How to Identify & Support Your Best Accidental Project Managers

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Galen Low: Hey folks, thanks for tuning in. My name is Galen Low with the Digital Project Manager. We are a community of digital professionals on a mission to help each other get skilled, get confident, and get connected so that we can amplify the value of project management in a digital world. If you want to hear more about that, head on over to thedigitalprojectmanager.com/membership.

Today we are talking about the plight of accidental and deputized project managers working in an agency context — you know the ones — they're the folks who got swept up into leading a project with minimal training, zero experience, and limited authority. And the question that we're asking ourselves today is, how can we, as project leaders, managers, and agency operators, identify the right people to take on a project manager role, and how can we better set them up for success so that our people and our agencies all benefit?

Joining me today in the studio is renowned agency expert, author, and founder of Sakas & Company agency consultancy, Mr. Karl Sakas himself. 

Karl, thank you so much for joining me today. 

Karl Sakas: Galen, great to be here. Looking forward to helping people. 

Galen Low: I love that. And honestly, I love what you do. I love how you help agencies. I love that you've dug into the sort of project management bit as well. And not to fanboy too much about it, but you're a name that I've been wanting to have on this podcast for a long time. I know you were on before with Ben, but under my watch, you and I haven't had a conversation that we've put to tape.

So I'm super excited to dive in. 

Karl Sakas: Great to be here. 

Galen Low: Awesome. 

I thought maybe what I'd do is just start off with one big question to get us rolling. And the question is this; what is the biggest benefit of an agency appointing or deputizing or maybe permanently promoting a non-PM employee into a PM role instead of hiring an experienced PM? And also the flip side of that, what is the biggest risk? 

Karl Sakas: Let's start by defining the term. So I coined the idea of a deputized project manager. I've been a full time project manager in the past. A deputized project manager is a part time PM who is doing that, whether they want to or not, on top of their other responsibilities.

They could be a designer who's fairly organized and now they're project managing design projects, developer, writer, or others. And the reason I called it deputized is you imagine like the old Western movie where the mayor picks up the star and pins it on someone and they're like, you're in charge now.

They've been deputized whether they want it or not. And now they have to figure out what to do. Go out and get the bad guy or go out and get the project where the retainer shipped. So that's where deputize comes from. And the idea of a reluctant project manager, it's a bit different. Although you can have some of the same challenges, a reluctant PM or reluctant any role is someone who can do the job, but they don't want to do the job.

They could do it. It's just not what they want. In hiring you ideally avoid hiring reluctant employees. I have some articles on that at the Sakas & Company website. With deputized, the assumption is maybe they're not always thrilled about it, but they're at least willing to try. In an ideal world, I mean, you'd ask what are the pros and cons around deputized or reluctant.

Ideally, never hire a reluctant employee where they could do the job they don't want to. That tends not to go well. Sometimes in my client work, they've hired someone who turns out to be a reluctant such and such, and we have to figure out what to do. But, on the deputized side, ideally, you'd have full time project managers, people who are enthusiastic about project management, committed to a career in project management. 

They're members of communities like the Digital Project Manager. They see this as their job. So in an ideal world, you'd hire full time PMs, but where deputized PMs come in, that can be when the agency doesn't have budget to hire a dedicated PM. Certainly, PMs are profitable when you're billing for their time, but hiring that first PM can be a big leap.

So deputized PMs are sometimes a stopgap solution. Or maybe a case where maybe there's not enough budget from clients to pay for full scale PM, but someone still needs to coordinate it, you deputize someone to get the job done.

Galen Low: I like that framing on reluctant, because I've seen that happen a lot. That use case that you mentioned, I've seen it happen in practice, a designer or a UX researcher is deputized, they're given the badge, right?

You have the con, manage this project. That's kind of it, like the end. And I've seen some folks who are very excited about that. They're sort of interested in project management. They are interested in contributing more in their role. And it's worked out really well for that particular agency or consultancy.

And then the flip side being the folks who are like, Oh man, like I don't want to have to be a project manager and a designer. And even though the cost benefit is there for the agency, it might actually deplete the ROI through a lack of enthusiasm and interest in actually doing the job. 

Karl Sakas: Lack of enthusiasm. And you're also going to see a productivity head due to switching costs, as people switch from being a PM mode to being a subject matter expert as an SME, things get lost along the way. 

Galen Low: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, even just like the training piece, the scenario you described is exactly how I've seen it and experienced it, right? Here's the badge. Go, make a decision. 

Karl Sakas: Yup, yup. Of course, you want to make sure you're not hiring reluctant PMs in the first place, for instance, a friend was at an agency where they hired someone who had been a designer and said they wanted to switch to project management, but the candidate didn't really get into why, and they clarified that this isn't a design role, this is a PM role.

And apparently she claimed that, Oh, yeah, understood. And then day one, she was interfering with the designers and they also had to fire her. And then apparently she sued the company and they had to pay a settlement. They could have avoided that in the first place. I mean, PM is a hard job. I would be asking if someone has ever been a PM before, why do you want to be a PM? 

Do you know what you're getting into? It's a great match for the right people, but it's not for everyone. I think in that case, if the agency, which wasn't a client of mine, if they had dug into the why on it, I think the candidate's story would have fallen apart.

And they would have realized that, I think what turned out was she was just applying for any job she could find and they hired her, but that was a mistake all around. 

Galen Low: No, I've seen that happen where it just appears upstream. It's okay, I'm doing this. What's the next step? Maybe I can manage the people who do this when they do projects. Okay, that sounds good. Off we go. 

Karl Sakas: Yeah. Yeah. 

Galen Low: Yeah. I love that. I love that sort of probing the why question when it's somebody applying for a role that doesn't actually have the experience in the role. 

I gotta use that opportunity to zoom out a bit. There's kind of a couple different paths I want to head down, but the reason why this topic was really important to me was because so many of my listeners self identify as accidental project managers. They were just in the right place at the right time. 

Karl Sakas: We got deputized PM, elected PM, and then the accidental. 

Galen Low: The accidental, right? And and it could be a blend of both. Some of these individuals, obviously, if you're listening to the podcast, they got the badge and they kept it. That's actually how I got my start in project management too.

I was just there and I was available and I picked up the badge when they threw it at me. And I do see it, like I mentioned at the top. I do see this practice happen a lot in agencies and other organizations for those reasons that you mentioned, right? Like sometimes it's not the right time to make a full time PM hire.

Sometimes you want to give opportunities to people who have shown promise or interest, but it's still a bit of a dark art, I think, and it can really send people down the wrong path and it can create stress and it can create mismatched expectations for that deputizer, accidental PM, as well as business risk for the agency.

So, that's what really got me thinking. It got me thinking, how can wise decisions be made around appointing, what you call deputizing, project managers in an agency context so that everybody wins? And I thought I might circle back around to that reluctance piece because you had written an article and it was a framework for getting things done, but I think it applies equally well to project managers.

It was that trifecta between desire and competence and capacity. I was wondering if you could walk us through that? 

Karl Sakas: Yeah. Well, imagine a Venn diagram with three circles that are intersecting desire, competence, capacity. And this came up as clients would say, I've got a team member and they're not getting their job done.

Or sometimes that most of my work is with agency owners. They were saying, I'm struggling to get things done. Or, I often hear things like I want to delegate to my team, but I don't trust them to get the job done. As an advisor, as a coach and consultant, one of the things that I would then wonder is, are you not delegating because indeed the team doesn't have what they need?

Or is it more of the boss's problem and they could, they're just not trusting them, even though they could and maybe should. And I identified this Venn diagram, desire, competence, capacity. And the idea is that you need all three of those for something to get done. And, conversely, if something isn't getting done, you're probably missing at least one of them, maybe two, perhaps all three.

So let's look at what they are and how that works. So the desire is, do you want to do the job? Because if someone doesn't want to do the job, it's probably not going to go well. That's desire. Competence is, do they know how to do the job? That could be the job they're doing now. Or if you're looking to promote someone, competence in the new role. We talked about, for instance, are tied to being an individual contributor to the managing people or managing projects, just because you're good at doing the individual contributor work, doesn't mean you're good at managing others at it.

So competence is going to scale over time, but competences can't even do the job. So desire, competence, and capacity is do you have time to do the work? Someone could have desire. They want to do it, competence. They know how, but they don't have time. They don't have capacity. That happens a lot for people in leadership roles where you want to do it, you know how to do it, but you're slammed with meetings. 

You're putting out fires. There's just no time in the day. You haven't made the transition, as I would say, from firefighter to fire marshal. You're putting out the fires, not preventing future fires. So if something isn't getting done, I take a look for an owner who's Oh, I don't want to delegate to my team.

They're not going to get it done. I said, well, take a look. Do they have desire? Do they have competence? They have capacity. If they're missing any of those, that's a problem, but you can address it and make things better. 

Galen Low: What I like about that lens is that, when I first looked at that trifecta, I was, looking at the Venn diagram.

I'm like, okay, up to that individual. But then I started looking at it more closely. I'm like, not necessarily like that thing you flagged at the beginning, like reluctance, which is opposite of desire, I think, in my worldview. So if you've identified that somebody has a desire to explore project management, like from an, I see a role.

Then that's a pretty good start. But as you mentioned, right, that person might be missing one or two or maybe all three of those things. But if they have desire, then the competence piece is kind of a split, right? It's have you identified that they have the skills? I mean, I guess, A) as an operator or as a manager, do you know what those skills are that would make them a good project manager?

Because I often see that get oversimplified. You're good at communicating and you're organized. You're a project manager now. Not bad places to start, but not the whole kit and caboodle. And then the capacity thing, I think is like, when I look at it now, I'm like, the onus is on the manager or the agency operator, right?

The agency leader to create the space and not necessarily just go, Hey, we tacked on new responsibilities to your job, but you still have to run those 5, 15, 20 projects that you're also the designer on. Good luck. Bye. I think that's a huge piece. 

Karl Sakas: That's unfair. And I mean, that also gets into providing other resources, for instance, talk to an agency owner who grumbled that the director of client services was making promises to clients without checking against the sort of agency wide calendar.

And I said, okay, who's in charge of the agency white calendar? And the owner admitted, well, actually, there was no agency wife. Okay. Problem number one, but you know, indeed the team should have been coordinating against the overall calendar, but it is up to the owner to make sure it happens. 

Galen Low: No, I appreciate that sort of accountability piece.

And then I guess the one piece I glossed over in that is that competence can also be the accountability of the agency in this context as well. And, I was thinking through what you're saying about, okay, well, yeah, it might be, you might be missing some things and that might make it not a good choice, but it also might make it a choice that needs some support.

So in the event that somebody has desire and has capacity but isn't really competent, what do you recommend to your clients to kind of fill that part of the Venn diagram? 

Karl Sakas: I mean, ultimately they need three things for competence. They need training on how to do it, knowing where various resources are, what done looks like.

For instance, a client mentioned that his team would take four hours to do things that would take him 20 minutes. I mean, it's a big difference, right? You're like, Oh, what's wrong with the team? Well, I dug into it. One, these are junior team members who had never done the work before. He had never told them it was supposed to take only 20 minutes.

They assumed four hours was normal. And he also hadn't trained them on getting it done faster. So training is important, showing people how, and that could be doing your own training or doing third party training from other organizations like the Digital Project Manager, or, I've got my training agency, PM 101 for deputized PMs. You don't have to do all the training yourself, but you need to recognize the need for training.

The second is coaching, which is that inevitably, training doesn't cover everything, coaching people through what to do. I'm a fan of the Socratic method. What do you think you should do? I wouldn't solve that. Eventually, you're going to have to give an answer, right? If it's just there, but, sort of an escalated approach or start, they make the three A's.

They make you aware, then they ask for advice. And then finally, you're actively involved. But the third thing is we've got training. We've got coaching. This is within competence. The third thing is basically on-the-job experience, doing the job, learning along the way, rather than working in a vacuum. My joke as a PM was that every PM, if you're a web project manager, was going to have launched a website without installing the Google Analytics tracking code. 

And when you were hiring an experienced web PM, part of what you were doing was they had made that mistake for someone else and then would never do it again.

That's why a PM is going to expect higher compensation than a project coordinator or senior PM or director of PM. You're paying in part from their having learned on other companies. 

Galen Low: Yeah, no, I love that. And can I just say that I love that you have a course for deputized project managers, because it's this underserved need, I find.

Because it happens all the time. Here's the badge. Go. You have desire. I'm giving you capacity. It'll be fine, right? And they don't need a degree in project management at that stage in their sort of career journey. And they, they don't need their PMP. They don't, arguably, don't even, wouldn't even benefit from, a CAPM sort of training course.

It's more practical, right? It's just here's what you need to know. 

Karl Sakas: It's the basics. It's kind of like a friend mentioned how their boyfriend studied nuclear engineering in the Navy. And the initial training was like, here are the basics of nuclear engineering. This is in an enlisted role, and then basically the plan was he was going to go back and get a bachelor's degree in nuclear engineering, which basically filled in a lot of the theory that he hadn't learned on the more operating basis.

So the Deputized PM course, and thanks to your persuasiveness, we've created a discount code for listeners of the podcast, which I think we'll share in the show notes and all. But here it's more about the nuts and bolts of being a deputized PM. If you want the theory, there's a lot more you can get elsewhere, but this is more like you got to do PM.

You don't need a history of how the Gantt chart was developed. You just need to put out the fire right now. 

Galen Low: Yes, exactly. It's like actually the practicality, the practical training leads. The theory follows to fill in the gaps. I find so often that in the training world, the opposite happens, right? Here's all this theory. Go and do the job. And they're like, Oh. 

Karl Sakas: Right. Dangerous. 

Galen Low: I will come back to that. We do have a deal on that program, which I couldn't recommend enough just because I think it's just so useful. And there's there's nothing quite like it. 

Before that, I wanted to just shift on to another idea that you had, because I was thinking about this sort of trifecta of the desire, the competence and the capacity. And I was also reading through some of your work and you had mentioned this notion about new rope versus wet twine as a way of describing employee mindsets. It really resonated with me separately from this trifecta of Hey, I'm going to appoint you to do this thing. I was wondering if you could just walk us through that idea.

Karl Sakas: Yeah. So this is a concept that I got through my friend, Stan Phelps. The idea is that there's a continuum around employee or any team member quality. At the top end, the ideal end of things is new rope. New rope, imagine working with rope, in Voice Scouts I did pioneering where you build structures from logs and rope and all.

New rope is strong. In this case, those new rope team members are going to drive your agency forward. They make your life easier. They're the 10x team members, that maybe even 100x team members. At the other end of the scale is wet twine. Wet twine is not very strong. It's, fraying already. If you have an employee who causes drama, who's always stirring things up, they're definitely wet twine.

Not every wet twine employee causes drama, but if they cause drama, they are wet twine. They tend to be very unproductive, especially relative to all of the management oversight that you need, whether you're in a PM role or a people manager role. For instance, I worked with a client that had hired someone who had badgered them into hiring him.

They were in a small town. This was, pre-remote roles as much, and they needed the hire. And finally he persuaded them to give him a chance and they foolishly believed him. And he was so unproductive. They actually put his desk outside of the agency president's office. So the president could look out the door and see, was this guy working?

And usually the answer was no, or at least not doing a very good job. So they ultimately parted ways before hiring me as their consultant, but I surely would have recommended firing him if that had been the case. 

Galen Low: The reason why it stood out to me was because I see these situations. I'm glad you mentioned this, like scenario of someone sort of badgering them to get a role.

I see the same thing happen internally. That use case that you mentioned at the top, right? A designer, sometimes they're appointed, right? They're deputized. They're like, listen, I need you to manage this project as well. And if they have the desire and they have the competence and they have the capacity, like that might be a good fit.

And then I've seen the other thing that actually we touched on earlier, which is I want to be a project manager. I have the desire and have the skills. I have the capacity or you can create the capacity for them, but they might still be this wet twine, right? They're going to create drama. They might be sort of badgering you into deputizing them to be a project manager.

But it can be a fallacy that this person will suddenly become new rope and won't be drama. 

Karl Sakas: Yeah, usually not. It is worth considering that there's new rope, wet twine. There's also we could call it 'in the middle'. They're not new rope. They're not wet twine. But if someone is, for instance, in the middle in their current job, and you realize they're going to be wet twine in the future job they want, don't move them into the new job. That's not going to go smoothly. 

And this also, I, when I onboard new clients for my agency growth diagnostic initial 4 - 6 week project, part of that includes doing a team census, where they list everyone on the team, and then they add annotated notes, including, are they new rope, wet twine, or in the middle? And from having worked with hundreds of agencies, there's some patterns. And it's hard to grow your agency with any wet twine, and you're certainly not going to reach your growth goals. 

Something to think about if you've been struggling, make a list of everyone on your team. You can read my article on New Rope versus Wet Twine. And if you notice a lot of wet twine or in the middle, especially even in the middle in leadership roles, that is hurting your growth, most likely.

Galen Low: That's interesting. 

The one thing that kind of got me thinking was that in the middle bit, and then the deputized PM. And if you are somebody, a manager or an agency owner or operator, like what are things to look out for if somebody is sort of not really settling into that deputized PM role? Like when do you call it?

What are some of the flags that you should look for to be like, actually, even though this person wanted it and they're capable and we make capacity for them and they're not wet twine, but they're somewhere in the middle, but it's just not working out. What are some flags that might signal that it may be time to not to take the badge away?

You know what I mean? 

Karl Sakas: Yeah, I mean, some of it includes taking a look at their morale. Ideally, you're doing some sort of pulse engagement type survey, 15Five or something else, monitoring morale. And if you notice a drop in morale since moving into the new deputized PM role, And then you also there's always going to be an initial challenge when you start a new role.

You're trying to adapt, but ideally, they're going to revert to their previous morale level as they get to know the job. They're getting support and things like that. If you're noticing, though, that it's not getting better, and if you're their direct manager, ideally, you're doing weekly one-on-one meetings, or threes, or you might be doing monthly skip levels if there's someone in between as the manager.

But, paying attention to how they're doing, a friend works at a large corporation and joined a new team and is a bit underwater, but has sort of kept that to themselves. And it turns out that's probably a good match for the company and team culture because in the recent performance review, the boss said something like never complains.

I would rather hear complaints from my team. I mean, I solicit that. Because if people aren't happy at work, and there are things you can do to improve that and you choose not to, or you don't even ask kind of what's going on, people have options, especially if you have new rope on your team, they can go somewhere else, make them feel appreciated, feel valued.

So, I don't know, if you want to retain good team members, ask how they're doing, and if they're in the wrong role, and you can move them somewhere else that's a better fit, do it.

Galen Low: What I love about that is that nowhere did that kind of go into a, look at this KPI, and if the KPI is like too low, then you just have to cut them, which is valid as well. But I think what people underestimate as managers is the just checking in, how are you doing and letting that be the sense check. 

Because there are cultures where yes, it's valued if you never complain, so then no one's going to complain and as a result, you're never going to get that feedback or sort of get that understanding of what's going on in your business, but I do like that.

Karl Sakas: To your point about KPIs, I mean, if someone is managing projects and everything's going over budget and over the schedule and all, like they could have super high morale, but if everything is off the rails, that is a problem. Don't ignore the KPIs. Also, don't do what a client did several years ago.

They reached out and the owner had said basically like my book work less, earn more. The owner had said, I've been running this for over a decade, I'm not making as much money, and I'm working longer hours and all. And I found a number of problems, one of which was that they were regularly going over budget by 50 to 80 percent on projects.

So I talked through various things, including levers for delivery profit margins. Which is basically raise prices, reduce the scope or manage the scope. I'll be talking about dealing with scope creep at the MYOB conference, October 2024, and also a PM-oriented version at the Digital PM Summit, of course, coming up.

We're we'll both be there in Austin. I've shared various advice and the client's head of operations actually asked when I'd said, stop going over budget. The operations heads question was, well, how over budget can we go? And I'm like, how much money do you want to lose? Yeah. 

Galen Low: That's the thing about and there is this widespread myth and misunderstanding that agency margins are huge, but they're really not.

Karl Sakas: Typically half or more of the revenue is going out the door in labor compensation, including the owner and owners, as well as key team members. Just because the agency brings in a million or 10 million or 100 million, that's not all going to the owner's pocket. 

Galen Low: Yeah, absolutely. 

And actually, you know what? This is a really good segue because we've been talking about the benefits and how to appoint a PM, to deputize a PM and how to support that person. But I guess the flip side is the sort of differential in value. Like you mentioned, sometimes you're hiring a project manager, you're paying for the experience of where they've made mistakes before, right?

Making sure that, the analytics tracking code is in there at launch, you're paying for that. When you're working with your clients, what do you recommend to them in terms of like when it's better from an ROI standpoint to actually double down and hire an experienced project manager that can deliver value out of the gates instead of deputizing a PM?

Karl Sakas: I mean, if we're looking at agency headcount between 8 to 12 peoples, when you should likely hire a dedicated project manager. If you're doing more technical work, potentially it could be even sooner. Keeping in mind that the PM is going to be profitable by themselves, but because they might be building maybe 50 percent of their time or so, say 20 to 25 hours a week, they're not going to be as profitable as a subject matter expert.

However, the PM gives you a multiplier effect. If an agency is using a mostly outsourcing model where freelancers or other way level agencies are doing the work, in that case a PM might be your first employee hire, because you need them to coordinate all of the other activities. So, either very early, if you're a mostly freelancer based agency, within 8 to 12 people, if it's primarily full time team members. And if you're at 15 to 20 people and don't have a dedicated PM, I'm not saying it's necessarily too late, but get on it and hire a PM very soon.

Galen Low: I love that sort of scale model as well. And the other bit, and I won't make you list all 42 of them, but you did have that other article about 42 ways your project manager saved your agency this week. And it kind of, it brought it back to mind because there's a sort of scale, right? Like just like dollars and cents.

And where is it going to help your profit and help your agency grow and deliver more value to your clients. And then there's all of those sort of like, "invisible" work of someone's got to, be looking at that project profitability and minding that if it's not you, then you need someone that you can trust to do that, who has a sensibility to do that.

Not just someone who's going to get the tasks done, but still be 80% over budget. That might not be the best way for you to kind of create a sustainable agency and then it's okay, now we're talking in terms of we might need a full time project manager. 

Karl Sakas: I mean, part of the challenge of being a deputized PM and you can do the best you can and get the training and coaching other support.

You're trying to do two different things at once. Typically, you're trying to do the subject matter expert work. Or it could be something else within the agency and you're also trying to do the PM. That also happens if you're an account manager/project manager. It's hard to do both. AMs are like, keep the client happy, sell them more work, think about possibilities. 

PMs are more focused on, okay, this is the scope. We got to get this done. Rather than, oh, maybe we can upsell them some more. It's no, I got to get this done. And so the challenge is if you're splitting someone to do AM and PM, they're tending to be good at one or the other.

They're good at the client relationships, but not necessarily managing the details or they're great at the details, but they're not as focused on what does the client need that we haven't figured out already? We're at possibilities. Ideally, those are separate roles and you build accordingly. But if you've got a deputized PM, give them the tools and knowledge they need, including knowing what they don't know. So they're not letting budget run out the door.

Galen Low: I love that. I love that sort of looking at the balance. It's not going to be a 50/50 split suddenly just because you willed it. 

Karl Sakas: No, that usually doesn't work too well. 

Galen Low: Super valid. Super valid. Karl teased it earlier on. Yeah, I did bend his arm a little bit, and I got you all a good deal on his course, Agency PM 101.

So if that course sounded interesting to you, Karl has kindly offered a $100 discount to listeners of the DPM Podcast. You can just head over to Karl's Agency 101 PM page, I've linked it in the show notes, and use the discount code "DPM Podcast". 

Karl Sakas: Yep. That'll automatically save you the hundred dollars and the course is on demand. So you can take it at your own pace. You could take it in an afternoon. You can do it an hour a day for four days. You could do it an hour a week over a month or so. It's flexible. It's up to you. It's modular, including some exercises. So hope people find comfort. 

Galen Low: And I go take it. 

Karl, thank you so much for spending the time with me today. Always love your insights, and honestly, this has been a lot of fun. 

Karl Sakas: Thank you, and to everyone listening, good luck out there. 

Galen Low: All right folks, there you have it. As always, if you'd like to join the conversation with over a thousand like-minded project management champions, come join our collective. Head over to thedigitalprojectmanager.com/membership to learn more. And if you like what you heard today, please subscribe and stay in touch on thedigitalprojectmanager.com.

Until next time, thanks for listening.