A Trusted Project Manager Is Critical to Keeping Your Web Design Project On-Time & On-Budget

Your firm’s website is the most critical touchpoint between your business and its customers. For any B2B firm, handing off this vital resource to someone outside your organization constitutes a measure of risk.

Trust is everything in any successful web design project. If you don’t trust your creative partner, your project’s schedule and its budget may be at risk. As features fall out of scope to meet your deadline, your firm will still launch a new website. But vital capabilities that could have benefited your business have been lost. At that point, your firm is left starting all over again.

Of course, any web design firm worth talking to gains your trust during the sales process. But as the engagement goes on, you need the lines of communication to remain open so the collaboration runs smoothly. If you’re working with the right agency, you’ll find the assurance you need by forming a trusting relationship with your project manager.

Your project manager plays a vital, multi-faceted role at every step of the process. By keeping your project’s goals in focus for both sides of the collaboration, a skilled project manager offers reassurance, guidance, and clear communication patterns. An effective relationship with your project manager ensures the revamped website, video asset, or other digital marketing projects your business needs are delivered on time and on budget.

According to research by the Project Management Institute, a trusting relationship between you and your project manager leads to faster time-to-market and lower project costs. Along with ensuring your redesign project generates the results you want, your firm gains a reliable point of contact for any future design and development expertise you may need going forward.

Primary Benefits of a Strong Project Management Relationship

Like any extension of a creative process, trust can be difficult to both define and quantify. When trust is established, vital information about scheduling, budget, and scope flows openly across both sides of the engagement. But if a project is lacking this crucial ingredient, the resulting breakdowns extend well beyond communication.

Once you trust your project manager, your relationship with a creative partner improves in a few critical areas:

• Clear communication of project needs: Every stakeholder understands the project’s requirements to progress through each state on schedule.
• Facilitation of accurate scheduling and estimates: A trusted project manager will recognize the reality of you and your team’s availability and step in with help to adjusting due dates and scope as needed.
• More insightful and honest project reporting: Providing all truthful information about a project’s progress and its potential barriers provides a transparent relationship versus only telling you what you want to hear. Plus, your agency collaborator gains the full story in terms of what your firm hopes to gain from the project.
• Increased collaboration: Teamwork improves with both sides of the engagement understanding their role in the project and its impact on the overall success.

The Core Components of Building Trust in a Project Manager

Given the future of your business can depend on the success of your digital project, you need to trust the point of contact with your web design agency.

The behaviors that facilitate trust are difficult to quantify, but Harvard Business School professor David Maister quantified trust as the interplay between four variables: credibility, reliability, intimacy, and self-orientation.

Your firm can build trust in a project manager as these traits are expressed in the following ways:

Credibility Assures Your Firm It Has the Right Project Manager

For your B2B firm, trust is built on the feeling that you’re working with someone who understands your project, your firm, and what both need. Your project manager’s credibility is defined by the sum of their skills and experience that provide a sense they’re qualified to lead your project.

Your firm may have different requirements to establish credibility with its project manager. You may want early assurances that your project manager has an understanding of your industry, such as security or data analytics.

At Clear Digital, some of our kickoff meetings include a casual introduction of each member of the team and the role they will play in the project.

Reliability Is Underscored Through Communication Patterns

For a project as important as yours, you need more than the assurance your agency partner will get things done and meet their deadlines. Your firm needs to build a sense that you’re working with a team you can count on.

During our Velocity Workshop, we kick off every project by underscoring that your creative partner’s leadership team is always accessible and available. Along with setting patterns for project updates, our director of client services establishes a cadence for additional check-in meetings about your ongoing experience.

From the beginning, your firm needs the reassurance of knowing the contact points for your project and in what ways you’ll be communicating. As the collaboration progresses and those communications are set and preserved by your project manager, you gain an understanding that you’re working with a reliable partner who can guide you through the process.

Intimacy Improves Communication Through Personal Connection

Your project manager and web design agency are your collaborators, creative partners, and, ultimately, contractors who report to your firm. But they’re also human beings.

Forming a personal connection is another important step in building trust with your project manager. Though building a rapport with another person is always a two-way street, a strong connection with your project manager enables greater honesty about the project and your role in its success.
Ideally, you need to feel comfortable expressing the factors behind your personal stake in the project. As we often saw through the pandemic, you should be comfortable coming forward with more intimate details such as the need to balance child care and working from home that may impact your availability.

And, when you’re working with a project manager who understands these nuances, you should expect your web design partner to work with you to meet your needs.

Self-Orientation Displays the Integrity Your Collaborator Needs to Build Trust

As a web design project progresses, you build an understanding of what motivates your project manager. For all of the preceding traits that form the foundation of a trusting relationship, it’s their personal connection to your project that contributes to its success.

As a web design project progresses, you build an understanding of what motivates your project manager. For all of the preceding traits that form the foundation of a trusting relationship, it’s their personal connection to your project that contributes to its success.

Projects succeed when everyone involved is invested. Do you get a sense that the people working on your digital project are doing so to just finish a job on schedule? Or are they genuinely engaged in resolving your design problems and helping your business? With a trusting relationship with your project manager, you’ll know your web design partner is just as invested in your project’s success as you are.

If the web design work your firm needs has lacked that kind of personal connection, we should talk.