Augment your Project Management with Brand Management
Introduction
Is your team trying to create a consistent brand experience across many different platforms? Are you struggling to standardize your internal processes and keep everyone on the same page? If so, adding brand management best practices to your project management workflow might be just what you need. Read on for some tips on augmenting traditional project management with the power of brand management.
Unify your team's vision
The first step to achieving a unified vision is to define it. This can be achieved through an easy-to-understand and clearly defined mission statement. Once your team understands what the project is about, they need to know how the project will measure success. By creating a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that align with your company's values and goals, you create more accountability from your employees and ensure that everyone is working towards producing results aligned with their roles in the organization.
Once you have developed these KPIs, you need to include them in your project plan so they can be tracked throughout their life cycle. As part of this process, it's also essential to define:
The budget allocated for each stage or phase of a project (this helps inform stakeholders how much money they will have at their disposal over time)
Any risks associated with each stage or phase so decision-makers know when they may need additional resources
Set your projects up for success
You will have a much better chance of success if you plan in advance. Define the scope of your project, including:
What are the deliverables? (e.g., website redesign, social media content calendar)
What is the goal to be achieved? (e.g., increase sales by 20%)
How will this goal be measured? (e.g., increased traffic to the site)
How will you know when you've reached success (or failure)? This can be tied to one or more metrics, such as revenue and customer satisfaction ratings.
Also, consider what type of structure would suit your business best: centralized or decentralized, top-down or bottom-up approach; which team members need to be involved; who all might need stakeholder buy-in for each decision point throughout the process; etc...
Keep items accountable and actionable
Keep items accountable and actionable.
Keep tasks clear and concise.
Set deadlines for each task and ensure that everyone knows what their responsibilities are in relation to the task at hand, especially if there is a team working on it together!
Set expectations as well as communicate them clearly so that everyone understands who is responsible for which parts of the project or tasks within it, as well as how much time they have available to complete those tasks (for example: "We will need this report done by Friday afternoon.").
Better define the scope of a project
To better define the scope of a project, you need to understand what it includes and what it doesn't. For example, suppose your company is producing an online marketing campaign for a new product launch. In that case, many pieces must come together for things to go smoothly: website design, copywriting, photography, and video production — but other factors fall outside of this scope. For example:
The cost of running ads through Google AdWords or Facebook Ads
Making sure that the pre-launch email blast is sent out on time
Ensuring that tweets promoting the product launch are scheduled on social media channels at the right time
Brand management is great for project management
Brand management is a great way to unify your team's vision. The key to brand management is the ability to set a project up for success from the beginning, which helps with accountability and actionability. With brand management, you can better define the scope of a project and keep items accountable and actionable. Brand management brings structure, clarity, and alignment with your company's values that will make every project run more smoothly!
Conclusion
Project management is always about taking large amounts of work and splitting them into smaller, manageable chunks. With brand management, you're able to break this work down in even more ways. You can set a clear vision for your team, stay on the same page with everyone's goals and objectives, ensure that all deliverables have been met when the project is over—and most importantly, make sure that you're all working towards one goal together. As much as we tend to think of these two disciplines as separate entities, they are actually quite intertwined. So why not use both to your advantage?