think I've seen. I've seen many places where they just assume like they're 40 hours a week. So that's your capacity, right, 40 hours per person. I'm like, no, that's not really how it probably works, unless your your norm is a normal week is 50 hours a week or something like that, unless your norm is a normal week is 50 hours a week or something like that. But there's admin meetings, personal shit. There's always stuff that comes in.
Speaker 3:You have to at least get people.
Speaker 1:That should be expected.
Speaker 3:Yeah, 30 minutes at the beginning of the day and end of the day to clear your emails, all right, that's a whole hour off. Who does?
Speaker 1:that.
Speaker 3:I do. I know I freak people out.
Speaker 1:People are inbox zero. People do not like to see my inboxes.
Speaker 3:I would have a panic attack.
Speaker 1:It freaks them out.
Speaker 3:I am 100% zero inbox. I can't, my husband's not and.
Speaker 2:I refuse to even look at his email we are the same person, bone, and I refuse to look at my wife's email because it's so many emails I don't like. I have 30 in my inbox, right now and most of those will be gone.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I'm the same way yeah, anyway, all right, so that's good. But I think this is good Just in general. I don't think people think of project management and capacity planning and resourcing and all that as sort of interrelated, and I think this is a good point. For people who are familiar with it, this is part of why you would want to put together, put in place, some project management. Discipline with your team is to be able to like, especially if you feel like your team's under-resourced right.
Speaker 1:Now you are building the data behind. Being able to do that Well, not even under-resourced.
Speaker 3:I feel like a lot of the struggle is that my team just doesn't know what to prioritize. They don't know what to do. They're so frustrated, there's so much to do and they don't know how to focus it, and so this can allow that adjustment of like okay, here's a very clear, here's your set, here's the exact amount of hours. You don't have to worry about anything else.
Speaker 1:Here's that set for this week. Well, maybe this is you're alluding to as well. The other one I've seen is something comes in from the side that is critical, high priority. Like, okay, well, yes, we can do that, but that means these other things are going to be affected. Right, we're either going to have to pay people to spend extra time, or it's going to be delayed or some combination of those.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:It's that ability to look for that, absolutely yeah, and it's it's that ability to like, look for that trade off. And what's interesting about the you know the intersection of project management, resource management um, the two just go hand in hand like almost instantly. And, um, what's so? I I came from that world, Like, I worked at a company called Maven link. It was project to resource management software. That's.
Speaker 2:My whole career has been in and around this space pretty much so my brain works very similar, I think, in that regard, Blaine, to you. And one of the things that gets really interesting from a taxonomy perspective and just a data like a structure of how you manage your teams, especially on the resource side, is like thinking about roles. Like we all have multiple roles that we play in. Right, you can be a strategist part of the time. You could be an implementation campaign ops, sort of like person part of the time. Right, Like you could come up with whatever you want your taxonomy of names and roles to be and you could say, okay, I wear roughly two to three hats at all times and certain tasks align to certain skill sets that I have, and this is how I'm going to like spread out my time across, Like you're starting to get deeper and deeper into.
Speaker 3:How do I?
Speaker 2:manage my team myself, all that stuff. Right, because the components of delivering a campaign or delivering on a, you know, implementation of a product or whatever they require different types of skills and different types of roles, and there's only like you can actually hone in even further than just like people, like a person. Right, you could go further into actually the number of tasks that we have that are like campaign, like email development let's just use that one those are over, like, they're way above and beyond what I actually have the capacity to handle for right, like cause, I have these other three roles that I wear and so, therefore, email development, as that hat, I should probably look to outsource to an agency or independent contractor or bring somebody else on the team or whatever. Right, because here's the number of hours that are just like going to that type of role, right, so I think, like it's, it's very.
Speaker 2:I hope that people hear this episode and go, oh, wow, that could be super helpful for me to start thinking about taxonomy and how I think about roles and responsibilities, not just at the like individual, human level, but like down to the literal, the literal job responsibility of what it is that they're doing, and this stuff isn't easy, like we could talk about it all day long, but it takes work to think about what are all the roles, how do I create that taxonomy, how do I assign them? What tools do I use to be able to do that? You know it's so like for those of you listening like yeah, it's going to be a lot of work but at the end of the day it's going to pay off because hopefully you create more visibility into, you know, growing your team or getting the help that you need or whatever it is that you're aspiring to do. But I find it really hard, being a technologist, to like not want to be the owner of the project. Sorry, project management solution.
Speaker 2:Right, like you know how tools work and you're like oh, I know how to make these features go together, I know how to set up the tax audit, but it's like OK, but hold on a second. Are you responsible for the project management tool blade as a marketing ops person? Is that your job?
Speaker 3:are you asking me? Because it depends on the company. It depends on the company um love it.
Speaker 2:It depends.
Speaker 3:Answer yeah, it depends um, and it's funny you actually say that In my current company my boards I own, so I own my sections. But overall the project management tool, everyone has their own section. So marketing has their section, ops has their section. I own and run my section how I want it. In other companies I have managed the whole thing and that's great. It's a ton of work but it's great because I have complete control. But I also have worked for helped support consulting companies where I didn't own any of it and I went bonkers because the way they had things set up just did not make sense. So I mean, at some point you have to take ownership of, you can at least own what's assigned to you.
Speaker 3:You know, like if it's a, if it's a certain item assigned to you, you have the rights to manage it how you want it. And so if you want to add the certain fields for your tracking and things like that, do it. Um, that's sort of my suggestion at that point.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's interesting that you share it that way. I think at the top of your description it was like it's you know you can. It's not tool specific, it's a matter of how you deploy and use the tool Right.
Speaker 2:But and that's true of all the MarTech that we manage right Like, yeah, marketo is great If if you implement it the way you want to, it's also bad if you don't do a good job with it, right, hubspot falls in the same bucket All the tools right, but I think one of the things I would just throw the word of caution out to folks in the audience is like one of your roles now, blaine, one of your hats that you wear as a job description is that you're a project manager and you're using project management software and deploying it in a way that is effective for your business.
Speaker 2:Now I could make an argument that if you also manage other technologies, that's a different type of job, role and responsibility that you need to take on. It's a different hat and eventually, hopefully, you either have someone else take on the other ones or, you know, you go. Oh, wow, the time it takes for me to just do project and resource management is pretty large. I need a project manager to run this now and I would I would say for those listening, like you know, exercise caution because, yeah, you want to implement it and make the tool work for you, but now you're the project manager who owns the project management software which is way different than running the tech stack for go-to-market and marketing ops and all that other stuff.
Speaker 2:So yeah, it's hard. There's a lot Agreed, yeah.
Speaker 3:And if your company isn't going to view your hours like you are. And then all of a sudden, they're like, yeah, take it, own it. Now, all of a sudden, you've added that and you're like I can't produce as much. And they're like why not? Well, I'm running all these tools. Okay, take the tools away. Well, that wasn't the point.
Speaker 1:I think, what you're getting is like project management is one of those things that I've seen a lot of places where people are just expected to do project management as a part of their job, without any kind of guidance on what that means or how it should be done, anyway, so I think I'm a big believer. There's probably some point at which you go like we actually need it's within marketing. We need a dedicated project management expert. May or may not be a full-time role, but we can get that. I'm really interested, um, because I've worked with a number of different project management tools, lots of different ones. Some I would probably never ever use again if I could avoid it, and others where I'm like I can make that work, and a lot of them in between.
Speaker 1:Um, but I I think um you mentioned a couple of times and you mentioned when we talked before about like there's some things you can do in the way I like the word mikey is taxonomy, but the way you put things, kind of structure things within the platform that can help with what I hope it helps with is not only like building out projects and tasks and things like that faster, but also making it like less of an administrative burden, which I think is part of why some, some places, don't do well with project management tools as well. What, like? What do you have in terms of? Are there some best practices you have for that, even though I hate that term but like guidance for like, what should people be thinking about from a structural standpoint?
Speaker 3:Yeah, um, I always say when you look at this, it's important to know what are you wanting to get out of it Is, are there certain data points you want out of it? Then those are probably those markers. You need to make sure included, um, some suggestions that the, the tool that work is getting done in. Not only is it a great way to filter, but also to better track how much work is being done, and so I always have like a tag or a field that breaks down what that tool is. I like to have some sort of like requesting department. You know you want to be able to.
Speaker 1:I'm sorry to interrupt. So that first one. Just I want to make sure you're saying for a given project or task, like I'm doing this work in HubSpot or Marketo or Salesforce or whatever. That's what you're talking about, not the okay, got it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So it's like if you were to have all these tickets in front of you, you would have markers on each of them, the tool that you're doing that ticket in. So if it's a email request, you're building it in Marketo. If it's a website, it's WordPress, and then the request or the person who submitted it. So is it coming from leadership? Is it coming from, you know, your sales team? You want to be able to say, hey, sales, we've delivered 90% of your requests. You know things like that.
Speaker 3:Those are the types of key factors that you want to say okay, I want to be able to track how many tickets I am working on that are four or five hours of a single task, and so you want to be able to track. Okay, what are the hours, estimated hours for those work, and so things like that are going to be necessary fields that you're going to build into this project management tool, and then you can create your automations. All of these tools have these workflows and automations that, if you say email creation, it's going to auto tag Marketo because you've created that automation workflow, and so you're not having to manually go in and change these fields for every ticket. You've got your rules in place. You know what each one means and so when you put a ticket in it, automatically sets that up for you ticket in it automatically sets that up for you.
Speaker 1:That makes sense. I hadn't, like I've never done one where I really actively track what team or role somebody who's requesting tickets, but I could totally see the value in that in a number of ways.
Speaker 3:So that has come into play when you have, like, product marketing, a customer marketing and lead gen marketing and everyone's like you don't do as much for me as for them. It's like, actually, if you look at the tickets that I've received, I have performed equal percentage and so it's a huge data point. Don't argue against me.
Speaker 1:Love it. Yeah, ok, so that's good. So another thing, and this kind of gets to the structural stuff. I again, having worked with different tools, what I've found in general, I think of some tools that better at like I'll call them large, medium and large projects right, where you have lots of tasks and especially if they go across multiple teams, things like that, or multiple roles, uh, versus those that do kind of queue management really well, right, ticket ticketing type type things. I've I've struggled with finding ones that do both of those well, but I'm, I'm fairly certain that I just part of it is just cause I haven't had the time or the particular training on how to how to make them work Right. But do you, I mean, do you run into the same things or are you, like, do you think of those kinds of I'll call them initiatives, because I want to avoid tasks and projects and things like that but like, do you find that you have to have different tools for different kinds of initiatives?
Speaker 3:Yeah, for sure. There are some tools that are better at that than others. I have found a few that you can create these workspaces, and the workspaces can be an association to those types of initiatives. So you have a workspace that's associated to more of those ad hoc things. You have a space that is your tech implementation and you have a workspace that's set for your high scale. You know year long projects. Each of them have their own workspace, and so it really is. How is that project management tool structured, Cause some do that really well, Some don't.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Like I wouldn't use Basecamp. Sorry for all the Basecamp lovers out there. I wasn't going to throw name drops, but go have.
Speaker 2:That's about it. No, I'm okay with that one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm not a fan, not a fan.
Speaker 2:It has its place, but generally speaking, they all do.
Speaker 3:They all have their place.
Speaker 3:And you to know that you have to know what tools you know can handle that. I think for me what is important in a tool is that, no matter the amount of workspaces, I want one spot that me, as a person doing the work, can look at and see everything that's assigned to me. Look at and see everything that's assigned to me. I want to know, no matter the workspace it's in, where are the list of my items that I have to work on in a given timeframe, and so, as long as I have one central spot for that, the rest of it can sort of be mixed bagged.
Speaker 1:Something that I hadn't planned on asking you about, but it's just occurred to me in this, it always comes up for me in the same context is and maybe this gets to the custom fields and things like that but is there a way to connect the dots between the work being done that you're tracking in a project management platform and say, team or company goals and objectives right, so that you can then also look at yeah, here's all the work we did in support of our top five company goals or team goals or whatever, and here's the things that we didn't did, that were in addition to that.
Speaker 3:That's how I tell people to structure it. Take your KPIs If the company has OKRs, refine your KPIs to be what you can deliver out of your PM tool, Because otherwise our KPIs can be sort of arbitrary and it's hard to put specific metrics around it. So being able to say all right.
Speaker 3:My goal is to support the marketing team. What does that look like If they're submitting me tickets? My goal is to achieve 90% of those tickets within the SLA and timeline. That's a specific, measurable goal that I can now track in my PM tool and say look, I support you guys. The whole way to get to what you guys wanted was to put out 60 campaigns.
Speaker 1:Makes sense. Another related question, I think Do you find that the way I'm trying to think about how to put this Two components to this One? I also worry about putting too much I'll call it cleverness right into a setup. Right, so you kind of create um, a structure that if it worked ideally it would be great. You have all this insight, yada, yada, but it actually creates a bunch of burden on the system or administrative work. The other is um as T as the teams grow. If you have team, a larger team, you already have sort of embedded complexity and inefficiencies because of that. So do you do you like? Are there, do you have sort of different levels of like, customizations to the tool and or how much structure you put into the tools based on size and stage of the and maybe maturity of the of a team?
Speaker 3:Oh God, yes, um, what I had built out in a couple of roles back when we had, I had a team of five under me and our revenue ops team was 12 and I was supporting 40 marketers. That structure was very complex and would not work in the setup now where it's me supporting three marketers. It's not going to happen. So I think you have to balance that. But again, it's knowing what in your current spot do you want to get out With me? Currently, I don't need to get out some of those results that I needed to get out at the past role. So what I need is a way to track my time and to show broken out so that I can easily drop in what's happening this week and my boss can just look at it and say, ok, I know what she's working on this week, I know how long it's going to take her, I'm good to go. So it's all about figuring out where that stands for you that stands for you.
Speaker 1:Okay and I assume. Well, maybe a bad assumption, but I, I think I would approach it to invite a smaller team that would also want to do things. Um, I wouldn't want, I probably shy away from too much customization. That would sort of paint us into a corner, if you will, I don't want to. I want to be able to be flexible and agile in terms of being able to execute. I think the more you change, modify things, the less you have of that ability.
Speaker 3:Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2:Also create, go ahead.
Speaker 3:No, go ahead. I was just going to say keep it simple, stupid, you know it's. There's too many options and things are going to get complicated. It's when things are already too complicated that you need to do all of that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I was, I was for the listeners. Uh, we're on video and I was smirking, uh, at the some of the comments, Cause I've. I have also seen people create some pretty interesting job security moments, creating some rather complicated processes.
Speaker 1:It's an interesting way of phrasing it.
Speaker 2:Okay, it can happen, I once worked with an IT team that, like, owned this, like custom integration between HubSpot and Salesforce, and I was like this is not necessary, but yeah, all right, you got. That was not necessary, but yeah, all right, that was the consultant. So you know, you've got job security. Good for you, you do you, you do you. But I agree, generally, don't overcomplicate it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, that's a general sort of mindset I have with just about any technology. Yeah, I mean, but that's a general sort of mindset I have with just about any technology right, it probably was fairly obvious that there was a need for project management sort of maybe not centralized, but a dedicated project management resource right that supported the entire team. Where you're at now, probably you play lots of roles. Project management is a piece of it and it's probably a small fraction of it is my guess. Do you have any sort of rules of thumb or guidelines for knowing, like you know, our team has gotten to this point, whether it's let's keep it to marketing, but marketing is working with, say, sales, ops and legal or other teams right that have to be a part of the workflows. Yeah, how do you know when you probably need to start thinking about at least a significantly portion of somebody's time dedicated to project management or up to full-time or maybe even more than one person?
Speaker 3:That's a great question. I would think it, I guess for me. I say this I would think you've come to be obvious, but I guess for me it's more obvious than for others who don't have that background. It wouldn't be so. I would be looking for red flags like lots of missed deadlines, lots of things not getting followed up on, projects getting put on hold because there's no one to move it forward. Put on hold because there's no one to move it forward, um, you know, any given person not getting their work done because they're spending too much time facing other people. You know those are, those are the key red flags that you need one sole person to come in and take the reins give me, give you an example.
Speaker 1:So I was working in a place where, um, I won't say it was like, uh, campaign managers, but let's just leave it at that. But people like campaign managers were part of what they were asked to do is to put together a, a plan, right, and they would put together their plan. They'd pull all the different stakeholders together and review the plan and go, like you, you know, michael, you know what you need to do, riso, you know what you need to do, blaine, you know what you do, right? Yes, everyone nodded um, and then they would get to, they would would wait to, you know, say a month it was a multi-month project a month later and be like, okay, we're going to check in, how's everybody doing, and like half the people wouldn't have Right, is that the kind of sign you would be looking for? Like it's just because it's not because nobody, like people, didn't care, is because no one was following up on a more frequent basis.
Speaker 1:Okay, that was a place where I was saying we, we need someone to right, yeah, well, or people just like oh, the other, like this other thing came in that was urgent and it's like I, and then I just forgot about this other thing because I don't have one place to look for work. I'm working on Okay, that's good, you're right, I think it'll be. People will have to kind of that's when it is a little bit learned, right, you need to kind of go through some experiences like that. Um, okay, we are running short on time. I do want to get to.
Speaker 1:This is a little bit more of a uh, mike's getting tired of me. This is like the fourth time today that he'll hear me go on some sort of rant. Um, this one I won't be a rant really, but like I do think. I see I see people I saw this in another community that was more for, like chief of staff or ops, like general ops people people were asking like, oh, what do you have for for time management? And I saw people putting in suggestions for what I think of as project management tools, which, which, to me, are just different than like, personal time management and that kind of stuff. Um, but do you see people sort of mixing those. And then I I do remember you said something about you can have your project management system linked to your calendar too, like, how, like do you think of those as different things, do you? Does your brain just sort of like meld them together? I, for me, I try to separate them.
Speaker 3:I I do think of them together, um and separate, if that makes sense.
Speaker 1:I kind of get, I actually kind of I think I get you there Okay.
Speaker 3:I view it as I mean time management is a mix of that. So to do time management you have to have certain tools to help you. Project management tools, a great way to help, but it's not the end. I'll be honest on everything. You know, we sort of teetered on the line of talking about time blocking, which is one of those time management styles that you can use. That.
Speaker 3:I have found helpful, and so what I like to do to sort of combine these items is those hour blocks that I was telling you about on my you know, different tasks or initiatives I am filtering on. Okay, this week, what are similar tasks that I have and how long do they take? Okay, so I have three emails that I have to build, and those three emails are, you know, an hour each. That's three hours. Where in my week do I have three hours? Now, I'm going to block those three hours. I'm going to put those tasks directly on the calendar and I know exactly what I'm going to do and when I'm going to do it. And so, as I'm working through my week, if something pops up, one, no one's going to schedule over that time because it's blocked.
Speaker 3:Um, and two well, um, but two. If they do, I know that, okay, something's going to have to come off or I'm going to have to move this, and so it's not like I lose track of everything that's happening in the week, because now I'm sort of just like shifting these blocks around. I do block open hours, so I have certain parts of my calendar that are like these are the hours you get If you're going to book time on my calendar. It's in these hours and every day has a different type of slot and there's certain ranges. So I like to leave that time for your one-off calls and emergencies and things like that, because I know it's going to happen. That's as a manager, as someone who's main running. If I was just like a specialist, I probably wouldn't need as much of those open hours. So that's sort of how I time block, but also use that project management tool to account for the spaces in my calendar that need to get done.
Speaker 1:I've tried the time blocking thing and I guess I'm just, it is a me problem, I'm not, I'm too easily distracted, I think that's one. But I like the idea of doing that. I mean it's similar to what, like I am an old franklin covey planner guy, so people may or may not be familiar with that. I don't know if they're around. Well, they're still around. But paper-based calendars are digital. One sucks um and, like I did that idea of like having to do is and putting them on the calendar and big blocks and doing all that. The other one I think you brought it up An interesting one.
Speaker 1:I heard about this years and years ago. So so a manager said that in this case it was like working enough, it was like on my door, I would, he would, he would here's, the here's, my, here's, my available time for got a minute meetings Right Cause it was always like people would just pop in and go. You got a minute and it would be like nonstop distractions and he's like if you've got an urgent thing, like super urgent, okay, you can interrupt, but otherwise, if it's not really that like, it doesn't have to happen. Right, this very second, like here's, when I'm available for those, you just sign up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I call them my open hours, office hours.
Speaker 3:I call them my open hours and I will have certain items that I know I'm going to try and work on during those that. I know if somebody pulls my focus, it's not an end, all be all. It's not like if I'm doing a pipeline analysis no one can bother me, that's not. I can't be sidetracked.
Speaker 3:It's going to mess everything up, but if I'm responding to emails or, you know, trying to do some different admin tasks, things like that, I'm going to put it in those open hours so that people can hit me up and I can step away, come back, step away and it's not going to disturb everything.
Speaker 2:I like it. I have one final question for you, Blaine, from me. I don't know. I think we're pretty much at time too. But go for it.
Speaker 1:My. My question is agile or waterfall?
Speaker 3:We don't have enough time.
Speaker 1:We don't have enough time for that one.
Speaker 3:There's a right answer to that one too, yeah agile.
Speaker 1:I don't know like I I think agile is good for some things I'll get rocker to come back.
Speaker 1:So I here's my. I'm working with a client now and they are using agile for some. It's not even really marketing it, but it's to me like, like I struggle, I can see the value and I'm starting to come around, but the the overlay of sprints to the kind of work that is being done just doesn't match in my head Right. So I I'm very often finding things that are taking longer than a sprint. So instead of me just tracking one thing, I'm artificially creating extra items in the project management system, and it's like it just feels wrong.
Speaker 3:Agile but lean, agile but lean. You got to be cautious with how you approach it, but if you have it set in the right way, I use sprints, that's how I use my, I have my weekly sprint and that is my setup and my board and my project management tool and that's my daily life.
Speaker 1:I'm open to it. I just I'm still not there. I also don't believe in waterfall Like. I think there's a case to be made for something sort of in between or elements of both.
Speaker 2:I will abstain from answering it.
Speaker 1:I'm not sure.
Speaker 2:Does that mean, you like?
Speaker 1:waterfall, mike, is that it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm totally a waterfall guy Wow.
Speaker 1:Are you really?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh no, no, no no, because I think nothing happens without a dependency.
Speaker 2:You can't do something without something else happening. First there are dependencies.
Speaker 3:Yeah, to an extent I mean yeah, you have to have like an initiation trigger, but at some point, like I think, I think it happened at the same time, Like.
Speaker 1:I think deadlines are more important than dependencies. Like I think without deadlines then people don't know when it like when is something actually need to be done?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I something actually need to be done. Yeah, yeah, I don't know. I just like you know I can. I can make a plan in a sprint to build the email, but if the copy's not finalized then I can't plan for that and there's a dependency there and therefore I need to track the dependency and the reliance on the team to be able to give me the things when I need it. And so, to your point, deadlines are deadlines, right, but I can't do a plan without knowing the prior dependencies now you're talking lean mike.
Speaker 3:Now you're talking lean and the methodology behind lean there. So I know all right so clearly with the new uh argument of is mops mops. Marketing like this is the new hot topic.
Speaker 1:There it is.
Speaker 2:We're going to keep going.
Speaker 1:There we go. Well, clearly, clearly, we could go continue on. Unfortunately we are. We are actually past our time. This has been a great conversation, Blaine. We probably didn't even cover all the things we had planned on, so thank you so much for for that and the insights. If folks want to keep up with you or what's going on, or pick your brain a little bit, if you're open to it, what's the best way for them to do that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm totally open to it. I love it. You can connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty sure I'm the only Blaine Tetterton out there in the universe. I should clarify I'm the only female Blaine Tettererton in the universe, so it should be hard to find me.
Speaker 1:There you go, got it, and maybe the only one who's hosting chapter events in Raleigh too.
Speaker 1:That's right. Yes, sounds good. Well, again, thank you, blaine. This has been a fun conversation. I think our listeners are going to really get a lot from this, mike. Thank you as always, and thanks to. Our listeners are going to really really get a lot from this, mike. Thank you as always, and thanks to our listeners for continuing to support us and give us great ideas and suggestions for topics and guests. If you have any of those suggestions, feel free to drop us a message on Slack or in LinkedIn or wherever you find Mike, naomi or me. Until next time. Bye everyone.