Project management is an essential concept in the contemporary business world, which allows organizations to shift their performance particularities and adjust them to the requirements of a specific project. Such an approach to the management of organizational work helps in achieving successful results efficiently, productively, and competitively. In particular, multiple organizations combine operational and project work to enable their companies to function from a long-term perspective and meet short-term project goals. This report addresses the management approaches of a digital marketing company by analyzing its project and operational work. First, the report introduces general background information on the importance of project management and the document’s goals. Second, the organizational context is provided to outline the departments of the analyzed company and their management approaches.
Third, the nature of work of the departments and their employees is analyzed according to compliance with either operational or project work with the following recommendations for management adjustment. Forth, the project work structuring section covers the particularities of arranging project work at the company with the assessment of their effectiveness and recommendations for improvement. Finally, the report is concluded by suggesting the implementation of a flexible structure, dynamic talent management approaches, and programs and portfolio features to maximize company efficiency, productivity, and competitiveness.
Introduction
Project-based organizational management is an omnipresent concept in the contemporary business world. This report is designed to analyze and interpret the approach to the work of a marketing organization functioning as a digital market service provider. The specialty of this company is its project-based work within the framework of specific client-centered marketing campaign development. This report includes a work nature analysis and project management approach assessment with ultimate recommendations for improvements. Overall, it is argued that for a company to incorporate project management effectively, it should implement structural and managerial solutions for an integrated functioning of all involved parties.
Organizational Context
The company selected for this study is a medium-scale company employed in the industry of digital marketing. For the purposes of this assignment, an alias ABC will be used to denote the company. Thus, the ABC Company functions in the market of online advertising campaigns and marketing for small, medium, and large business organizations. The company is classified as a medium-sized organization with approximately 600 employees working within all its departments. The company seeks clients in the Australian market and internationally to provide marketing services, including web design, website maintenance, content marketing, and social media advertising. Given the preference of the ABC Company to provide services to businesses of different scales online, the company might be classified as a digital agency (Madina, 2021). Overall, the company is a strong competitor in the market with increasing revenues and the attraction of talented professionals into its marketing and development teams.
The company functions within a hierarchical structure of management, with the board of directors and a head of the company being at the top of the hierarchy. There are several departments functioning in parallel with one another to complete different tasks within the company. In particular, the ABC company contains a marketing department, an advertising department, accounting, administration, and customer service departments. The employees in the marketing and advertising departments complete the work based on clients’ orders, which includes the development and implementation of marketing and advertising campaigns. These departments are comprised of IT specialists who work in the digital marketing sphere. The accounting department of the ABC Company is engaged in managing accounts and internal and external financial operations. The administration segment is involved in human resource management and work arrangement. Finally, the customer service department works with clients by resolving service-related issues.
The Nature of Work and Its Management
When considering the work performed by the employees at the ABC Company, one should follow the structural subdivision of the organization to analyze the work done by the representatives of each department separately. Firstly, the employees engaged in the marketing department of the company develop digital marketing campaigns based on the orders made by specific clients. The IT specialists develop and promote websites and the online presence of the client’s organizational image. According to research, given the complexity of such tasks and the necessity to manage the efforts of a team around one specific task within a short-term perspective, such work might be characterized as project work (San Cristobal et al., 2018). Therefore, the work nature of the department, depending on its performed tasks and responsibilities, allows for concluding its project form.
Secondly, the advertising department is particularly engaged in the delivery of digital advertising services. More specifically, the employees working in this department are engaged in the development of advertising campaigns online and on social media in particular. The specialists comply with the requests and order guidelines from the clients to introduce, implement, and maintain the effectiveness of the advertising campaigns. Similar to the marketing department’s work, the advertising work might be labeled as project work due to its short-term nature, continuous change depending on the client and project, as well as the different work process predetermined by the scope and specificity of delivered services (Project Management Institute, 2017). Thus, the advertising department employees work according to project work particularities.
Thirdly, the administration department employees perform standardized procedures of working with schedules, human resource management, salaries, and other conventional tasks necessary to maintain the company’s functioning. According to Project Management Institute (2017), such work might be classified as operational work due to the completion of tasks that ensure the use of proper resources for the ongoing functioning of the whole organization.
Fourthly, the accounting professionals perform standardized daily practices of accounting and financial management to ensure organizational functioning in its entirety (Osman and Al Hinai, 2018). Although the accounting managers’ particular tasks might vary depending on the project the company works on, the practices this department uses and the work they do on an everyday basis remains standard; therefore, this work might be classified as operational. Finally, the customer service department workers, similarly to the work of accounting and administrative departments, do standardized work by performing customer relations tasks, working with grievances, and other client-based issues. Overall, this type of performance might be categorized as operational work since it does not involve substantial change or adherence to a particular project but rather prioritizes standard customer service practices.
The current management approach in the ABC company aligns with the project management approach. Such a statement might be justified by the research findings that demonstrate that marketing organizations are delivering services to specific clients with personalized approaches using project management (Palacios-Marqués et al., 2019). The company uses bureaucratic management approaches to oversee the operational work and project management to control project work. Such a combination of different management approaches leads to the hybridization of governance and yields contradictory outcomes (Muhammaditya et al., 2021). When evaluating such an approach, one might state that it allows for focusing the project management efforts only on the practices that require such management specifically. In other words, only the marketing and advertising departments should be governed according to the principles of project management, which requires frequent change and agility (van der Hoorn. and Whitty, 2017). Since such frequent changes are not necessary for the operations segment of the company, it saves resources to manage standardized procedures within the administrative, accounting, and customer service departments using bureaucratic management. However, such a hybrid approach might hinder the work of the company as a whole due to its complexity.
As for the recommendations that might be suggested to the ABC Company in regard to its management, one might infer a more flexible structural management. In particular, the strict division of responsibilities and processes between the marketing and advertising departments often complicates the work of both departments on the same client’s campaigns. The communication-based and data-processing obstacles deter the speed and effectiveness of work and hinder customer satisfaction, ultimately causing organizational losses. To minimize such drawbacks in the performance of projects, a more flexible and adjustable structure of cooperation between marketing and advertising departments should be foreseen to enhance efficient project completion (Harsch and Festing, 2020). Moreover, another recommendation that might help facilitate inter-department collaboration is the implementation of dynamic talent management approaches to integrate individuals with particular competencies into the project team regardless of their department’s specialty to maximize project productivity (Harsch and Festing, 2020). The implementation of such managerial change recommendations might increase the effectiveness of the ABC Company’s work and ensure its compliance with the latest trends in the business world.
Structuring Project Work
The processes that have been marked as project work in the ABC Company’s performance include the marketing and advertising departments. In particular, these organizational segments involve employees’ performance based on separate projects arranged, controlled, and assessed according to distinctive client’s orders. In other words, one marketing or advertising campaign is regarded as one separate project that comes through all the stages of its lifecycle and requires deliberate management, team engagement, and organizational change and agility depending on the requirements of the project (Grebic, 2019). Given such specifics of these departments’ project-based work, the use of projects, programs, and portfolios by the management of the company is relevant to consider.
The currently used approach to project management at the company demonstrates that the company predominantly uses the project feature in its arrangement of performance of marketing and advertising departments. In particular, when initiating a new project, the alignment of the teams, task distribution, and the control of their performance are overseen by project managers from the perspective of a single effort (Caressa and Pirozzi, 2022). The particularities of the given project are limited by the client requirements and the specific tasks envisioned within the context of the planned advertising or marketing campaign. However, it fails to use portfolios and programs as effective means of project structuring. The organization should use portfolios and programs since they constitute a solid background for strategic management (Martinsuo and Geraldi, 2020). The integration of higher-level project structuring is essential in achieving project efficiency and organizational agility in the long-term perspective.
In addition, the company fails to use the feature of programs in its project management practices. According to Minelle et al. (2022), programs are essential for managing complex projects or several similar projects with limited resources. At the planning stage of project management, a program-based approach allows for integrating the resources available within the company to meet the requirements of several projects with similar characteristics or requirements. For example, when delivering services in terms of social media advertising, the same steps are commonly made by the teams to develop a campaign. For that matter, the company might integrate the feature of programs to unify the work of teams on several campaigns aimed at social media advertising for several clients.
Moreover, the program feature is valuable at the implementation stage of the project lifecycle. Indeed, it helps minimize risks, coordinate the engagement and performance of team members, as well as distribute the tasks similar across several projects within the same program to the same individuals or teams (Minelle et al., 2022). In such a manner, the best practices are implemented across several similar projects with limited effort and efficient task completion. Finally, the completion stage that involves evaluation of project outcomes and improvements implementation might benefit from program feature use. Since the evaluation procedures are commonly similar and standardized, they might be used simultaneously for several projects within a program.
For the ABC Company to enhance the efficiency of its project management efforts, it is recommended that the organization incorporates the feature of portfolios into its project management and structuring. In particular, according to Hopmere, Crawford, and Harré (2020), the use of project portfolios enable company agility, risk prediction, and proactive monitoring of processes. Indeed, since the company predominantly specializes in the same type of services that align with the standardized campaign development approaches, it is relevant to implement previously used solutions for future projects. At present, the company’s management initiates new campaigns as new projects with the repetition of the same steps from one project to another. However, with the initiation of a portfolio system, the process of working with new projects will be more efficient, structured, and productive. As stated by Eskerod, Ang, and Andersen (2018), with the integration of portfolios, “project opportunities can be seen as situations in which additional value (compared to the baseline stipulated value at the project approval time) can be created in the project execution phase and in the project operation phase” (p. 40). Thus, to generate sustained value for the company and its customers, portfolios are essential for project management.
More specifically, such an approach will allow for compiling best practices used by teams on previous projects and building agile solutions for the future. According to Sweetman and Conboy (2018), portfolios help advance agility and facilitate problem-solving and risk-management in complex projects. Furthermore, the use of portfolios allows for enabling concurrent work on several projects at the same time with efficient distribution of resources and talent (Raad, Shirazi, and Ghodsypour, 2020). Such a recommendation is particularly relevant for the ABC Company, given its simultaneous engagement in both marketing and advertising campaigns for several clients. In such a manner, the use of portfolios is highly recommended for the organization to minimize its risks and competitive losses related to non-efficient project management practices.
Conclusion
In summation, this report has reviewed and analyzed the ABC Company’s performance in the digital marketing sector from the perspective of its operational and project management. The analysis has shown that the company combines operational work in the accounting, administration, and customer service departments with project work within the marketing and advertising departments. The management approach of the company might benefit from implementing a more flexible structural subdivision of departments’ performance and more dynamic talent management to meet project goals more efficiently. In addition, the company should use portfolios and programs to facilitate its productivity and efficiency when working on complex or simultaneously occurring projects.
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