The Digital Project Manager

How Project Leaders Can Run Projects Like Founders

• Galen Low

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Project delivery leads at agencies and consultancies are being called to do more than just manage timelines and budgets—they’re being tapped to think like business leaders. But how do you actually make that leap from tactical execution to strategic influence? Galen sits down with Mark Orttung (CEO of Projectworks) and Pam Butkowski (SVP of Delivery at Horizontal Digital) to unpack the real shifts in mindset, behaviors, and expectations that define this evolution.

They explore what “thinking like a founder” really means in a delivery context, why hybrid roles are becoming the norm, and how to identify who’s ready to step up. Whether you’re trying to grow your own career or help your team level up, this conversation brings clarity to a path that’s often vague and unspoken.

Resources from this episode:

Galen Low:

Why is it so important for small and medium sized professional services firms to cultivate their top talent into business leaders?

Mark Orttung:

There's a lot going on right now in the market. I feel like technology changes weekly or daily. One of the things we found was that for us to succeed, we really needed the project manager to become a trusted partner of our client, and that drove a lot of the new work we got.

Galen Low:

What signals are leaders looking for when they're deciding who is ready to step up and what can project delivery leads do to stand out?

Pam Butkowski:

The first one is folks who are ready to step up stop asking "what about me?" It's not, what about me? It's what about us? The second thing is reading the room. If business is not great, don't ask for the moon.

Galen Low:

What is the biggest shift in mindset between being someone who delivers projects versus being an executive?

Mark Orttung:

To me, it's like just a bigger puzzle. Now you've got multiple projects and you have leadership who may or may not be billable, and you have people that are on the bench who are not billable.

Galen Low:

How do we avoid generalist traps, but maintain efficient differentiation of labor? Hey everyone! Welcome to our session on how project delivery leads can level up using a founder's mindset. For those who don't know me, I'm Galen. I'm the co-founder of The Digital Project Manager, and I will be your host for today. This session is all about how project delivery leaders, project managers, project professionals can level up into more strategic rules. But first, before I get too deep into it, let's meet our panelists. First up is Mark Orttung. Mark is the CEO of Projectworks, and he's helping consultancies grow profitably through smarter resourcing and delivery. He previously scaled Nexient into the largest US based Agile services partner. He led Bill.com as President and Chief Operating Officer, and he drove SaaS innovation, honestly, before the term existed. Mark, speaking of leveling up, you were telling me in the green room that there's folks that you worked with at Nexient as someone that you had actually promoted three times. Can you just talk a little bit about how she like reset her mindset through all that change?

Mark Orttung:

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me and I'm really excited to be here. I've got a podcast called The Z Suite and I had a guest, Vicki Papa, she worked for me at  Nexient and we promoted her from account director to client partner to general manager to chief revenue officer over a period of five years. My favorite quote was, we were talking about sort of how does her mindset change and how do we change the mindset of clients as she gets new roles?'cause it's quite difficult. And my favorite quote was, she said, it broke my brain a little bit every time you promoted me. But also that's how I knew I was taking on the right challenges and pushing myself in the right way. So there's a whole in depth discussion that the people are welcome to go watch. But anyway, it was just a, it kind of felt like it fit in as well. One of the favorite moments I've had from our Z Suite podcast.

Galen Low:

I love that. Can I first say that I love the idea of the Z Suite series? It's like frank conversations of how people have like grown and developed in their careers. Folks who are like very high up. And by the way, that like reaction from me, my facial reaction was genuine. That's the first time Mark told me that story. I'm like, wow. Like up to the C-suite. We've talked about it, but like we didn't have any examples of it. I love that. Who should I pick out next? Oh yeah, Pam. Pam, you are the Senior Vice President of Delivery at Horizontal Digital, and I have described you as a tough mutter to dozens of agency project professionals who have ascended the ranks under your guidance fam. You have a history of just like leveling people up over the years. You are somebody who gets people promoted. I can say it without you sounding braggadocios, but it's true, and I've seen it happen over the years. I was wondering if maybe you could just tell us a bit about some of the shifts in mindset that you've seen for the folks that you've been leveling up. You know, maybe to echo Mark's stories.

Pam Butkowski:

Yeah. That question is very timely and very relevant to what we're talking about today, right? 10 years ago when I was hiring, promoting, mentoring, managing project managers, it was very focused on the iron triangle, right? It was very focused on, here's what I have to deliver. This is what good looks like for me by myself, my slice of the pie. Now we need our delivery leaders to understand the entire pie and be responsible for the overall success. And so we're seeing kind of a shift in where delivery professionals are going in that they need to care about a lot more than just their own remit. Right. I'm sure Galen, you've probably heard me say this before, but I tell my teams it's not your job to solve every problem, but it is your job to make sure that every problem gets solved, and that remit has expanded not just for project delivery, but at an organizational level now for delivery leads.

Galen Low:

I love that sort of zoom out, and I like that it's not necessarily just for project delivery leads, but also it's that holistic view and like we start hearing so much about it now, it almost begs the question like, how. And I know folks under your leadership and guidance get the how and hopefully we can steal some of that fire today in this conversation because I think it's the how that really matters. Everyone's like, yeah. Understand the whole pie. Pie. But then it's like the whole, like how do we then mobilize that? How does that change our behavior? How does that, you know, give us better visibility for our own self? And how does that help us advocate for ourselves within an organization? Love it. Love it. Awesome. Solid panel. Let's maybe just dive into it. Let me sort of tee up the problem the way I see it, and then we can we can discuss. So, here's the way I see it. Nurturing top performing project leaders into more strategic roles isn't always like top of mind, especially for like small and medium sized professional services firms. We're talking agencies, consulting firms. It's kind of like just like doing the work. But you know, mostly if sometimes the only way to climb the ladder as a project professional project manager is to work hard, deliver results and trash talk that are equally ambitious colleagues and advocate for their own growth at every annual performance review. These days, leadership teams need all the strategic support that they can get, and they all almost certainly have that unspoken echelon of top performing PMs that have massive potential to become bonafide leaders within their organization. The only problem is that the path from, say being a project delivery lead or department head to joining the management team, or even just playing a role in strategic planning is pretty murky. Typically, there's no course or like rising stars or top talent programs at these medium sized consulting firms. It's still kind of like the school of hard knocks, taking a chance on someone and speaking to them in a foreign language until they understand or maybe don't, but that doesn't need to be the case. At least I don't think so. And frankly, most agencies and professional consulting firms need to take action now to support their businesses. So today we wanted to explore that path. From three different angles. As I mentioned earlier, we wanna be thinking about how can C-suite executives, like Mark, within professional services firms benefit from additional strategic firepower by, you know, leveling up their high impact project professionals. How can senior leaders play from the middle to drive that growth? And of course, how can ambitious project leaders do more to carve out a path for themselves so that they can sit at the strategic table? I thought maybe I mentioned it in my spiel, but I think it's worth talking about the question of now. I think in my conversations there's always been that whole, okay, well how can I level up? How do I progress in my career? I wanna be more strategic. I wanna sit at the strategic planning table. And from the other side, you know, a leader saying, okay, well listen, I wish folks were more ready to step up. I wish they would engage more with the business. I wish they'd understand how our business operates. But there is this sort of moment in time and so I thought I'd just ask the question, why is it so important right now for small and medium sized professional services firms to cultivate their top talent into business leaders? And also what does that even look like?

Mark Orttung:

Great question. There's a lot going on right now in the market. I feel like technology changes weekly or daily. If you're keeping up with all the new tools that are leveraging AI and how they. Change what's possible. So there's just a lot of noise and a lot of complexity. One of the things we found at Nexient was that for us to succeed, we really needed the project manager to become a trusted partner of our client. And that drove a lot of the new work we got. And so we needed our project leads and account leads to be both deeply expert in delivery and sort of design and development of software, but also willing to think like a salesperson at some level. So they need to do sort of, and these two things don't normally go to together in the same person, right? It's usually you have one skill or the other, and you almost, you know, allergic to the other one. So we wanted to get our best delivery people into selling mode and give them effectively a quota. So we did that over a period of many years with them as they became the senior manager or the account director on an account, they would start out by finding opportunities for new things, new projects, and then handing them off to a client partner who was much more comfortable selling. But over time, we wanted them to go up that curve and become comfortable themselves.

Galen Low:

I really like that. I'm revisiting my past here because I've always been a hybrid, and yes, it has always been smuggle and golum, like two different perspectives fighting one another in my brain. What's interesting is I hear a lot about going that way, right. Project delivery leads, project managers being encouraged to sell. Have you had it happen in reverse, like account managers becoming project managers, is that something that happens would happen? Or is there something that's actually a quality of project managers that sort of lends itself to being really good at sales Or vice versa? Is there actually some qualities of an account manager that makes them good project delivery leads if you were to sort of hybridize.

Mark Orttung:

Yeah, I've seen, so one of the things that we pitched a lot at Nexient was this idea of a growth mindset. That pretty much anyone can do anything if they're willing to be humble and sort of do all the practice and learn, and you're bad in the beginning, but you can learn pretty much anything. And so based on that, we had some peer sales people come in and say, I wanna write a statement of work. I wanna write a proposal, I wanna think about project scope. Not because I wanna become a practitioner, but because I wanna understand it and I wanna experience it. And to me, that was awesome, right? They just became so much better at selling because they wanted to dig into some of the project management work. I loved that. That kind of surprised me at the time, to be honest. I've seen a lot of practitioners move into selling. I hadn't seen that many salespeople move into practitioners.

Galen Low:

I like that tie in of the growth mindset, or as Pam put it, understanding the whole pie, you know, I think is the sort of thematic tie in here. Pam, how about you? Like I know you and I, we've talked a little bit about hybrid roles over the years. We've started seeing a trend more, or at least maybe it's one of those things where you're like, you're thinking of buying a yellow car and suddenly you see yellow car as everywhere. I don't know, but are you noticing more hybridization? Are you noticing a greater emphasis on almost this like commerciality, this commercial understanding for delivery leads? Like across the board?

Pam Butkowski:

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think part of it is like control the things you can control perspective, right? And so for project leads for folks in delivery, I know we're not at the metrics part and spoiler, this one won't be on there anyway, so I'm just gonna introduce a new one. Client retention and reducing attrition is one of the biggest things that we can control, right? Which directly impacts the bottom line. Our revenue to Mark's point. He actually started giving revenue targets and giving delivery leads and project managers a go get. The easiest way to do that is through delivery and through retaining clients year over year, and you can't do that without a growth mindset, without some account management skills. So yeah, we're absolutely seeing that kind of more accountability or responsibility in revenue targets in growing the business, in having a stake in client retention and reducing attrition. We're also seeing when we're talking about hybrid roles, not just project management, account management hybrids, I think that's a piece of, or maybe a result of some other roles becoming more hybrid like client partners and strategists are starting to be a little bit more hybrid. We're starting to be a little bit more nimble in other areas of the business, which then trickles down to project management needing to be a little bit more nimble as well. Right. So I think there's definitely some hybrid stuff happening and just more generalization around capabilities regarding both growth and delivery.

Galen Low:

Oh, I like that. I think some project people, PMs specifically, don't always fully appreciate that they are, in some ways the economic engine for a professional services firm, like an agency or consultancy, those projects drive dollars and those relationships continue to drive dollars. And so there is that sort of relationship there. Diana was saying, I'm also seeing due to staff reduction, that PMs are expected to just become client facing, to become the account lead. And I thought maybe I'd get the two of your perspectives on that because in some ways. It does really feel that way, and maybe it is the case where it's like, listen, margins are thinner. We need people doing more. You know, there's the AI sort of variable here. It's like, do we need to hire more people or actually can we just get people to do more things? Is that a driver or is it more pure play in terms of like that cohesion of delivery? Probably the true slide somewhere in between. Mark, what's your perspective on that?

Mark Orttung:

A couple things. Services firms are so much easier to run when you're growing. If you are adding clients and adding projects, then there's opportunity for everybody to get promoted. There's, you're right. And if they're flat or shrinking, it's really painful. All these things come outta the woodwork that are problematic. And so for me, the, we kinda, I feel like I stalled this model from eccentric 'cause that's where I started. But this idea of account leads who are practitioners who get to work so of the holy grail happened. And one of our clients, it was a large utility, gas and electric utility, so lots of money, and they got to the point where they pulled our project lead into their annual budgeting process and they would show us the list of all of the projects for the next year. This one's 10 million, this one's 20 million, this one's 5 million. And say, what do you think? Which ones do you wanna bid on? Can you help us write the RFPs? Right. And that to me was like, they did that, not because she was such a great salesperson, but because she was such a great practitioner, they trusted her as part of the team. But if you're selling, I mean, that's like the holy grail. They're like, here's these buckets of money, which one do you want? And how do you wanna frame them? That to me is what you're trying to do is get the two to come together in a really good way.

Galen Low:

I love that. Pam, you gave it a this in terms of growth.

Pam Butkowski:

I did. Listen, everything is easier when you're making noodles of money, right? But I don't think it's ever a bad thing to have a project manager of client facing skills ever. When we're talking about growing our future leaders and cultivating our future leadership talent, client facing comes with that territory, right? I talk to clients every day. I don't lead a single account. And so you have to have that skillset. And so I think learning it early is never a bad thing.

Galen Low:

I concur and then actually like, you know, Mark, you're taking me back to the my Accenture days where, you know, like walking the halls is a skill and what we mean is like go on client site and while you're there, look for opportunities for us to sell more through. There's two ways to look at that. There's the icky way, you're like, oh, you know, I'm like, I'm a salesperson now and we need to like give into capitalistic greed, which is not untrue. But also that hand on the lever thing. Right? And I think a lot of the time I talk to project managers who are like, oh, we just get past the scope of work and are expected to deliver it. Like we're never consultant during sales, you know, of course it's unrealistic. They haven't asked us to come to the table. Well, guess what? Those two things, those are two puzzle pieces that fit together, is if you are, quote unquote, walking the halls or client facing, A, Pam, to your point, you're like learning those skills when it's not necessarily your job, which by the way is great because then you're also not necessarily measured on that while you're learning. But also you have your hand on one of the growth levers, maybe not the growth lever, right? You're not choosing whether or not to give up lease hold space. You're not choosing what the rates are. You're not necessarily like picking and choosing, you know, which staff to keep on. You have your hand on one of the levers that drives revenue, and then the ideal vision is everyone is like pushing towards that growth so that it's like prosperous times. Because Mark, to your point, like not prosperous times in professional services is pain. And I think if you guys will let me, maybe let's just use those two lenses because I wanted to dive in Pam to what you're saying. The skill sets and the signals. Mark, we've been talking about the growth mindset, and I'll put a optimistic and slightly pessimistic spin on this, and what I'm gonna say is. If you wanna be the one who gets promoted and stays in a time of relative hardship, not necessarily prosperous growth, but also from a more positive light, how can one sort of develop their career in any climate? But what I wanted to ask was what signals are leaders looking for when they're deciding who is ready to step up? What can project delivery leads do to stand out, you know, in prosperous times or in times of hardship? You know, maybe you're in survival mode. Maybe you're just happy go lucky, growing your career, that's fine too. But I think coming back to what I said originally, like it's sometimes really gray, but I haven't met a single leadership team yet that doesn't have that group in mind going. That person's like almost ready. It's not like written down anywhere. There's no like list in the cafeteria, like the break room wall. It says if you want to get promoted, do these seven things. Like it's kind of gray. Pam, what do you look for? What do you think leaders ought to look for folks who are ready to kind of level up?

Pam Butkowski:

I think there's really two things for me, and they're gonna seem very general and a little bit lack in tact, if you will, but let me explain. The first one is folks who are ready to step up, stop asking, what about me? And it used to be, again, this is a trend kind of 10 years ago, the folks that I was promoting were the ones who fiercely defended their projects and didn't care what it meant to other projects or other accounts. They delivered what they needed to deliver and right. They were good soldiers and they did what they needed to do in order to deliver again, their slice of the pie. Now, that is not the name of the game anymore right now. If you need something for your project or your slice of the pie, again, you are understanding how that impacts everybody else and you're working towards solutions. Okay? So it's not, what about me, it's what about us? How are we, right? The people who are ready to step up are the ones who care about the impacts to the rest of the organization, care about how the work that they're doing affects other people or other accounts or other teammates, and they're looking out kind of for the greater good. The second thing is reading the room. Again, to Mark's point, if business is not great, don't ask for the moon. Right. If your organization's having a hard time and you're not meeting your numbers, then you just need, like, revenue is more important than margin right now. You need to understand that, and you need to be okay with discounting strategies. You need to understand when those are appropriate and not fight back. So again, it's kind of a what about us mentality there, but read the room, understand the temperature of the leadership team, understand the temperature of the organization and how you can impact that in a positive way.

Galen Low:

I love that. I want to go back there eventually, 'cause something you said, you tucked it in there, you're like, revenue is more important than margin sometimes. That's one of the things that I, for me, it was brain breaking, right? So like, you know, cash flow versus like mega profit. Anyways, we'll get there eventually because I think it's one of those things that. Each person looks at it a little bit differently. And Pam, to your point, you know, you could be a good individual contributor, but really it's kind of like zooming out and being able to a, see that whole pie and the pie came back and Yeah. I'm so hungry. I know. Like, we should have eaten breakfast, Pam. Mark, does that resonate with you? And like, you know, yeah. You know, promoted the chain. Like what are the signals that you look for?

Mark Orttung:

So a couple things. One is mindset. So it's really things are not gonna go well and how are they gonna handle it? How do they handle challenges? Because it's, most people that have been involved in client projects know there's like just challenge after challenge. And you have to be resilient. You have to be creative, you have to be willing to learn from it and get better. And I think the best leaders demonstrate that over and over again, and they're ready for whatever comes their way. My second one, I was gonna say is I think kind of goes along with Pam's read the room, which is, I was gonna say really high EQ. You want people who really are empathetic to the client, and specifically to the client's business and how it operates, right? So have an understanding of how the client makes money, what's good for their business, what's bad for their business. In a very large organization, we often have people sit down and say to the client, how do you get your bonus for the quarter? And it's often like really fascinating what comes out. It may be what you thought, maybe not, but now you know what they're trying to do and you can help them do it. And it often kind of reframes your project and what success looks like. So yeah, so I think it's very similar to Read The Room, but it's sort of that EQ and really having empathy for the business and the people in the client.

Pam Butkowski:

I was trying to be with mine, yours is a better way of saying it. It's not about you and read the room. Cute.

Galen Low:

But honestly, I think it's the right, you know, a sometimes we need to be told the same thing in different ways. B. It's amazing. What kind of clicked in my head was that connectivity between EQ and being a team player. Like for some reason they hadn't connected for me in my head, but Pam, when you were like, yeah, you kind of need to be thinking about the greater whole, the whole pie, not just you your slice of pie. And in order to do that, you need to understand and like have the sort of emotional intelligence and the observation skills and the growth mindset to be like, okay, well what do other people want? How are they gonna get bonused out? And how can I help in a way that serves me not necessarily like. Maybe it's logical and obvious, but it's like. Not, I'm gonna help you make your bonus and I'm gonna miss all my targets in the process, but also seeing how it all connects like that mesh, which I think is really interesting. Which actually brings me to my next sort of thought or question. I want to go back to that brain breaking thing because I think with each of you, I've had conversations about, you know, what it feels like to kind of get to that next level. Then you kind of look back down, right? You're like, you climbed up one rung of the ladder and you look back down, you're like, how did I not see it that way before? It's kind of like these epiphanies that sometimes feel like they came too late, but I'm just wondering, in your opinion, what is the biggest shift in mindset between, you know, being someone who delivers projects or project delivery lead versus being an executive or you know, sitting at the VP or SVP level? Like how do you look at projects and long-term vision differently?

Mark Orttung:

I think a couple things. One is from your own perspective, to me it's like just a bigger puzzle. You're trying to figure out as a project lead, you've got all the things happening inside your project. When you take on, say, a whole practice or maybe a geographic region. Now you've got multiple projects and you have leadership who may or may not be billable, and you have people that are on the bench who are not billable, and all of that fits together into your puzzle now. So you're trying to work with each project lead to make sure that each project is awesome. But now you've also got all these other pieces, like what are, and we used to call it rural schools and tools. So like what's the methodology you've got? How are you training your team? How are you constantly upleveling them? And all of that time isn't billable typically. So you're kind of trying to balance the whole thing so you can make all of that work. One way to think about it from your own perspective is it's a bigger puzzle. Another one, and I talk about this a little bit with Vicki on that podcast, is the perspective of the client. Has to change and it's almost impossible to do. So, you know, this is somebody who is your account director and now they're your client partner and they will constantly go back to them in the role of an account director, even though you've changed their role. We actually got to the point where we would just pull people out of a client and put them in a new client. Because if you introduce them to a new client and say, this is your client partner, they buy it and they just, they go to them in that way. It's so hard to get your client, to treat them differently. Actually, I'm curious, Pam, if you figured that one out. We never figured out how to say this is no longer the person who does these three things. They now do these things.

Pam Butkowski:

Right? No, the, I mean, we can unpack this all day. I totally agree with you, and I think the same is true for project managers leveling into a more program role, right? Like it's natural for clients to wanna go to them for PME type things. I do the same thing a lot of times if I elevate someone to a program lead they're going somewhere else.

Galen Low:

Yeah. It's interesting too, because where my head goes is like, okay, yeah. Like it's hard to change how other humans perceive you. Because we're kind of wired that way as a survival skill to be like, okay, I figured you out. Moving on. That's who you are. That's the role you play in our, you know, social fabric or in my world. If that's all true. Then also internally, do you have that problem internally where it's like, okay, yes, we've promoted this person, they are in a new role, and they're like, oh yeah. But also, can you manage this project? Like how do you deal with the backslide internally too? Like have you found it to be a challenge or is it as simple as being like, companywide memo, this person is in this role now by.

Mark Orttung:

One thing that I've found is sort of a failing as a leader. You promote someone, you feel great about that, but did you backfill them or do they just have two jobs now? Right. So, that's the other challenge is you've got to actually have someone else take their old job or you've just given them a second job and it's easy to do. You feel great. You're like, you're promoting someone, you're doing all this great stuff, but. It's so hard for them if you don't give them a strong person to slot into whatever their, the old role was.

Galen Low:

I love that. I wanna revisit some of those things too later because like some of the things I set up top where I'm like, usually there isn't any program to help people, you know, get promoted or, you know, support and it's all like, you know, 85% billable hours and utilization seems to me like you actually, it didn't have that problem. You actually had a way to get people promoted. Sorry, Pam, I cut you off.

Pam Butkowski:

I think just to layer onto that a little bit too, I mean this is ending up being the theme, right? When things are good, but I think that like when you promote someone, and maybe we're in a tougher economic climate. People do need to be a little bit more nimble. And so it's awesome to get promoted in that kind of an environment, but sometimes we need you to slip back down because we don't have the resources or we can't hire right now or whatever. And so we need to we need to make sure that we're really intentional about when we ask people to kind of step back down and play a different role, and that we are able to pull them back out and let them do the job that they're supposed to do.

Galen Low:

I love that because it brings us kind of full circle. You know, first thing I asked was like, why is it important now? And I said AI and probably some other things. And I think going back to some of the comments into chat right now, I don't know if it's clear for everyone slash anyone if this is a permanent shift or a temporary shift. I do wanna weave in this question as well because with all this sort of hybridization going on, like what becomes of our titling or. Mark to your point, like we're thinking of sort of two different perspectives. We're thinking of, you know, health of the business, health of the project. We're doing multiple jobs, we're account managers for project managers, and then like our role shifts dramatically. The title doesn't even capture it anymore. So like that will probably evolve, but maybe even to kind of zoom it out even a little bit more. Are some of the things we're talking about today, is it just because of like times of hardship or will these things become permanent? Is this like the price of gas where you're like, oh, oil's expensive now and the price of gas goes up, but then somehow it never goes back down? You know what I mean? Like or is this kind of like a temporary thing?

Pam Butkowski:

No, I don't think this is going anywhere. I think this is just kind of the evolution of services organizations of being more nimble. I mean, we've seen recently, and I don't think that this is going anywhere either with things like AI and expectation, like clients are way more cost conscious, but it's not just about how much they're willing to spend, it's their expectations around pricing from services organizations, right? They expect us to be more efficient. They expect us to find faster ways to get work done. I mean, I think. Gone are the days when we have resourcing plans with 42 roles on them, right? And so I don't think that's going anywhere. I think that's an expectation from clients that will continue to be there, and we need to figure out how to deliver to those expectations. So I don't think that the hybrid thing is going anywhere. I also don't think that the project manager title is changing. I think the expectations of that role will evolve. I don't think that we're gonna retitle an entire set of people internationally who do this for. Like, no, the expectations in that role will change. I don't think that we're gonna retitle everyone who's a project manager.

Mark Orttung:

I would echo that. I would say I, I was talking to somebody who runs one of the top 10 US consulting firms, and he said that clients have just cut their budgets in half. Yeah. For what they're willing to pay, so whatever they used to bid, they now are supposed to bid half of that. And it's just on the consulting firm to figure out how to deliver the same value and half the price. And it's just assumed that they will because technology and AI and that's it like that. So I think it's fascinating and I think, but I also think sort of as my role, I, you know, I started out as a developer and I've gone through a lot of different things in my career. What I think the theme is I've gotten a broader perspective. Like as you become CEO or as different levels, you just need to think about everybody's perspective and pull it all together as you work on the puzzle. I think that is gonna happen to everybody sooner in their career, but every level you're gonna be expected to understand, appreciate, and take into account all these different perspectives. Because in theory, you're not doing any like boring work anymore 'cause that's all done for you. I don't know if that's really true, but that's sort of the theory of the whole thing, right? And so now you've got time to really understand everybody's perspective and really pull it all together. I think that's what the expectation placed on you will be. I don't know how that will play out. It'll be fascinating to see.

Galen Low:

Yeah, I agree. I am, for better or for worse, it will take time for us to like figure out where the dust settles. Ideally it is that way, right? Where it's like, yeah, all that boring stuff that was taking up your time, it gets automated, you know, AI does it and, but I think the other thing it's been coming up in a lot of conversations, not necessarily that like AI is changing stuff. It is, but also it's this sort of trigger moment for us to like rethink how we think about thoughts. You know what I mean? Like to be very abstract about it, is this moment in time to like. Go. Okay. But like I should zoom out. I should look at the pie. I should look at the puzzle. That's always been true. It didn't suddenly become true. It's just that it wasn't a priority and now it kind of is and might be forever, is the kind of, I think where we're landing here, which is. It's a big thing to wrap your head around. It is not necessarily new, it's just the moment or it's become very important and that's, I don't know, I'm finding this flattening out. Right? Or I've had the privilege in my career of like standing out in some way, having people who like push me out to front of stage and give me visibility and help me understand the puzzle, you know? And I was like yeah. I'll just go along. Like I was a loose logging in a river, just going wherever it goes and getting lucky. And now it's almost like, no. Those are things that you need to have for your career health. Like don't just accidentally come upon them. Seek 'em out. So you got the people who will teach you about the puzzle, who will do the translation, who will, you know, help you understand and maybe consume the entire pie. But, you know, I think that's the important thing Now. Which I think leads me actually to, I think we've been talking from the viewpoint of the, you know, project manager a lot here. But Mark, you mentioned something important, which is that, you know, having programs in place and having this sort of the non-billable upskilling stuff as part of the fabric of your organization, I don't know that every team lead thinks that's even possible. I thought maybe I'd zoom out from that and say like, what role can, like a founder or an executive or leadership team play in supporting this transformation of their top project leaders into, you know, ideally the firm's next generation of business leaders?

Mark Orttung:

Yeah. At Nexient, we're very intentional about that, and so what we did is we created a wiki page that had sort of the requirements of every job in the company. So you could see whatever track you were on, you could see your level, what we expect for you to be great. And the next level up, you could see the CEO, you could see the general managers, you could see the client partners. You could think about what skills do they need. And you could also look horizontally, like if you're a program manager, but you wanna become a product manager, what are the skills that they have and how can you go get them? So we were trying to be very transparent about, here's all the things you could do and here's what you need to be good at to do them. And then please, we also kind of made it, you own this, so if you wanna switch roles, come to us and tell us that. Tell us what you wanna learn and then give us your plan. And so we were always trying to push people to own it, but with the information of what's possible. And if you're trying to get to this other box, what do you need to know? What skills do you need to have?

Galen Low:

I really like that sort of core capabilities model and also the fact that, 'cause like what I was gonna say is that I've seen it sort of quote unquote backfire of like, I meet all these requirements, give me my promotion now please. It's so you can pitch it. It's transparency and visibility into how things work so that you can pitch it and you know, it might not be a yes just'cause you tick all the boxes. Yeah. There's just so much that goes into this and even the sort of leadership teams I've worked with where it's just like. If they wanna be a product manager, but I just don't think they're gonna be good product manager here. Then yes, they're ticking the boxes and yes, they have ambitions and yes, they're pitching this, but like we don't think it's the right fit. And on the other end that sounds like, oh, you gave me a map to a treasure. And then you're like, sorry, princesses isn't another castle. You know, like it seems like a bait and switch, but actually it's not an automatic promotion because you fulfilled all these requirements. Yeah. Like it does give you visibility into what it would take for you to make a case.

Mark Orttung:

And hopefully if there were something missing for that person, it would be in the box. Like, you're not gonna be good at this because of X. And yeah, like ideally it would be part of the transparency that whatever that is.

Galen Low:

I mean, Pam do, have you had similar systems? Like does the sort of Billability thing come up? You know, you've worked in some large agencies. And I still think that's kinda one of those things where it's like, yeah, but billable work. Like do we really need to train this person so that they can become a better human? Or can we just get paid? Like how do you find that dichotomy? Especially as like where you sit in the organization where someone above you might be like no, Pam, just work 'em to death please. And everyone below you is like, Hey, we can be excellent and we can help drive growth, but we need some help.

Pam Butkowski:

Yeah, no, completely. I think unless that tone is set from the top level of the organization that everybody is responsible for growth. Everybody has a CEO mindset. Everybody needs to care about this, then it's not gonna resonate, right? Like that is the tone that we need to set at an organizational level. We've got a lot of opportunities to do that, right? We've got town halls, we've got company wide meetings, we've got, and the way that you approach those is so critical for the tone that you've set around priorities. What people care about.

Galen Low:

I love what you said there because I know so many organizations where like town hall and like having values and a mission statement is just like a box tick exercise and they don't give it the time and attention and care to realize that every time you have a town hall and you're talking about what matters, it's building this cultural fabric within your organization. It's shifting people's understanding. It's giving them the information mark to your point about like what is the way you need to think to be successful here. Or at least the way you need to behave to be successful here. And like I just see so many organizations, they're like, we cobbled together some slides and got the staff together and we're like, blah, blah, blah, forecasted revenue. Bye. You know? And it's like, okay, actually that was your moment. That was an opportunity to like upskill everybody for free because you would've spent that time anyways. That mindset shift, I think it's really interesting.

Pam Butkowski:

As someone who is kind of the voice of leadership, but also the voice of the teams. One thing that I really try to encourage my teams to do is look at their remit as a book of business. It is their tiny business that they are running. It could be two small projects. If you're a more junior project manager, it could be $20 million in revenue across one large account. Right? But look at it as a book of business that you are running for the organization. I try to empower my teams to make smart calls. But I also make sure that the calls that they're allowed to make are in line with the organization. Right? So I think that folks at this kind of layer that I'm representing here today, we're really critical in translating the needs of the business to something that will resonate with our teams, but then also translating the pain points, the objectives, the things that our teams are going up against to leadership in a way that is going to resonate and land with them as well. Right? And so being kind of that two-way street of what the organization needs and what the teams and individual projects need is really important.

Galen Low:

That I think is so cool because like, especially even, you know, coming back to that, how, and like Mark, I think you described it well in saying that, you know, you need to understand the puzzle and how it fits together, but then the practicality of that, Pam, that you just hit on is that. It's like that's where it happens every day. Not like at a two day workshop, not at a, you know, online training that you did after hours. It's actually on the job, and it's the people you've got and the culture you've got. That creates the ecosystem for people to be empowered to make good decisions because they understand. They've been given the whole puzzle. And I do, like, I see the note in our notes doc and just as transparency, and I'm like, I get it now.

Pam Butkowski:

No, it's impossible, especially at an enterprise level for everybody to understand, right. The tippy top of the pyramid and the lowest level of the pyramid for both of those levels to understand each other's priorities completely. And so middle management VP layers, like, that's where it becomes so critical to do. Be the connection points between all the layers.

Galen Low:

That's a fantastic segue into our bonus segment. Mark, I was wondering if you could tell me as CEO, what does gross margin mean to you? Why is it important and when do you look at it?

Mark Orttung:

Yeah, absolutely. I, now that I run Projectworks, we're all about metrics, so this is, for me, this is fun. So gross margin is really at the core of how healthy is your business. So the way to think about it is for the revenue that you're getting, what is the profit you're making on a given area? And actually, I think to really understand that you need to separate it from project margin. So when you run a single project, it's a very simple thing. You have the billable revenue coming in, the cost of the people, and possibly there's some other direct expenses that you need for that project. As simple as that, the project margin is. The difference between how much revenue you get and your cost. If you take zoom out a little bit, as we talked about earlier, take five projects and add up all of their project margin. The other costs you need to add in for gross margin are other people that, or other costs for delivering your work. So it could be your leadership of a given practice. It could be people who are often billable but are not currently. They all get thrown into the cost side of gross margin. So it's all your account revenue, minus all your account costs and your practice costs. And so if you have a great gross margin, that means the core of your business is healthy. You might still spend too much money on marketing and sales or finance and accounting, but that's a different part of the margin. This is the core of your business. If this is good. Then you're in great shape as a company.

Galen Low:

I love that as I sort of zoomed out to see the rest of the puzzle. Right. Talked about like individual product profitability doesn't mean that the whole business is going to be healthy and there's other things, right? We talk a lot about utilization and billable time and for all the folks who are billable, but there's also folks who aren't. And yeah, that impacts the overall. Pam, do you discuss gross margin in your role?

Pam Butkowski:

Sure do. Yeah, all the time. I think, I mean, mark talked a lot about gross margin at an organizational level. I think there are various, I'm literally looking through the rest of the metrics to make sure we're not gonna cover this. Yep. Okay. So understanding margin as you can affect it as a project manager or as a program manager, or as a practice lead is really important too. Right? There are various layers of managing margin as well, right? There is an account level margin, and maybe that is something that you should start tracking at a program or an account level if that's the way the organization is set up. But. No, we're looking at margin all the time.

Galen Low:

Cool. Love it. Maybe I'll shift on to the next one, utilization rate and utilization target. Pam, I'm gonna throw to you on this one. What does it mean to you? Why is it important and when do you look at it?

Pam Butkowski:

Okay, so I got the one that we all hate. I look at it every day. I wanna back us up a little bit on this one because it's, this is one where everybody in a billable role feels the pain of it, right? It's this like looming gray cloud of like, but I have a billability target. I have a utilization target that I have to hit. I need more work because of this. We sometimes forget that it's not just a target that's tied to you. It's something that then informs a lot of the revenue targets. A lot of the decisions that we make in as an organization, a lot of literally at a baseline, utilization targets are what we use to then feed up all of the other metrics that determine how much we need to sell in a year to keep this business going, the baseline, right? And so it is really important and it feeds everything else. So I know it sucks to track to like an 80% utilization target, but it's so important everyone. I look at it every day. I look at it through a number of different lenses. I look at it around where we're gonna assign new projects and how utilized or billable folks currently are. Or I look at it on a weekly basis to see if allocated to actuals are in line. If on paper it says that my team is supposed to be 80% billable and we're tracking to 110, there is something wrong. I look at this metric all the time. I think it's really important for everybody to understand what the word utilization means to your organization. To some organizations, it is just billability. To some, it's a combination of billability and non-billable work around growth, around sales counts towards positive utilization. So understanding what your organization actually uses to measure utilization is really important so that you know kind of what good looks like. The other thing to keep in mind when you're looking at this or when you're personally tracking to utilization is. The timeframe over which your organization views utilization. Is it a yearly target, an annual target? Is it a quarterly target? Is it a, every week you're expected to hit this utilization? Understanding kind of how they use these metrics to inform larger goals is also important. So, that's a question that you can just ask your managers, ask your practice leads, what does utilization mean to us? How often are you looking at it? My utilization target is 85%. Am I expected to hit that every single week? Or is that something that we're gonna look at the end of the year as my success metric?

Galen Low:

I also love it as a one thing that we think we all know what it means, so we don't ask. So it's like that simple action of asking. Even just in the past, you know, minute and a half, I was like, oh, that's why I get asked about it all the time. Not just at the, you know, like once a month or once a quarter because it's important for planning. Our panelists, let's give it up to them. Thank you everybody.

Pam Butkowski:

Thank you.

Galen Low:

Thank you. Alright folks, there you have it. As always, if you'd like to join the conversation with over a thousand like-minded project management champions, come join our collective! Head over to thedpm.com/membership to learn more. And if you like what you heard today, please subscribe and stay in touch on thedigitalprojectmanager.com. Until next time, thanks for listening.