These short and easy to absorb videos will help you get your head around your marketing strategy priorities in a way you can capture the relevant internal and external forces, the strategic priority of the business and target markets which will help you achieve your goals. There is 3 videos in the sequence.
The current version of Microsoft’s Project software (2013) has really improve marketers ability to manage even better projects, campaigns, NPD, events and launches. With great new pre formated reports, communication and stakeholder engagement has never been more available and as we all know, keeping people informed and motivated is critical to project success.
While on the surface Microsoft Project 2013 (MS Project) can look like a complex piece of software, you need to make conscious decisions about how you are going to use it and then stick with that plan – you can base this on your stakeholder needs and use the software as a tool to help deliver on those. Its true, you can let the software bog you down, but if you have a goal on want you want out of it, and focus on that, it’ll be a great asset for you.
Reporting with Microsoft Project
For marketers, the software really only needs 4 things to work for you – that list of jobs to be completed, your estimated duration of each of those jobs, your best ideas on how the project needs to flow or the precedence of tasks, and finally who (individuals or teams) is doing each task. With this, you then have a project schedule, important start and finish dates, duration and if you have costs for your resources, a cashflow budget for your project also.
Then you can do some of your own work on the look and feel of the project – milestones, add in some notes on Goals, Scope and Assumptions and the strategic alignment of the project with the businesses needs. You then have a portfolio of reports to build your presentations and communications with, that will get sign off, win over sponsors, motivate your team and other stakeholders and generally make you look like someone who is completely on top of the projects they are responsible for.
There is a lot of tracking and reporting options for when the project is underway, but often in the fast paced marketing environment where you are running multiple, short term projects, its the proposal and baseline plan that is used to run the project.
While it sounds pretty nerdy, we are big fans of MS Project 2013 for Marketing Projects and can help though our facilitated sessions around 1 of your actual, upcoming projects or through our Project Reporting & Communicating 1 day course or the 2 day Project Management Skills for Marketers session.
Book Securely at Eventbrite for all our courses (booking fees included)
In 2015 we’ve got a series of F2F interactive courses happening in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane – see our training page for the the full list of 7 marketing short courses and 29 dates across the year, the first one is in Sydney 30-31 of March.
New courses include ROI & Budgets for Marketers, #MarComms101 looking at all communications options from analogue to digital and paid, earned and owned and critically, the integration of these, Project Reporting and Communication, Market Orientation plus Marketing for Smarter Decisions. Our regular strategic planning sessions and project courses including learning how to use Microsoft Project for your campaigns, events and NPD on on as well.
Here’s a short video intro – enjoy and let me know if you have any questions. Secure booking is via the calender on the right of this screen or direct to our events page on http://www.eventbrite.com.au/o/liberated-vision-amashman-7935550716
I’ll look forward to seeing you in a course and please share this with colleagues who you think might be interested too !
