AOL Advertising is a service-based organization offering various types of online advertising campaigns. Advertising campaigns offer clients customized audiences, brands and platforms that help advertisers reach their digital marketing goals. Whether the goal is to maximize brand exposure, increase online ROI or recruit a certain number of online registrations, AOL has a number of tools to help clients reach their online targets and goals.
Project Management is incredibly important to the bottom line of how all departments function at AOL. The digital online environment requires employees to manage multiple simultaneous processes that must all work together to create the end result: an online advertising campaign. Every advertising campaign experiences an assembly line of departments start to finish. First, a Sales representative pitches or responds to a request for proposal (RFP). Then an Account Manager plans the business with internal AOL systems, determining if there is enough inventory at the right price to meet a customer’s needs. From there it moves to the Launch & Traffic Department to begin the implementation phase. Launch & Traffic members receive an advertiser’s physical ad and sets up the campaign parameters (how and where it will run) through AOL’s back end data systems. After the Launch & Traffic team sets the campaign live, the post-launch process begins. Post-launch the campaign is reviewed by the Business Analyst team, who monitor the campaign’s performance to ensure that the campaign is running and performing as intended. Then Account Management works with the Billing department to bill for and finalize the campaign. Overall, each piece of the process has a number of key operational procedures that together allow AOL to successfully pitch, sell and execute multiple online ad campaigns simultaneously.
All of the departments listed above (Sales, Account Management, Launch & Trafficking, Business Analysts and Billing) engage in project management techniques and procedures on a daily basis. How does your organization execute project management through its operational processes and procedures?
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At Nestle, our project management is centered on the idea of cross-functional teams that take a Six Sigma approach to reducing cost, increasing efficiency, and hopefully also pleasing the customers. Each business unit has a daily operational review that measures key objectives. These key objectives are reset each quarter to coincide with the loss analysis that analyzes the most costly activities and manufacturing lines within each factory/business unit.
In addition, there are Weekly Operational Reviews and Quarterly Operational Reviews that provide the same level attention on higher level losses.
Any project that is not able to be solved is escalated one step at a time up the ladder and if not solved, is turned into a Six Sigma project if the cost savings can justify it.
Project management is particularly important within the content production department at McGraw-Hill Education. Each major production project begins with something called a Planning Meeting which involves representatives from production and the product team to discuss details around budget, schedule, and detailed needs for the project. All of this information is recorded in an online system where all members of the project can check it throughout. On going project meetings take place throughout the life of the project which helps to keep each team up to date with what’s going on. There are quite a few moving parts so it’s critical that everyone tracks the information in the same place so it’s as transparent as possible amongst all involved parties.