A day (sort of) in the life of a project manager.

It’s no secret that there’s a lot that goes into maintaining the success of a full-service patient-focused clinical trial recruitment agency. From our art directors and writers to our video production crew, our media buyers to our data analysts – we all do our part to keep the agency up and running each and every day.

With so many departments and so many individual moving parts, you might think it would be difficult to keep everything on track. Some things must fall through the cracks, right? Wrong. This would be the case, except for one (not so) secret weapon – the project manager. Don’t let yourself be fooled by the seemingly mundane title, the role of project manager may seem easy to wrap your head around, but there’s a whole lot that goes into each and every project manager’s day that helps keep the whole agency afloat.

At a quick glance, a project manager is just that – a manager. We manage client relationships, internal teams, creative development process, and media campaigns. If it needs managing, well, that’s what we’re here for!

Let’s break it down further to get a better understanding of what a project manager sees from day to day. Of course, every day is different depending on the projects being managed and where they are in their respective timelines. But it’s a pretty good bet that I’ll be dealing with at least a few of the tasks outlined below throughout the day.

Let’s talk about emails.

The first thing I do every morning when I log on is open up my inbox to see what the day has in store for me. Did I receive that client feedback yet? Are we all set with the agenda for our 11:00am meeting? Did someone email overnight with an urgent request that I’ll need to reorganize my day around? As a project manager, you learn how to craft beautiful emails, and you put that skill to great use as you spend a large portion of your day receiving emails and drafting responses. The project manager is the one who faces off with the client, and that means we take pride in the emails we construct. It’s our job to make sure everyone is on the same page, and a well-constructed email can truly save you a whole lot of trouble (and a bunch of meetings!!) in the long run.

Meetings, meetings, and, oh hey, more meetings!

Like I said before, the project manager is generally the main point of contact for clients, and this means I get to attend my fair share of meetings in a day. These can be weekly status calls to ensure that a project is on schedule, or maybe our creative team just finished pulling together a new concept for this particular project, and it’s time to present to the client. Or maybe this isn’t a client meeting at all. Project managers also serve as the middleman between the clients and the rest of the agency, which means we schedule and attend a slew of internal meetings as well to discuss anything and everything going on with our current projects.

It’s time for a review session.

Part of a project manager’s job is ensuring that each step of a project is aligned with the client’s vision and that the overall scope of the project is being adhered to. Before anything is sent to the client, it’s the project manager’s job to review it and make sure all client considerations have been taken into account and that no project parameters have been missed. This means reviewing every asset that has been developed for a campaign against the project outline, checking for consistency in wording and tone, making sure all client feedback was taken into consideration, and a whole lot more. A project manager should have a full understanding of just about everything going on within a project, and it’s important to use the visibility we have to ensure that everything we create and send out is up to our very high standards. That’s part of the project manager’s job.

There you have it, that’s the day-to-day of a project manager. Excluding about a billion other items here and there that require our attention. It’s also worth mentioning that no day is ever the same. We’re constantly juggling tasks and rearranging priorities to ensure that nothing gets missed and that everything gets out the door on time. We thrive on organization and seeing a job well done. So, you know, I should get back to work. Until next time!