How To Measure The True Impact Of Your Projects

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Galen Low: Welcome, everybody. Welcome to our panel discussion on measuring the true impact of your projects. We do events like this once every month as a way for our members and our VIP guests to engage directly with the experts who contribute and collaborate with us here at the Digital Project Manager. 

My name is Galen Low. I'm the co-founder of the Digital Project Manager and your host for today. I've also got with me an amazing pair of project management's leading experts—Pam Butkowski and Stephanie Best. Today's session is all about measuring project impact beyond the Iron Triangle. 

So I thought maybe let's just meet our panelists.

First up is Pam Butkowski. Pam, you and your team of delivery strategists at Hero recently launched a new experience for the LPGA. That's low key making a big difference in the world of women's sports and sports equity. What was your favorite part of the 20-month project, and how much better is your golf game now?

Pam Butkowski: Golf game is no better than it was at the beginning of the project, unfortunately. But yeah, no, I mean, there were so many things to love about this one. So yeah, we redesigned the LPGA, the Ladies Professional Golf Association, their website. There was a lot to celebrate about this. The impact that it has on women's sports, giving women athletes a place to shine and really highlighting their successes and achievements.

A lot of long hours, a lot of weekends, a lot of people who touched it. I pulled some of the stats the other day and we had 74 people within the hero organization who worked on this at some point or another. So it was a big guy, nearly 25,000 hours build to it. Like it was a big one. But I think my favorite thing about it is that, it's one of those projects that I think that we can all look back on at specific points in our careers. And we have like key projects that just catapulted our careers and like the trajectory of what we were about to do next was different than it was before that. And this was that project for so many people.

So it was a fun one to be on. 

Galen Low: I love that angle, by the way, just in terms of, I know we're here to talk about project KPIs and project success metrics and like why not have it, is it the thing that's going to be on somebody's portfolio now, is a huge win. It's something that as project managers, it's really nice.

First of all, as project leaders, as anyone involved in projects, it's a good way for us to look at our team's contributions to a thing. It's not just work, it's like making a difference. Super cool. Meaningful indeed. 

I'm going to shift over to Ms. Stephanie Best. Stephanie, your consultancy is called Greannmhar, which is an Irish word that I can't seem to pronounce. So my question for you is, what does it mean and how does it reflect what you do for your executive clients? 

Stephanie Best: I love that. Yeah, Greannmhar. So it is an Irish word. It means witty and playful. So it can take on different meanings depending on where you are. However, we love this word because we like to approach something that's rather serious and something that's quite important.

If you, you need to mature your project operations with a sense of curiosity and empathy and levity as well. So we feel Greannmhar really fits in quite nicely with that, even though most people can't pronounce it, which is another really good discussion point for me. I've considered changing it.

But I do the discussion around it and like what it means and its history as well. It's a word that reminds me of my father who is a witty Irish man. So it's sort of a namesake, but yes, I'd say that it just, it's our backbone to some of our mission and our identity and just how we like to approach our clients and serve them.

Galen Low: I love that. Now that I know what it means, everything's clicking. It's phenomenal. 

Let's dive in so that we also have time to get interactive as well. Let me just tee this up. The way I see it is this—the iron triangle of scope, schedule, and budget is taught to project people as the goalposts, the grail, the sort of raison d'etre for a project manager.

And while those factors do definitely play a massive role in ensuring a project doesn't overrun the allocation of resources, it doesn't measure all that much more than that. In fact, I can name several projects that pass through the iron triangle beautifully before crashing into the side of a mountain in a smoldering blaze.

So while nailing the iron triangle might be a noble mission for project managers and executive sponsors in many industries today, in a digital world where project leaders are being encouraged to be more strategic and outcomes-driven, and where projects themselves are the ingredients for broader business transformation, it's not quite good enough for the trinity of scope, schedule, and budget to be the only guiding force.

And then the big question is, all right, well, how do we measure project impact? And is it really within the control of even the most strategic project leaders? So, yeah, that's the juicy bits. I'm going to start with a very just general question for you too. And the question is, in your opinion, what makes a project successful?

Should I start with Stephanie? 

Pam Butkowski: I love, first of all, like the difference between what I do and where I'm at versus Stephanie, what you're doing every day. Like I'm agency land. And so I think we have very different perspectives too on what makes a project successful. So this is going to be fun. 

Stephanie Best: I think it's going to be really great because I'm ex-agency and now I focus a lot on business transformation projects.

So, it's shifted my mindset of what is a successful project. So for me anyway, is client satisfaction, raving fans (i.e. your clients), so my clients and maybe the people that this benefits and then work that you are proud to stand by, but I have to say also effective risk management. So to me, those are really important success factors that are really outside of the iron triangle. 

Galen Low: I love this sort of risk angle. I was having a conversation with someone the other day about the fact that seeing into the future, right, planning, and especially for projects is a massive risk, nobody knows what the future is going to hold. So actually when it all comes down to it, we're doing all these things to try and make things go smoothly vis a vis mitigate risk.

So in some ways, if risk has been managed and mitigated, minimized all those things, transfers accepted, anyhow, risk has been addressed, I guess, managed, then that is a success in terms of an endeavor of something that we didn't know if it was going to work or not. So, I think it's pretty cool. 

Pam, you're right. You do have a bit of a different perspective from the agency side. 

Pam Butkowski: I do. I agree with everything that Stephanie said. First of all, the risk piece is a really cool angle. Things are going to go wrong on every project, right? Like you can't mitigate every risk. And so I think that on the flip side of that, like what you do when something does go wrong, did your team rally?

Did you stay positive? Did you handle it seamlessly for your client? Did you quickly put together a plan that was feasible? What you do when something goes wrong also contributes to whether something was successful or not. But from the agency perspective, we like to say we don't want one and done work.

If a project we launch a site, if that continue or that relationship with the client continues beyond that, it was successful. Obviously we're looking at things like margin for the agency. We're looking at things like our resourcing mix and utilization, and are we keeping the right people busy, right?

There's some operational stuff when you're in an agency that you want to take into account as well. But if that relationship with the client continues past your original SOW, that's the biggest success metric for us. 

Galen Low: I love that you both went there in terms of something that's like lasting and longer term than just the sort of window of a project.

And I will force your hand about project KPIs in a second here, but I do like that idea that is does it allow us to continue? It's actually like a massive way of looking at any kind of collaboration, but especially a project because it's like, are we going to continue working for this client? Is this business still going to continue to be viable to run?

Is our strategy viable? Is that going to continue? Do we burn everyone out? And now, do we have attrition? Do we have churn? Is everyone rage quitting, flipping their desk? Cause that probably won't let something continue. And that's actually a really interesting way to look at it. 

Stephanie Best: I think it's a really important part of that is, can we continue? 

Pam Butkowski: Galen, you touched on this at the beginning to like you've seen projects where technically on paper like we hit every part of the iron triangle. It was on time. It was on budget. We delivered what we scoped, but we talked about this when we were just chatting before a little bit.

If everybody on the team hates each other at the end and if everybody is I don't even know if I want to be a project manager anymore. That's not a success. We made money and we delivered it on time. But people are, yeah, rage quitting and flipping their desks and leaving. That's not good.

Galen Low: Love it. 

 I do want to get into, some of the things that you both mentioned, right? Like the actual sort of metrics themselves and measuring that sort of impact in terms of like, why does this project exist? And I think it can be a bit of a layer cake, to be honest with you. So I thought I'd ask a loaded question, which is just who defines how a project is measured in terms of achieving its KPIs or business outcomes?

And then who is accountable for achieving those KPIs in your experience? 

Pam Butkowski: The layer cake is a really great analogy because there can be different KPIs based on what type of organization you're in, what type of work you're doing, right? Who are your audiences? Who's actually benefiting from the product you're building?

Again, I'm speaking from an agency perspective here, but we typically have a couple of different sets of KPIs, one for our client, one for us. And so for our client, it's really important to, and like for the product itself, once it goes live, the success metrics and the KPIs for that, and for our client's organization, we like to define really clearly upfront with our clients.

Put them in a project chart or make sure everyone is aligned on it. For us, we need to make sure that it's something that we can actually commit to. We need to make sure that if we're writing it or writing it in a document that gets a signature on it, it needs to be measurable. It needs to be feasible.

It needs to be something that we can actually deliver. And so there is a balance. We can't say we're just, we're going to increase your ROI, like big consulting words. No, it needs to be measurable. Your traffic will increase by this much. Your ad clicks will increase by this much. Very clear, again measurable, yes we hit it or no we didn't KPIs.

On the flip side for us, we're looking at things like, I touched on margin earlier, but are we going to make money on it? Things like awards. In agency land, that's really important and maybe we're willing to make a little bit less on a project and discount it to win the work because we know that it's going to be really cool and innovative and win us awards and get us press.

And so there's a whole separate set for us that we, we like to prioritize. 

Galen Low: That's what's really interesting about it. Cause there is that sort of once removed where it's okay, I can't promise you that your sales are going to go through the roof because I don't really control your product. I might just be rebuilding your website.

Like I might just be doing a marketing campaign. They can get to the checkout, but you know, the whole convincing of the buy might be out of my control. And just recognizing that and having that conversation that of course, at the beginning of a project, everyone wants everything to be a, just a smash hit.

Pam Butkowski: And it is okay to have some fuzzier KPIs with your clients, but those are more objectives. Those aren't actual KPIs. A KPI, as we all know, needs to be something that you can measure. You can definitively say, yes, I achieved it or no, I didn't. For LPGA, for example, the site that we talked about earlier, one of the main objectives was to increase fan engagement for golf fans and golf enthusiasts.

That's really hard to measure. So, we came up with quite a few pieces of functionality that we believed would drive fan engagement, and then proved it through user testing. Proved it through stakeholder interviews. And while we couldn't actually put firm KPIs together about how it was driving fan engagement, we got feedback.

We proved our hypothesis, and then we put it into action, and sometimes that's good enough. 

Galen Low: I love that it also defines scope, too. It's okay, what is our metric that we're trying to hit? And let's build scope in that helps us measure that so that we know. 

Pam Butkowski: And test the crap out of it. 

Galen Low: Yes. 

Stephanie, your angle. I think you've moved out of agency land, but it's sort of your background. Now you're as I understand it, in the executive boardroom, working on sort of strategy, delivery, strategy, execution, realization, probably what you will, who's responsible for sort of defining these success metrics, making them measurable? And who gets held accountable in the types of projects and maybe even just some examples of projects that you are at the helm of or involved in?

Stephanie Best: That's the easiest question in the world.

No, but I really love that Pam and I are from very different backgrounds and we have different ways of answering this question. The way that Pam has answered this question just makes so much sense. That's exactly the answer. If I were to choose an agency to work with to develop a product, a lot of what I'd want to hear is like tailored metrics to your needs.

And we have some other sort of metrics that help us make sense of the business. But we are client oriented, right? And that's fabulous. My answer is going to be different, of course, because I'm looking inside of a company now these days, rather than in the market with a variety of different clients, like growing other brands. I'm looking to improve the project efficiency of an organization and enhance their operations.

So who's responsible? I'd say that leaders are responsible for designing strategy effectively and clearly delegating duties that support the strategy and collective feedback. And then for project managers, I would say they are responsible for insight and feedback of what works and what doesn't and ensuring that they deliver within the expectations of stakeholders, right?

So it's a very different beast that you're dealing with. The ROI is a business printed metric. However, it may not always feel relevant to an agency producing a web project for a client. The client is responsible, though, for seeking initiatives that support their strategies for ROI, etc., or greater fan engagement, etc.

And the agency itself is responsible for satisfying the client and driving their own raving fans. But for metrics inside of a business project, you would probably want to see that people are more fluidly able to complete their tasks, that your project velocity perhaps has increased. People have a deeper sense of meaning attached to the strategic goals of the company.

So you might see the attrition levels decrease over time, and then you would see client satisfaction scores hopefully over the course of a year, so a bit latent increase as well. So that's what we saw with one of my last clients in doing a sales model optimization project where we went in and essentially mapped current state, what's working, what's not, and then created projects to elevate the current state.

Galen Low: And coming back to the thing you said setting the direction and getting feedback, like from that sort of leadership team. And later you had mentioned this sort of buy-in to the broader strategic objectives at like various levels of an organization. And I'm like, how do you make that happen?

Because I agree with it. Right? In the sense that yeah, we're looking to operate efficiently towards our goals. And then that means people have to know what the goals are. And then also it means that if something's not working, leadership needs to find out about it before the end of the project.

Stephanie Best: It's really important. Like in a large enterprise, it becomes more convoluted and a small to medium enterprise is a little bit more tangible. It depends on how hungry companies are for strategic planning and then sharing that clarity with the rest of the company and then how effective they can delegate that to people on the floor their leadership, their VPs, their directors, and their managers.

And so throughout the hierarchy, how do they really manage value? Because are you just producing work throughout a hierarchy? Is it a tangle and entanglement of approvals? Or are you actually producing work based on the value stream in a company, which is a whole other can of worms. However, it is really about change in a company and leadership strategy.

Galen Low: I like that. It brings about this sort of notion. I alluded to it at the beginning of sort of project economy. And part of the reasons why project management is so important right now is because organizations need to change and transform quickly. It's we're not just doing business as usual and we're not going along a straight line in order to stay competitive in order to realize the value that we need to be seeing our strategy manifest.

It needs to arc and that only works if, to your point, we address what's not working and that we can deliver efficiently. 

Stephanie Best: Yeah, I absolutely agree. The goal of these projects is to become more efficient and more effective. So if you can accomplish that and you can find different ways to measure that for organizations, that's a huge win.

Galen Low: What I love about both of your answers is that there's lanes. I think I came into this even years before this, that sort of notion of a strategic project manager. There's this vague cloud that somewhere leads to like project manager as CEO. And it's eh, it's not exactly that. It's not like you're gonna like suddenly leave this webinar and then be at the table with the Csuite as a project manager, or even as, VP of operations necessarily like setting the strategy and being accountable for that strategy and then the strategy, like the delivery thereof.

But there is this correlation between, having clear, measurable, visible goals set from the top and then also using that sort of ladder into clear, measurable goals and our objectives that relate to that, that are more within the realm of the sort of non exec folks doing the work and there has to be that sort of conversation or that translation.

I'm curious kind of from both angles, because assuming that, yes, the sort of project success metrics are related to knowing what the sort of broader business objectives are, how do you each go about defining meaningful project success metrics while staying in your lane, I guess? And how do you learn enough to know how to set those KPIs that are achievable, that are measurable, that are sort of within your grasp?

I'll flip it again and start with Stephanie. 

Stephanie Best: Quick sidebar. If a project manager is dreaming of becoming CEO one day, hot tip is to focus on the strategy and the value towards the organization. So if they can start to speak the language of leadership and pivot into new pathways, then I found myself getting promoted doing that. And I think that might be effective for other folks if they're interested. 

Pam Butkowski: I think that's really important and a really good piece of advice. And even just to take it one step further and make it a little bit more tactical, like we talked a lot about the iron triangle, the organization doesn't care about the iron triangle.

The organization cares about the benefits that you achieving the iron triangle brings to the org. And so understanding how the decisions that you make as a project manager positively impact your organization and if I deliver it on time, that means I free up resources to take on other initiatives quicker.

I, right, like all of these other things that come into play if you do your job, understanding how that connects is exactly what Stephanie's talking about. 

Stephanie Best: Thank you for reiterating that. That's wonderful because you touched on effectiveness and efficiency for the organization in someone's role, but they can drive that.

That's driving value. I love that. Okay, so that was really insightful. And just for the interest of Galen's question or Galen to made a low, so how do we define meaningful project success metrics? Relevancy and value are the backbone driving meaningful metrics. So examples outside of the triangle because the triangle serves a purpose, right?

It helps us mitigate risk. It gives us a sense of control and it also helps us balance out something that could be profitable, right? So it does have its place, but things that maybe are outside of that or maybe, or strategic alignments. So will the project move the needle in terms of strategic objectives? So success isn't just completing a project within constraints, but whether it's delivering the tangible value, and that's goes back to that charter, does it drive more engagement raving fans sales? 

Is it a brand moment, et cetera? Just trying to speak some agency language here. Next is agility. So did the team adapt to the changing needs or the timelines or market shifts? Are they keeping their finger on the pulse? Right? If you're designing an agile project and you're working in sprints, that's a great opportunity to manage risk and stay relevant. Even if it changes a little bit from what you thought your end target would be, the end target is always going to have to be value and what the client is going to benefit the most from.

And then that brings us to value delivery. So, and agency projects for the real measure of success lies in the value delivered to stakeholders. And if they feel that it's valuable, they'll want to return, right? And then of course, there's all these other vanity metrics. So I'm going to flip it over to Pam because I feel like I keep getting these lovely long answers.

Pam Butkowski: Again, I think you're spot on here where we always start and I like to start with why are we spending money on this? Why is our client spending X number of dollars on this thing? It's got to be really important to you if they're spending $4 million to do this. Why? And then start breaking it down. How can I help them achieve the value that they are trying to your point about value delivery?

How can I help them on the ground achieve the value that they're hoping to get out of this? You touched on like different stakeholders as well, I think understanding what is important to each of your main stakeholders and coming up with specific KPIs wherever possible for each of them. That's something that you as a project manager can influence immediately right out of the gate, right?

I touched on this a little bit earlier. I find project charters invaluable in doing that. Because just the act of making a charter with your client forces you to talk about what you care about. It forces your clients to, you're going to find out just in putting together that document, I really care about impressing my boss.

I really care about saving the company money. I really care about my next promotion. I really care about taking care of my team and making sure they look good. And then you know how to show up every day, right? Those are some of the things that as project managers, you can help impact for your clients to help them achieve their success objectives.

One step further, also team charter. Let's find out for each of the team members that you're working with who are actually delivering the product. What is this going to benefit for them? What are they trying to get out of it? I want to learn a new technology. Figure out how to use these new innovative tools that we're using and then build a plan around it.

Like everyone can grow a little bit more. 

Stephanie Best: I love that so much. Team Charter. I remember every single one of my agency projects, I would take people who have worked together maybe like yesterday or like 57 times. And I would sit down with them in the room and then I'd say, okay, everybody, this is a different project that, yes, all these faces, but do you really know what they do?

And do you really know what still matters to them? So, we did a roundtable clarifying what we're going to do what we're going to deliver on this project, what we feel our role is, what we need in return, we need to see from our team, and then also why it's important to us. Right? And I found that builds high-performing teams. Like, Oh, I actually didn't really realize you were a copywriter or you do design as well?

And so it's just, it opened up so many lanes of communication. So Pam, I love your answer. Like the team charter is that is a way to succeed. 

Pam Butkowski: It's so important to, especially on the, and I'm just going to keep talking about this. On the agency side, like we do everything for our clients. And so anytime we can take an opportunity to do something for ourselves as well.

Help our teams come together a little bit more, do something that helps push their careers forward a little bit more. Let's do it. 

Stephanie Best: You want to have a strong, stable company, right? And we're the people who deliver great things and love being there. I don't think there's any better situation. 

Pam Butkowski: Yes. And let's have a little fun. What we do is really hard. Let's make it fun. 

Galen Low: Can I say that was the most like, a) on theme and on brand because it's fun, right? It's the serious fun that we're having. It's such a crystal clear simplification is what I want to say, but distillation is what I mean. A distillation of what we're trying to do with sometimes complicated goals coming from the executive office.

But fundamentally, it's like viable business. We want to keep doing it. How can we keep doing it? Well, we can't stay put. We have to do these things. And then everyone can care about that in their own way, but it does create this, this sort of laddering effect. And I'm like, I'm not the guy to talk to about levers and drivers and OKRs and all that stuff.

But you can see this like sort of basic relationship with, Hey, we want to keep doing what we're doing. And we need to find a reason to care. Why should I care about this? Why does it matter to me? I'm going to do my best work if I know, but someone needs to tell me what it is we're trying to do. And then somebody to help me maybe put that into something that I can remember every time I'm showing up to this project.

And that's going to sort of deliver impact. 

Stephanie Best: And that is a great example of how to tie someone's role to strategy, whether it's a project or the business, and that drives meaningful work. 

Pam Butkowski: Just a little bit of spoiler alert if anyone from my team is listening. We actually went through this exercise, my delivery leads and I, we've seen project managers in general like focus on the weeds, very tactical, jumping right to I need a RAID log.

I need deliverables tracker and talk about the tactical things we are doing instead of why they matter. So we just had this conversation and I literally pushed back and said to my team, why do we exist? Why do project managers exist in this organization? And we even jumped right to tactical as well to mitigate risk.

But why? So that we don't get surprised by things, but why? And we ended up distilling it, thank you for the word earlier, down to five things. We said we exist to quarterback and lead the team, provide value to our clients and help them achieve their goals, be the source of truth, eliminate swirl and protect the agency.

And everything we do feeds into those five things. And so we've actually built out our own personal kind of project management KPIs and our success metrics around those five things. And they don't necessarily pertain to like what we are delivering as an agency. It pertains more to the value that we are delivering for our clients through the things that we do as project managers every day.

Stephanie Best: I can feel the passion from you coming through all of that. That is so incredible. I love your start with why that reminds me of this. It's probably 14 or 15 years ago now that Simon Sinek published this, but it's his start with why. Like we probably all see that. There is so much packed in there and you can do that in your strategic planning.

You're defining your identity as your organization and also defining like just like your roles and responsibilities. That's a really great way to contextualize that. That's really good. 

Galen Low: And I like that in there, especially from the agency perspective, there is not only just protect the agency, but also help our clients achieve their goals, which also fundamentally means you need to understand what their goals are. If you're going to do your job as a project manager, if you're working for PIM. 

I do think we can dive into that a little bit as well, but I want to get into some of the tough stuff first. We were talking about, both of you have mentioned realizing value over time. And I imagine that there's some folks in the audience, and also me, where we have projects, like I definitely have projects from my past that are still generating their return on investment to this very day.

I've moved on long ago, decades ago. Okay. A decade ago, I am dating myself now, but I think there's this sort of latent impact that project managers aren't always around to see. And I'm wondering if people are wondering as well, how do you measure latent impact that happens long after you, as the project manager have moved on to other projects? Can you? Do you?

What is something that can tie a project manager to like longer term impact, not just, we launched, it was pretty good, at least for the first 30 days, and then I like shifted on. 

Pam Butkowski: We like to put into practice, even if it is a one and done project, we want to make sure that we understand where the product can go long term, right?

Where can it go next? What does this thing look like in six months, a year, two years, five years from now? Obviously, we don't want to leave our clients with something that they need to, tear down and rebuild five years from now. We want it to continue to grow and provide them with something quality and stable that is going to serve them for a long time.

And so having a vision in our heads about what it should look like a year from now, two years from now, even if we aren't doing the work. Even if we've set up our clients to own the product and continue to build it on their own, having something to look back at it and say, did it achieve what we wanted it to do three years from now?

Did they build this big piece of functionality that we said would revolutionize their industry? Yes, cool. And in some cases, is it doing what it was created to do? Sometimes it's not cool, big, sexy, innovative stuff that we're doing. Sometimes they need a way to manage like our clients need a way to manage a lot of content in an easy way.

If I go back and look at a marketing site that was created with that goal in mind. If I look at it a year later and the content is still easy to understand, we did it. It is still paying off. 

Galen Low: You know what I really love about that is because so many people come to me and they struggle because they're trying to put together their CV or their portfolio.

And they're like, I don't know what percent we increased traffic by. I wasn't there for that measurement. To your point, you're like, well, is the thing still happening? Are they still managing their own content? If that's true, then...

Pam Butkowski: But it still do what we wanted it to do. And again, back to our, all of our points earlier, like understanding the why did we even do it in the first place?

It isn't just to increase click throughs by whatever percent. There are bigger goals than that. So understanding why your clients or why your organization is spending the money that they're spending on the thing that you're building is important. 

Galen Low: That comes back to what Stephanie said, right? Speaking the language of strategy, not the language of click through rates.

You could also speak the language of click through rates, but yeah, the bigger... 

Stephanie Best: You could. It's a different conversation, though. 

Galen Low: My last question, I guess, with the exception of one that I'll sneak in at the end. The devil's advocate question is, okay, that's all fine and good—value, goals, caring, keeping doing a thing.

But what about this iron triangle? Is it okay then to not hit the iron triangle if you hit success? I don't know whoever wants to take that one first. 

Stephanie Best: Is it okay to not hit the iron triangle? Like I think 15 years ago, Stephanie as a project manager would just freak out at this question. That's what time does.

I think that the answer it is up to the customer. So if the customer values other elements of success more than the iron triangle, then you have a happy customer and the iron triangle does have its place. As we say, like giving people a sense of control over just those quick checks on a project and also mitigating risk.

But if you see value in metrics for success outside of the iron triangle and maybe the client doesn't, then I think it's always worth having a conversation to find a happy middle and go back again to that why. What's that vision? And what's that purpose? Understanding that we don't have unlimited time and money and features.

Right? But it does come back to just thinking, okay, well, how does the customer define success and how can we deliver that for them? Does it make sense? Do we need a strategic partner or are we equipped? So I think that it is okay ultimately not to hit the iron triangle. There's so many other things that I feel we've really well covered in this conversation that just speak to value and driving growth in an organization, driving success for clients.

And to get too focused on the iron triangle, you could actually just lose value. And that could be more costly. 

Galen Low: I love that. I also like what you said about resources are finite. The fundamental reason sort of iron triangle exists is because you might run out of time, people or money, and then it's no good and you can, if you spent all your time on the one goal of a project and only got to step one of 19 and then ran out of money, that's still not good either.

Stephanie Best: Yeah, that's where you have to be very careful with your sprint planning if you're doing an agile project and that's where you get the biggest risk. I'm just going to go off on a tangent with just pure waterfall. I think any industry could benefit from at least hybrid project management, because if you just do a pure waterfall project, it is a year long project.

That's the target in a year. And we're going to work in silos and deliver each of our proponents to the next team. You will probably, 70% of the time, miss your mark. 

Pam Butkowski: You will never deliver it. 

Stephanie Best: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You'll never deliver it. It just comes, it's going to be forthright. It's just it's going to fail.

An experienced person will know that you just, you don't want to manage a project that way. And you don't want to just feel like you can create this imaginary predictive glass wall full of beautiful iron triangles, right? It doesn't exist. 

Galen Low: That's the Christmas ornament right there. On the agency side, it's it's very real, right?

Because you have a contract that says you have this much resource to do a thing. If you want more, then you have to ask for more. It's not just, we can't just slide it under the rug in terms of Yes, executive team, we delivered that project very well. You really do need to like, report on the resources etc.

You and the team you manage, how important is it still to hit the Iron Triangle? Is there a world where you can not hit the Iron Triangle, somehow hit the success, and that would be okay? 

Pam Butkowski: There's definitely that world. So, the Iron Triangle is very real, especially in agency land. That said, nobody says that the sides of the triangle all have to be the same length.

And nobody said that the sides of the triangle can't change length while you are delivering. The timeline can change and the budget can change so that everything can expand a little bit. Everything can contract a little bit. One side can contract a little bit it can change. I think evolving your management of the triangle while your goals and while the project is evolving is important.

I do think that there is a world, however, where you can break the triangle and still call the project successful as long as, so Stephanie, I agree with everything that you said, and as long as people know you're doing it. If you're blowing your budget out of the water, if you're trending over your timeline, if you are needing to cut scope in order to hit the other two sides of the triangle, you got to talk about it.

You have to make sure leadership knows. You have to make sure that you're calling it out before you break that side of the triangle. You have to make sure that people are informed and that you have a plan for what happens after you decide to break the triangle. Making those decisions in a silo or even worse, not knowing that you're about to break a side of the triangle, that is bad. 

That is not success. Intentionally deciding that you need to break your iron triangle in order to provide more value, in order to sell in more work, in order to build a longer lasting relationship with your client, in order to create a case study that's going to win us more work in that industry in the future.

Like the reasoning behind why you are breaking the triangle is more important than the fact that you're breaking it in the first place. 

Stephanie Best: What a fabulous answer. Galen, I'm just curious because I love the way that you describe this really creative and visual way of just having this very flexible, agile triangle.

It's still a triangle, but it could be a dolly triangle. It could be anything. And so important because you're considering the triangle and the ecosystem that it exists within. Trying to mitigate risk, trying to communicate the status of the triangle within that ecosystem to ensure the health and satisfaction of the company and the client.

Pam Butkowski: I've done enough of these with you guys, and I think I do this every time I give my iron triangle spiel. I don't know how I keep ending up in this place where I run through my own script every time, but here I am. Here's my spiel on the iron triangle. Whenever we, and this is part of I've told my team about this is just a part of our process.

When we kick off a project, whether it's with a new client, with a client we've been working with for years, doesn't matter. Every time we kick off a project, we sit down in the kickoff meeting and I make the client prioritize the iron triangle. I make them say, this is the most important side to me. This is the second most important, and this is the least important.

And then I tell them, thank you for doing that. I own number three. You don't have control over number three. I do. I'll tell you what I'm doing with it, but in order to deliver one and two for you, I have to own the third side so that I can flex like this. And it sets expectations right up front that I can't give you all three.

I can give you two, I promise. 

Galen Low: All of this is just the reality and Pam your friend and me from the agency side, and just because you're Pam this whole notion it is about money. It is about resources. It's, there's a transactional thing, like, why are we spending money on this thing?

It's not finite. Time is not finite. But we can use this triangle as a way to have a conversation, as a way to educate and manage expectations. Not because it's fixed, but because it's not fixed. So that we can have the conversation to be like, to hit your goal, we need to play with the triangle a little bit. What do you want to do? 

Pam Butkowski: Yeah, Stephanie hit the nail on the head earlier when she said that the sides of the triangle are finite. They can't go on forever. And so you have to have a mechanism or a lever to pull to make sure that you're managing two of the finite sides. One of them has to flex. 

Galen Low: I'm going to go into Q&A time and I've got a couple questions here. I've got a question from one of our members. And, ooh, it's a juicy one. Here's the question. 

The question is, if our team isn't KPI-driven, how can we get the right people in the room to determine the KPIs? 

Stephanie Best: Well, why isn't the team KPI-driven in the first place? And what do they value in terms of KPIs?

I think my first question is understanding that, what is the root cause of that? And then if you're looking for the right people, I think determining what is valuable and important to you and what problems you're trying to solve and what value you're trying to drive will inform the type of KPIs, which is a Google away once you have the first answer.

Galen Low: No, I like that. It's like the importance of measurability, right? That's what I'm garnering from the question is that it's we don't set goals or measure things. And I'm like, it's probably going to be a problem for me to measure success. So yeah, I agree. It needs to start with a bit of an education piece.

Pam Butkowski: Yeah, I agree with that. 

Galen Low: I'm going to move to the next question, which is as follows. 

Next question is, in organizations that have both team leads and project managers, is it still the project manager's responsibility to create opportunities for team members to grow? 

Pam, I think you have thoughts. 

Pam Butkowski: Yes. No, you know what?

We have the word manager in our title for a reason. You are leaders by nature. It doesn't need to be in HR management for you to give a shit about the people you're working with. That's just being a part of a team. I don't think that it's even just solely falling on the project manager. We should all just be looking out for each other.

And again, let's just plug the charter one more time, shall we? Doing the team charter upfront and understanding what people want to do, what they want to take on, what they're excited about, like what they're hoping that project does for their careers. Like you are in a seat as the project managers calling the shots and building the plan. 

You're in a place and in a seat where you can give them those opportunities. If you've got a content author who's really passionate about getting into QA, let them. Build them in the plan. Have them shadow your QA team. Of course, again, communicate. Make sure that you're talking to their manager and that the things that you're doing on the project fit into their overall goals and where they want to go in their career at the organization.

But yes, help them. They will do the same for you. 

Stephanie Best: And if I could add a little bit more to it is even if you don't hold the carrots to promote them directly or change their function in the organization, you can still open up communication channels. You can encourage them, you can let them shadow, trial and error and then give really good feedback about someone who's really curious and wants to try something new. Because it helps them navigate those conversations and have a bit more of a light to stand on when they're talking to their manager saying, yes, I love coffee, but I really love to QA.

I want to try this for a bit. 

Galen Low: I have this question that actually ties into another question that I see in the chat. 

Pam, could you please restate and maybe elaborate a bit more on those five reasons why your PM team exists? 

Pam Butkowski: Okay, so the five things were quarterback and lead your team, provide value to our clients, and help them achieve their goals. Be the source of truth, eliminate swirl, and protect the agency. So we actually took those, we're calling it our North Star. We took those five points of the star and then took them to tactics and then tools. So, under leading the team, one of the expectations in there would be to call the plays. We got real sportsy on this one.

So, how you do that? You need to know the needed next step. Get clarity if you don't know what's needed. Ensure that those who are responsible for executing know what is expected of them. Work with other leads across the agency to be able to direct your project team if they are unclear so that they can manage their own teams as well.

That's the expectation. And then in order to do that, we have a clear project plan. And now we're getting into the tactical. Things that we started with. Remember when I said we all said we make project plans. That's a tool that we use in order to call the shots and call the place. Project plans are staffing and resourcing plans clear what's on deck for each week so that every team member knows what's expected of them for the week.

Running really clear and succinct stand ups. So, we went through that for each of the five points of our North Star, so that the tools ladder up to, why does it matter? 

Galen Low: Tools that help us call the plays. 

Stephanie Best: It is like a sport nobody's not a family, it is a sports team. 

Pam Butkowski: It's funny because I've got three delivery leads who helped put this together with me. And two of them were like, I don't sports ball. Like somebody else has to take this one. 

Stephanie Best: Oh my gosh.

Galen Low: It's me, it's totally me. That's awesome. I think we might have time for one question, which is a bit of a can of worms. 

What is your opinion about OKRs? 

Stephanie Best: I think they're important for strategy. They truly have a lot of value there.

I think that veteran forum, like your strategy as a company, your role as an individual projects that you do in general, I think they add value, but I don't think they really determine necessarily what you're producing. I think that they're just supporting pillars for success. 

Pam Butkowski: I agree with that. I think they're very important to ensure that you're moving in the right direction.

When you're making day to day decisions, you should make sure that you're, they work in favor of any OKRs that you're working against, but they're meant to be directional. They're meant to be like you're spot on when you said they're needed for overall strategy. Absolutely. I develop OKRs for my practice as a whole.

We don't do them on an individual project basis. But for the project management team at Hero, we have OKRs to make sure that the things that we're doing, the North Star, fits into what we're trying to achieve. 

Stephanie Best: More internally facing rather than externally facing. And the work that you accept maybe supports some of those internally facing OKRs.

And, or maybe the work that you reject, you never know, but yeah, and then ultimately when you accept something, it should just fit into the natural flow of the work. So when people are falling in line with their roles and responsibilities, they know that a project, okay, this is who we are as an organization, as our strategy, and we know what we're delivering for this client.

So it's a win-win scenarios, so knowing who you are and what you can do, and then how you drive value. And the OKR is in the background behind all of that. 

Galen Low: Gosh, that was a whole can of worms in two minutes. 

Congratulations, panelists. Thank you again, Pam. Thank you, Stephanie. So many gold gems there. So much fun that we had. This is what we're all about. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us today. And we'll see you all at the next one. Yes. 

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Until next time, thanks for listening.