A Day in the Life of a Project Manager | Indeed

Summary

In this video, Jillian, a project manager at RPM, shares a glimpse into her typical day, highlighting the diverse responsibilities and tasks she handles. She's the go-to person ensuring projects move smoothly from kickoff to completion, working across teams in an advertising agency focused on broadband clients. Jillian shares her experiences of balancing work from home with office visits, managing different project stages using various tools, and the unexpected challenges she faces daily. She also provides insights into the skills required for project management and the satisfaction derived from seeing her work come to life in areas like Times Square.

Highlights

• Jillian kicks off and wraps up every project! 🚀
• Loves using monday.com for project management; it's colorful and customizable! 🎨
• Zoom calls galore! Her mornings are packed with them. 📞
• She juggles multiple projects like a pro, routing them through various stages. 🏃‍♀️
• From home to Times Square, her work life is full of variety. 🗽
• Using real-life experience, she's mentoring new project managers too. 🤝
• Sees her own work on Times Square billboards—how cool is that! 🆒
• The day ends with confirming creative installs—checking off those tasks. ✔️

Key Takeaways

• Project managers are involved in every project stage from start to finish. They work across various teams to ensure smooth execution. 🔄
• Flexibility with a work-from-home and hybrid office policy allows Jillian to manage her tasks efficiently based on importance. 🏠
• The role requires good organizational skills, strong communication, and adaptability to fast-paced changes. 📈
• Using project management tools like monday.com helps in organizing tasks and streamlining communication across teams. 🛠️
• Mentoring is part of the job—helping onboard new team members and sharing practical insights. 🗣️
• The satisfaction of seeing your work materialize, especially in prominent places like Times Square, is immensely rewarding! 🏆

Overview

Meet Jillian, the vibrant project manager at RPM, where her day kicks off with opening emails and project management tools like monday.com. Her role spans across teams, ensuring everyone is aligned and projects proceed as planned. Jillian delights in her flexibility to work from home or opt for office days when needed, balancing her professional and personal spaces with flair.

As Jillian navigates a typical day, it’s no walk in the park. She thrives amid constant change and the adrenaline of surprise project demands. Whether it’s a last-minute creative brief or a routine check-in via Zoom, she manages her tasks seamlessly. Problem-solving is part of her DNA as she multitasks through diverse projects, like planning promotional creatives for the Hamilton tour.

Jillian's passion for her role radiates in her mentorship of new project managers, guiding them through common systems and experiential learning. The cherry on top? Seeing her team's hard work as she strolls through Times Square, spotting billboards she helped create. As the day wraps, her satisfaction lies in ticking off tasks and setting new goals for the projects ahead.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction and Overview The chapter titled 'Introduction and Overview' begins with a brief introduction by Jillian, a project manager. She welcomes the reader to explore what a day in her life looks like. Jillian works at an agency named RPM, which specializes in broadband clients within the advertising sector. She explains her role, emphasizing that she manages the entire project life cycle—from inception to completion.
• 00:30 - 01:30: Work Environment and Daily Routine The chapter discusses the work environment and daily routine at the speaker's advertising agency. The speaker has been with the company for a couple of years and collaborates with different teams to complete projects. The work environment is described as enjoyable due to a great group of clients. The company has implemented a hybrid work policy, allowing employees to work from home or in the office depending on their needs. The speaker prefers to go into the office for important tasks that require in-person collaboration.
• 01:30 - 02:30: Tools and Software The chapter titled 'Tools and Software' focuses on the daily routine of setting up important applications required for efficient work. The speaker highlights the convenience of working comfortably and the importance of having necessary tools like email, calendar, and project management software within reach before starting the day. They emphasize their reliance on monday.com for managing projects effectively.
• 02:30 - 04:30: Challenges and Meetings The chapter discusses the speaker's favorite software, highlighting its web-based, color-coordinated design, and customizable features that cater to their company's needs. It's particularly beneficial for designers to upload files and facilitates easy communication among art directors, copywriters, and proofreaders. The speaker also reflects on their daily routine, mentioning unpredictability despite having set priorities, often encountering urgent, last-minute tasks.
• 04:30 - 05:30: Work-Life Balance and Project Insights In this chapter, the focus is on the concept of work-life balance and gaining insights into managing projects efficiently. The narrator describes the hectic nature of their mornings, which are often filled with back-to-back Zoom calls and desk work to review priorities with various account teams. A typical day starts with a meeting with Ashley, the account executive, to discuss all priorities related to a project named Hamilton. This meeting serves as a platform for Ashley to update the narrator on client communications and for the narrator to provide insights into the current status of tasks within the agency.
• 05:30 - 07:30: Career Path and Job Satisfaction The chapter discusses the process of using branded materials and ensuring they meet certain guidelines, such as the necessity to have elements like logos centered. The conversation highlights the flexibility in using these elements and the assurance that the current projects, including those related to Hamilton, should comply with the guidelines. The chapter closes with a note on waiting for revisions to be finalized.
• 07:30 - 09:30: Afternoon Tasks and Onboarding New Staff The chapter "Afternoon Tasks and Onboarding New Staff" discusses the speaker's work-from-home setup, emphasizing the importance of having a distinct living and working space while living in New York. They find it necessary to change scenery throughout the day by moving between their desk and couch to avoid sitting in one place for long. Many of their work hours are dedicated to routing projects, which involves managing various stages of the project life cycle for multiple projects.
• 09:30 - 11:00: End of Day and Final Tasks The chapter 'End of Day and Final Tasks' details the responsibilities of a project manager during the process of reviewing design submissions. Once the designer submits the first draft, the project manager examines it to ensure it aligns with the brief provided by the account team. The manager's role involves ensuring all relevant team members, including finance, account, and creative teams, review the project as needed. The chapter emphasizes the integrative role of project management in acting as a main line of communication across various teams, highlighting the appeal of the job due to its collaborative nature.
• 11:00 - 12:00: Advice for Aspiring Project Managers The chapter provides insights for aspiring project managers, starting with a personal anecdote from an individual who began their career as a company's first intern. Despite having an undergraduate degree that didn't fully prepare them for the role, they emphasize the importance of organizational skills and the experience gained on the job. The chapter suggests that real-world experience in a project management role is invaluable for skill development.

A Day in the Life of a Project Manager | Indeed Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 [Music] hi i'm jillian and welcome to a day in the life of project manager come on [Music] so a project manager is really just focused on the full project life cycle so i'm kind of the person that gets everything kicked off and i'm the last person that sees a project so i work in an agency called rpm which is focused on broadband clients in the advertising
• 00:30 - 01:00 space and i've been there for a couple of years now and i really work across all of our different teams to get the project all the way completed through the agency i've worked at a couple of different advertising agencies and this is definitely the most fun because it's such a great group of clients our office has instated a work from home policy and a hybrid um being able to go into the office so a lot of times i'll go in if i have something that's really um you know really important that i need a lot of people in that i know that they'll be in the office for otherwise i can work from home and just
• 01:00 - 01:30 be in my sweatpants and not have to worry about what anyone looks like but it's just really great having that option so the first thing i do when i sit down at my desk is make sure i open all of my applications so my email my calendar our project management software just to get a sense of anything that's come through overnight but it needs my attention and then i'll start routing things and following up with people for my priorities for the day we really work with the project management softwaremonday.com which has been my
• 01:30 - 02:00 favorite software that i've worked with so far it's a web-based tool that is really color coordinated and we're able to customize it to fit the needs of our company so it's really great for our designers to upload any files that they have and it's really easy to go through and route with our art directors copywriters proofreaders and really relay information easily when i start my day i sometimes know what the day is gonna look like um where it's gonna be a slow day or a busy day but i have all of my priorities but inevitably there's a fire drill that
• 02:00 - 02:30 happens and there's something that we have to get briefed within an hour and out the door just to make the client happy so my morning is primarily spent on zoom calls and at my desk going through priorities with my different account teams so the first meeting that i'm going to be on today is with ashley my account executive to work on all of our priorities for hamilton so that she can give me a status of things that she's gotten from the client and i can let her know where things are living within the agency good morning um just gonna go through hamilton stuff so
• 02:30 - 03:00 let me get my screen up for these flex frames i guess we'll just see since it looked like we now can do branding especially if it has to be centered i'm thinking like with the star and like the mj stuff like we should be fine yeah i don't think we have anything that has writing on the sides anyway for hamilton so i think we should be good as long as we can actually use branded material yeah okay cool and then we'll just wait until we get that revised yay okay thank you
• 03:00 - 03:30 of course today so welcome to my living space being in new york it was really important when i was making the decision to live alone that i knew i was going to be working from home still so i really wanted at least some separation of where i normally work versus where i live so just to get a change of scenery throughout the day sometimes i'll come and sit on my couch so i'm not sitting at my desk for 10 hours straight so a lot of my day is spent routing projects which really means going through our whole project life cycle with multiple different projects
• 03:30 - 04:00 so once i have the first pass from a designer i will then take a look at it and make sure that it fits the brief that i've been giving from my account team and then i'll go through and make sure that any person that needs to see it has seen it one of the reasons i really like my job is because i work with so many different teams project management is one of the few roles that really works across all team members so we're working across our finance team our account team our creative team anyone that really needs to see a project we're kind of that main line of communication
• 04:00 - 04:30 so i wrapped up my day from home so now let's head into the office in times square but first let's grab some lunch so i got into project management i was my company's first intern and kind of just fell into it and now that i've been here i can't imagine doing anything else my undergraduate degree didn't totally prepare me for my day-to-day but i learned a lot of valuable skills like organization and then staying on top of things that were really helpful but i really do think the best experience is just being in the role and doing it
• 04:30 - 05:00 doing the actual work what i love about my job is just really being able to interact with so many different creative types and just being able to have my hands on all different types of projects it's really special to go out and see my work when i walk around times square there's nothing cooler than going up and seeing a billboard that i know that i've helped put up so i'm in the office after lunch and i've kind of just been catching up on things that i missed while i was on my subway commute but a lot of my afternoon is going to be still spent routing different projects one of the projects that i'm working on right now is with our hamilton tour
• 05:00 - 05:30 which is the tour that's going all across north america and we have some billboards and bus sides that will be going up in seattle in july so one issue that i'm kind of having at the moment is i have two different designers working on both of these creatives but it's essentially the exact it should be the exact same creative so if i have the bus sides pulled up this is the approved option that we're going with for the bus sides and this is the billboard so we're just making a small tweak before this goes to the client to make sure that both of them are consistent
• 05:30 - 06:00 so one of the things of being a more seasoned project manager at this company is i help onboard new project managers so this is abby who just started a couple of weeks ago today we're going to be working through an email system that we use pretty commonly for a bunch of different shows so if you log into your screen here the screen that you have pulled up um these shows are these this email system is primarily used for telecharge houses okay so for chicago if you go over to the campaigns tab um you can see here we have a lot this is a an account that
• 06:00 - 06:30 uses this system pretty regularly so you can see here we have a post purchase triggered email so anytime that you purchase a ticket to chicago on telecharge 24 hours after you'll just get a confirmation that says we can't wait to see you here are the covid protocols things like that so those are pretty common you can also send like just one-off emails if you have a specific segment that you want to do so um for example on this doubtfire a couple of months ago we did um
• 06:30 - 07:00 anyone who had bought a ticket in 2020 but their show had been cancelled after the shutdown um just as a reminder like hey we're back on broadway like here's a link to get tickets and things like that great so we've finally reached the end of day and i have a couple more things i can do before i get out of here so i'll go and just check my email and make sure everything is looking good here so we got some proofs approved with our vendor here which is great we got confirmation that some additional creative was installed on one of our theaters today
• 07:00 - 07:30 then i'll go into our project management software and just update any statuses of to make sure that everything is accurate so this newsletter is with the client and we are looking good for timing on that i'll take a quick look at slack and make sure that all my messages have been read so i haven't missed anything there and before i go home i'm going to run past the phantom of the opera theater and just take some pictures for the team to confirm some new creative that we just installed so today was a pretty typical day luckily we didn't have any fire drills
• 07:30 - 08:00 that we had to quickly move on um so i spent most of my day routing and on zoom calls and kicking off some new projects so overall this is really what my day to day looks like [Music] so welcome to the majestic theater where the phantom of the opera performs eight shows a week um i'm just here taking a picture of the poster here to make sure that all of our creative is up to date we had a new cast member go in last week so i'm just gonna take a quick picture for my team and send it off to so that they know that everything is looking good
• 08:00 - 08:30 if you're interested in becoming a project manager i definitely recommend just finding different skills and tools that work for you as far as organization and being a really good communicator so something i didn't quite realize when i came into project management is just how fast paced everything was going to be so i would say just make sure that you're building up your stamina and you're just able to roll with the punches as they come along thanks for watching be sure to give us a like and subscribe to indeed's channel we'll see you next time all right she's directing sound sorry