Ops Cast After Dark: MOps & IT Alignment, DAMs + MOps, and Project Management Challenges with Naomi Liu, Mike Rizzo and Michael Hartmann

In this episode, we have a casual conversation about several top of mind topics. There may or may not have been adult beverages involved.

• How important is Marketing Ops and IT alignment? Why is not talked about more?
• Should Digital Asset Management (DAMs) be under the domain of Marketing Ops?
• Why is project management and project management platforms a challenge?

Recorded live.

Hi, I’m Michael Hartmann, I’m Naomi Lou, and I’m Mike Rizzo. And this is ops cast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and rev ops pros created by the MO Pros. The number one community for marketing operations. As professionals tune into each episode as we chat with real professionals to help elevate you in your marketing operations career.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by the MO Pros. Today is another, what are we calling this ops cast after dark episodes. So you got me and Naomi, Lou and Mike Rizzo say hello.

Oh, he came up with a new one. Nice to try something. I don’t know. Let’s sit there, like getting a little nervous heart, palpitations it in a different language every time he didn’t know. He didn’t, he didn’t know that was coming at you like, oh no. I was just getting nervous about how am I going to say it?

Um, I wonder, you know, uh, what was that? It was kind kinda big last year where you can hire like a, B, B, B rate, celebrity to do a little video thing for you do remember to Tamiami school cameo. Maybe we could get like, some people like to do cameo and do introductions for them, for us. That’d be fine. We’ll just like skip any other introduction.

We’ll just have like cameo guests, come on play. I actually bought one of those. It was actually pretty, it was actually pretty good. I got to go specify your guy, Ernie Hudson to do one. Well, the community shifted and had a what’s his name? Um, oh my gosh. Co-founder of apple. Yeah, it wasn’t yak Wazniak yeah, they didn’t like some of the chairpersons and stuff.

I think Naomi, you pitched in on that. Maybe I don’t. And they had Wazniak wished me a happy birthday last year. It was right when we were in this part there, Steve, the other, Steve, the other Steve. I don’t have chit chat. Like I know that this is a fun thing. And so first I’m going to throw out, like, to those of you listening.

Um, if you ever want to join us for one of these sort of more informal, just, you know, read lungs and, uh, and join us, let us know, reach out to us directly, either in LinkedIn or, or slack and we’ll make it happen. No sounds right. No, I’m just kidding. You’re welcome to you’re welcome to we’ll have a drink together.

Oh, no, we’re going to get hammered again. Um, in multiple ways I think so. Uh, Well, let’s just, I’m going to open up the floor. Like what, like, what are you like, what’s, what’s eating at you these days. What are the challenges you’re facing anything interesting that we can share with the community? So for me, not so much a challenge, but something, I think that, um, See or hear or read rather, uh, get talked about a lot is, you know, folks are always talking about, uh, you know, marketing strategy and alignment with sales.

Wait a minute, wait a minute. Did you just say a boot? I, I, if I D I neither confirm or deny, I, uh, did I really say that

Really, this is okay. That’s a moment it’s captured in audio history now. I mean, we just got to embrace it. If we get on the subject of a digital asset management later in this, because it’s top of mind for me, we might store that’s when I said, I purposely said a and you missed that. I was going to ask, I was going to ask you, I was gonna just going to tell everybody I’m going to lie, but it’s everybody it’s you, you’re also wearing a Tuk, you know?

No, I am not, you know, I’m not, I’m not actually, but sorry about that. No, it’s okay. So yeah, so what I was saying is, you know, you don’t often see the topic discussed as much as you do about, you know, marketing strategy and alignment with sales and your chief revenue officer and revenue offer operations and whatnot, but that’s.

Marketing strategy and alignment with it and building alignment with your CIO. And the reason it’s top of mind for me today is because I actually had a meeting with, uh, my CIO. And it reminded me about how much I love like working with our it team, which I know is not something that you generally will hear coming out of the mouths of.

You know, someone who works in marketing, but I really have a great relationship with our it team. Um, great relationship with our CIO and, you know, it’s, I think it’s really important to get a seat at that table to understand, you know, what their challenges are, what their resource constraints are because especially in a larger organization, um, we rely heavily on them.

And so as much alignment as you can get with that side of the business, I think is super important. So I’m curious what you guys think about. Yeah, I, you know, I, I, it’s an interesting one. I don’t know that I have exactly that same scenario, but I, um, I also have found it really useful to have a good relationship with it, leadership or similar types of organizations.

So for example, where I’m at, there’s a digital, digital product team and there’s overlap with, with like website marketing technology and that kind of stuff. And so. Making sure that we’re aligned on. Who’s got what and all that kind of stuff has been a really, um, I wouldn’t say it’s been easy, but it’s been a good thing.

And I think recognizing that and playing off each other’s strengths, you know, I think it’s the same thing with sales and marketing alignment. Right. You, you kind of want to know, okay, who’s got, what role, um, when do you, you know, where are those overlaps and where do you work together? And then just, you know, I think having that is really good and it side I’ve never really, I never really thought about it until you brought it up.

But I, when I think back about it, like every place I’ve been I’ve had, if not, you know, senior it leadership people at a lower level that we just worked together regularly to solve problems. And that was always an important piece of being successful. Yeah. I think the relationship building part with them is really important too, because, um, you know, some folks who are listening to this might be wondering, well, how do you, what do you do with it?

How do you work with them? Um, and at least within EFI, I rely heavily on them for things like, um, security reviews, right. Um, helping. GDPR, things like that. So whenever we get a GDPR, um, request, for example, um, it’s like a full scale, like cross the organization. Um, you know, we got to check to see what systems the person is in, how are we going to delete them?

How are we going to, you know, do we retain them if we need to, things like that. Um, and there’s also. Situations where, you know, there may be skillsets in-house that we can leverage as opposed to outsourcing for certain projects or to even use like support, um, for specific vendors that we’re using. Um, and it’s interesting because I know that, you know, for certain applications that I’ve brought into EFI, when you develop a relationship with.

It, and you can show them that, you know, marketing is not necessarily just, well, marketing is not just arts and crafts and that these tools that we’re bringing into the organization are there for a purpose or not just kind of like a bandaid silver bullet. You tend to find that there are it folks. At least I’ve encountered that are really excited about things.

And there’ll be the first in line to say, you know, I think it’s a great compliment when you know, folks in it get wind of like a project that we’re working on or bringing in a certain tool or platform. And they’ll actually proactively reach out and be like, Hey, I want to learn this so that I can support you.

This seems super interesting. And I think it would help my career too on the it side. And they’re like, you know, I just, I want to learn about it and how do I get, you know, Having it guys come to you and say, how do I get Marquetto certified? I think it’s actually pretty amazing. Oh wow. That’s pretty.

That’s pretty interesting. If the audience could see my face, like my eyebrows went all like a skew. I was like, well-manicured eyebrows for the audience is just listening to us today. I got dressed today and I went outdoors. It was amazing. And Naomi saying that my eyebrows are on point. Yeah. That’s your eyebrow game is on point today.

Um, so, so I think it’s interesting. One of the things that, um, I think it, I think it’d be, it would benefit it people as well to be become friends with their marketing ops marketing tech folks, because, you know, I don’t know if this is still true, but I, and I think it is, but the amount of tech spending is happening in most businesses.

Uh, it’s, there’s a ton of it happening in the marketing side. Right. And, and so a lot of what’s really sort of changing and evolving in the tech technology spaces in marketing and, and probably sales tech to a lesser degree, but, uh, or maybe not, but I think that, you know, so if they do want to advance their career, helping them understand that would make sense.

So, but I, you know, kind of like you, like, I also, there are things about. Um, some of the technology stuff that I, I actually would rather have somebody take, right? So I’ve in Mo several of my roles. I’ve had responsibility for like website kind of infrastructure and a little bit of strategy. And like, I don’t want to deal with like managing our domains and, you know, all the kind of stuff that goes with that or hosting.

I just want it to happen and be done. Um, if I have to manage it, I will then probably outsource it. But like, if we can have somebody that can handle that and we work together, then that I’m all for that. So anyway, I think this is interesting one. Um, maybe we need to find some it people to come on as guests.

I think that will be really. Yeah. I think that’d be super interesting actually. Um, yeah, I mean sitting knows somebody when I was at Mavenlink like, I got to work with Roger, who is our like CIO, um, pretty like, you know, just in general, it was a smaller organization back then. And, um, we talked a lot about like the needs of the technology stack and stuff.

And we talked a lot about taking product level data and letting that pass through to kind of the marketing side of things as they are SAS. But I never, and the relationship didn’t really go much, much beyond that. Um, but I’m sure like over time that, you know, it continued to expand, but it’s fascinating that you have such a close relationship with yours because.

I’ve I know how busy he was just managing the rest of it. So, um, it’s cool that they take the time and then you’ve got these people asking me to certified, like that’s, that’s pretty special. Yeah, that was really cool. I remember when we were first implementing Marquetto and I was in our office and SF and, um, I was just walking down the hall and one of our it guys at the time, like came up to me and I hadn’t worked with him before.

I think he was in, um, I think he was in. The database team or analytics team or something like that. And he came up to me and he like tapped me on the shoulder and he introduced himself and he’s like, Hey, I heard about this Marketo project that you’re working on. And I just wanted to tell you that, you know, whatever you need.

Um, I would love to kind of be on that team to like learn the system and how it works and just get to know it because, you know, I just think it would be really beneficial to like learn some of these tools that are outside of my wheelhouse. And I was like, yeah, for sure. So I totally took them up on it.

And I think maybe he regretted that after, because I was like, how about this? Want to learn this? Can you do this? That’s all right. So, so we just need to put that the big ask out there, if you are an it pro or, you know, an it pro. Who is either interested or has a good relationship with marketing ops marketing tech, let us know.

Let’s let’s, let’s, let’s make that a topic for a future episode. So, Mike, I think I heard you say that you’ve got, you’ve got something that is kind of top of mind for you. What’s your hot button today. I mean, it’s, I wouldn’t call it a hot button. It just was relevant. Uh, like, or just timely this morning, I had a unique opportunity to connect with the CEO of a digital asset management company.

Um, and we were just talking shop about the, the value of a product like that. And, um, I happened to have worked for a digital asset management company. And so, um, I, my line of thinking was like, yeah, like when I went into that role for the very first time, uh, kind of thinking about growth and demand gen for this SAS digital asset management company, coming from a marketing ops background, my, I was like, Hey, where the heck has this thing been like through my entire career?

And what’s fascinating is damn like digital asset management has been around for. Like longer in most cases than a lot of the marketing automation platforms out there. But for whatever reason, like it never makes its way into the tech stack for most of us. And I think it should. Um, but like, I don’t, I don’t know why that is.

Do you, like, I think before we started recording, you both had opinions on digital asset management that you could share. So, so I had a couple of thoughts. Uh, actually, I, I I’m thinking back to the conversation we had when we had the folks from cabinet em on and how one of their big findings was that.

Yeah, there are a lot of things that were, people were putting in their tech stack that they were documenting there that were not, I think what most people wouldn’t think of as marketing tech, per se. And I think digital asset management is one of those ones, because I think that is historically gone under the domain of like a creative team or something like that.

And my, my, my experience with them is. I think conceptually they’re great. The really hard part is managing versions and managing the taxonomy so that it’s easy to find the right thing quickly. Um, and that is, I’ve never had an experience where that has gone super well. I’ve seen some that are close. But it also like it’s, it’s, um, it’s a heavy lift to get it right.

And it’s just one of those things where it’s like, I’m I struggle with like, who should really own that? Should that be under a creative or content team? Or should it be under marketing ops marketing tech? If you’re going to get it. I see the value in having one place where, you know, okay, this is. This is the place where we have our best versions, um, at different sizes or whatever it is.

Right. So I don’t know. I I’ve kind of got a, like I’m on the fence, I guess, about whether or not they would want to all that interested in them. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, for, for me, I think, uh, The, the sort of like bleed into marketing operations, um, is, uh, you know, you’re right based on the experience that I had working for an organization in digital asset management, and even from the conversation we were having today, um, it usually does come down from a creative team or, um, you know, a head of marketing that is looking to sort of like manage some of those like design assets.

Um, but. When somebody comes to us and says like, Hey, I need to be able to, um, at scale, like distribute assets to people all across the globe, right? I’ve got reps in the UK, Australia, China, you name it. Right. And I need all of those things to be managed properly. Sometimes that comes to it. Right. Like, how do I do that?

Is it a SharePoint drive? Is it like, you know, is it, if you think it is, if you think of it as sort of a general, um, document management, which is, I think where a lot of digital asset management stuff started from was document management and. I think got a different feel, right? Cause it’s usually you’re talking about documents with text in them.

So then you do things like you’ve got OCR and you’re scanning. And when you, so the, which means like all that stuff about taxonomy and searching is a sort of, part of the process of getting your assets in there. Whereas with, with, uh, with purely visual or even video stuff, You have to then add that after the fact, unless now truth be told, like, I haven’t looked at that technology in years and years and years.

So, um, maybe there’s stuff out there that does some of that and through intelligence, but I think that. That’s where it breaks down a little bit. It’s just that capturing that consistently over time is, is hard. Right. Right. And for me, like, I think, I think when your reps need the most up-to-date version of your go to market PDF or your most up-to-date version, or like, you know, there’s been solutions that have been created to dynamically create.

Presentations or PDFs or whatever inside of Salesforce. Right. I’ve seen those tools out there too. Like as feeds that inevitably ends up being a part of the sales op revs up marketing ops tech stack. And the reality is, is like a lot of that stuff can be managed by a dam, but like, people don’t know that and they don’t realize that you can manage not just like version control, but also.

Like geo-based like location access. So that reps logging in from a different place can only see the documents that they need to see. Right. And so like that kind of stuff. When you think about scalability and go to market reach, and you’re enabling your marketing and sales org to just get what they need when they need it.

And it’s the right one, especially if you’re in like a compliance, like situation finance or government, or, you know, it’s not only for them, but in those situations, I think digital asset management needs to come further into this marketing ops conversation because we deal with a lot of those problems all the time where they’re like, Hey, did you set up the Google drive?

Like to have all of the right decks in. And we’re like, yeah, like here’s the lake. And then, you know, inevitably it ends up being like someone else created another Google drive or whatever. And I’m not saying like these solutions like damn we’ll solve for those people problems, but it certainly can help standardize and control access in a way.

Very different than a Dropbox or a drive or a SharePoint or, and yeah, you can hack your way to have SharePoint to some of those things, but it’s still not going to like, look at compliance, like you were talking to Michael has given us a thumbs down on the, on the SharePoint thing and yeah. So anyway, I just, I personally like have experience working for a damn company and I was.

Why do we not use this more? Like I know people have these problems, right? It’s just this crazy to me. And now they’re talking about things like headless damn, where like, you can make sure that those assets no matter where they live, just get updated. So like you update it in one place and wherever else it’s displayed.

It makes it makes its way there, which is pretty cool. So I don’t know. They only need your thoughts on, on dams. Any damn thoughts on dams? Um, to be honest, like it wasn’t until you brought it up, that it. Crossed my mind again. Um, it’s definitely something that I don’t think about at all, but you’re making me, you’re making me feel like I should think about it.

Um, so, well, that’s all I have to say. Yeah, well, that was great. That was actually what I said shared cause this, this CEO, so. Do you think like marketing ops people think about this stuff. And I said, actually I think that they think about it by accident. Like they’re faced with a problem all the time. They just don’t like, I was completely uneducated about what the heck digital asset management was until I found a job in that role.

Right. Like, I’d have, like, it’s been around for decades. And also I think so if you give him a thread to pull on, like, yeah, you’re going to like start getting people thinking about it and they’re going to be like, oh, I think this actually solves a lot of the problems we have in our company. I think you’re right.

That it comes up by accident and the way, the way it’s always, almost always come up for me is that. Someone said in the, on the creative team or contents, you said we need a dam. So I want to be able to say, say that too, since you all are trying to monopolize it, but yeah, we need a dam, but, uh, you’re the tech guy.

You go figure out, you know, what we should do. Right. And, um, but I’m not really, I don’t have a huge stake in the outcome of it either. So I think that’s been the challenge. Uh, so. I will say that the like the one time where I saw it get close to being useful is when, um, we had, we, we implemented a, uh, project management system that we use for all of our go to market activities.

So across marcomm and marketing ops, mark tech, um, and that the platform had sort of a bolt on. The basic digital asset management system and they could kind of communicate, um, and there was some real value there. Cause then you, you know, you know, otherwise in a project management system, if you can upload assets, right, you can say, okay, for this project, this is the asset.

And some of them may have where you can do reviews and annotations, then do versions and all that. But then you have that’s that version of. Thing for that project, right? If it, if it’s the master, there’s not really usually a good place. They don’t, the project management systems don’t generally have a great sort of like file storage.

That’s independent of the projects. And so that, that was the one time where I saw it have some value. We still had the challenges of making sure that we were really good about, um, Yeah, tagging things that were in the digital asset management system the right way so that we could find them based on whether it was an audience or a type of type of a tactic we were doing or whatever.

Right. But being able to sort of have that linkage between project management and the file management system for the dam was definitely useful. Yeah. That makes sense to me and it, and that, that too comes up a lot, right. When it’s like, you’re talking sort of like campaign ops, right? Like, as someone goes to make a request for, you know, some campaign that needs to be deployed, um, a part of that inevitably ends up being like at digital, like assets.

Oftentimes visual or video or whatever, or even a PDF. And that still has to translate back to some sort of like system that’s, uh, that, you know, like project manage that all the way through. And I think if you set it up the right way, you know, with some of the technology that’s out there in dams, you can create a campaign ops process that sort of adds a tax on it.

To the output of the file because of the type of request that comes in. And then you started like a hop, skip, jump through the, the, the problem of like, how do I find that thing or make sure it’s stored in the right place. But yeah, I think, I think there’s a huge opportunity for that category to sort of like come back to life.

That’s not just for brand people, but I think marketing ops people need. Like a harder look at like, is there value there for them? Um, but the, the project management piece, like we did a bit of that even at Mavenlink where we have like a version kind of thing, but you’re right. Like it’s stored against the project and yeah, it’s, it ends up being really, really complicated.

There are so many project management. Okay. So, so I was just going to get into that because this is another one that I struggled with a little bit sometimes. And, um, I guess there’s sort of two or three things that I would like to get your thoughts on from a project management standpoint. So one is Mike, you mentioned CA uh, campaign ops, right?

And I think campaign ops managing those kinds of projects in air quotes and projects right. Has kind of has its own scenario. Then you’ve got, what I would think of is, um, More of the it type projects that we do within know, and they could be small to big, right. But they’re, they’re sort of, there’s a technology or a change management process that you have to go through and, and, and you, that’s a little bit of a different kind of beast.

Um, and then the third is, and it’s kind of goes at the all full marketing level where you are. Here’s our overall high level goals for the next year, the next quarter. Right. Um, and so I’ve what I’ve struggled with is what’s the right system, or what’s, there’s never been a system that I’ve found that handles all three of those really well.

Right. Right. And especially that high level versus like execution level. Right. And connecting the dots like, so here, here are the projects. And, or camp campaigns that are tied to this and where’s that right? So, um, I’d be curious, like, have you like, am I the only one that’s struggled with this? Oh gosh. Um, what do you know, what do you do to solve for that?

You, uh, you take some duct tape, you print out paper and you create a Gantt chart made out of paper and string. Now I’m just kidding. Power, power point with bars. PowerPoint. Yeah. In lines to mark the months or quarters. Yeah. I always get this like really serious look like she’s like holding back. She’s like you guys are idiots.

Let me tell you about project management. I have, I have no comment actually, too. I’m just, I’m just happily listening. I’m learning from the best. Oh my God. So funny. I don’t understand why are you, why do you laugh when I say that as I dealt you learning from the best and me being on the other end of that compliments, I’m like I was learning from the community, which is the best.

So at the end of the day, The Moss hangs off the trees and in like south Georgia, right? That’s the sarcasm. That’s tripping up and learn this. Are you talking about chin or it’s called old man’s beard. Did you know that? That’s what called. I think it’s more of the old man’s beard. Like it’s not really like dangly.

Yeah. So that actually only grows where, and this is completely off topic, but I learned this recently. It only grows where there are areas of very low, uh, air pollution. It will not grow. It’s like super fragile. So if there’s like, if it’s clean air, no air pollution it’ll grow. I know, clearly there’s nothing to learn learned.

I’m learning from the best now, now I know, um, yeah, project management. And so I really appreciate like, like you calling that out, uh, Michael, like the attention on just the disconnect between like top level KPIs. Down to like project execution, whether that’s like for actual campaigns that tie back to, you know, the goal for the KPIs or just like the internal stuff that needs to be done in order to facilitate that, those things, you know, sometimes it’s fixing integrations that break, right.

Those fires that we have to put out all the time. None of that is easy to manage. And then like, like let’s just step back for a second. Are you a. Are you agile project management or are you waterfall project manage it or like, you know, what’s your methodologies like squares and we’re just pretending to S to say that you, you know, what those things are, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I’ll be, I would be faking it for sure. So, you know, I obviously worked for. Well, not obviously for those that don’t know, uh, I worked for maybe like makes you Mavenlink makes a solution that is tailored to managing people and resources around the space of, uh, project management. It’s not exactly a project sponsor, Mike, I’m just wondering.

No, no, we just happened to be talking about our experience and you touched on project management, so it’s your fault. And so, but like, because of that, I learned a lot about waterfall and then I learned a little bit about agile because people come to the booth and be like, oh yeah, you guys do agile. Like you have a Kanban board and all this other stuff.

And anyway, I, even with that, I still couldn’t describe to you what agile is perfectly like by any stretch. And I personally don’t think that marketing teams, I haven’t seen like teams execute agile project managers. At an agency or internally very well. Cause I think we have long-term projects and there are things that just need there, there are dependencies, no matter what.

And when you’re trying to break them down to small and you try to turn them into swim lanes that are at for agile, scrum kind of management, there’s a disconnect in back to your comment earlier, Michael, uh, in like, what is the point of this thing that we’re doing? And what else is it tied to? Right. So like, as you give me a task to go execute on some campaign or whatever, and I lose the bigger picture of that, this is for this persona or this audience, or this go to market strategy.

Like, I don’t think agile is a good practice for that. Uh, and so you have to like create the process in agile to adhere, to tying it all back. Right? You need all of the details in your story. That’s written. Like who’s the persona, all this other stuff. And it has to live on every single card that you take on in that project.

So it’s, it’s a painful thing, I think everywhere. And one of the sessions that I got to jump in on yesterday, and obviously at this recording, that’ll be many days or months or years ago, but Smartsheet AAJ, who’s been a guest. Uh, he now works for smart. Uh, as a marketing ops guy and, um, he, they, they ended up doing a session where it’s like, how does marketing ops at Smartsheet use Smartsheet?

And I w I was like in love champagne. Yeah. Yeah. I was like, oh my God, this is so cool. Uh, so. I’ll try to find a link to that and I’ll post it in the show notes for people to go watch, because I think to watch that, to join that, I, I really wanted to hear that. Yeah. I mean, at a bare minimum, even if you’re not using Smartsheet, right?

Like you can get ideas on how to think about managing your process and using a tool like theirs or others to, to do that. Um, I thought it was really, really cool. So yeah. I mean, my theory about why way, well, None of it’s a theory, but there are two, like two major things that I see it almost every place where this stuff starts to break down and it falls into two categories.

So, so one is a call. It just sort of generally call it roles and responsibilities. You might call it racy, you might call it, you know, swim lanes. And what I have found is that, um, And it’s somewhat tied to the level of detail you break down the work. Right? Um, I think there’s a sweet spot of there’s some that’s too high level too, too, too, too detailed.

But what I found is that when you get people, like if you don’t have that clearly defined roles and responsibilities, particularly around approvals, um, then, uh, and you either get people who are moving out of their swim lane too much, or they’re not moving out, not recognize when they need to actually move out of their swim lane.

And pick up and help. So that’s like roles and responsibilities and I guess kind of related that the level of detail you have the S the second is. Um, and like, this is something I really am a big believer is like project management is not a side part of your work. I mean, it can be at a small organization, but project management as a discipline is a really, it is a skill set that you have to learn.

And most people who are doing sort of a functional job who are asked to be pro to project management stuff are going to fail. Not because they can’t or couldn’t do it. It’s because it’s, it’s not. Their core job. They’re not being measured on it. Right. And so if you, you, there’s a point at which, especially if you get in a large organization where if you don’t have almost a dedicated project management function, I think you’re, you’re setting yourself up for all those other like that can help address that other problem.

Right. So you have someone who can sort of reinforce like this is the roles, responsibilities, um, hold people accountable and all that kind of stuff. And, um, I agree. I’ve even to the point where I’ve actually fought for bringing in a project manager on big projects, partially to keep, to make sure that we were doing that well.

And to keep me on track. Right. Cause I wasn’t like I was not doing either thing very well. Yeah. I totally agree. And I think, I think as organizations start to scale, um, having someone who’s dedicated to actually seeing like tasks completion, done, task, assignment updated, and, and all of those things is like critical.

We were faced with, uh, You know, everybody just gets distracted by like the hottest thing that happens next. And, and, you know, and that’s kind of a world where there’s like not really dedicated project manager, you sort of understand like the goals and things that you’re working towards, but like you end up just doing kind of whatever you need.

Um, but yeah, I totally agree. I. I would advocate for having a project manager. The one challenge though, with having like somebody who’s in charge of project management and like, or like a scrum master, if you’re doing like agile is like, it is that person’s responsibility to absolutely like, make sure that everything is like, like meetings don’t go awry.

And like, you don’t just start talking about something totally different. Like, and it’s hard. That’s a hard thing to do. Cause you kind of have to be. Uh, whatever, like, uh, kind of stern, right? It’s like, Hey, that’s not what this is for. And it’s just like that this feels bad, but like it creates efficiency. I actually think most people in that meeting would appreciate someone doing that, especially if they’re not an asshole about it.

Yeah. Especially, and that goes to your defined roles. Right. But that’s your job. Do it, well, I guess if we can circle back to the very first topic that we talked about, which was alignment with your it team, when it, if you have good relationship with your it team. And your CIO. Um, I’ve found that with larger projects where we’ve had to do, you know, implementations or, you know, like renovations, I guess, of data or tech stacks, or just, you know, projects, we’re expanding out functionality.

They’re very, a lot of the project managers that, um, I’ve worked with are on loan to me or my team from the it organization. They will assign a dedicated project manager, um, on an as-needed basis. So that really helps a lot. So yeah, I think I’ve experienced that as well. I totally agree. I love it. So now, now that we’ve come full circle, it’s like a search.

Yeah. So I like, I feel like we’ve only scratched the surface. I think we already, like, I think we need to have it up. So with some, some ID leaders. Yeah. We’ve got to do it leaders. I want to find, if you use a digital asset management product internally, I want to talk to you and you want to come on here and say the word damn.

And you just want to say the word dam all time. I want to talk to you and, uh, what else? Project management. Yeah, project management. We’re going to have AGA come back and do more. Now it doesn’t work in audio, but we’ll just have to show, look for the show. Note link. I’ll send you the thing. Cool. All right.

Any final thoughts before we sign off? No. No. All right. I just want to go to the store. Go get some food. I’m hungry. Uh,

alright. Thank you. Both of you. This has been fun. I’m glad we’re doing some of these. And, uh, for those of you listening, thank you for allowing us to invade your personal space. I can’t remember that’s from, um, anyway, uh, so thank you for listening. Thanks for joining us, supporting us, uh, as always, you know, we’ve, we’ve thrown out there some ideas.

If you’re interested in any of those and want to reach out to us, feel free to on LinkedIn or for slack. If you’re in the MO Pros community. Uh, until next time, we’ll talk to you later. Bye.