Project Management Planning

(part of Chapter 8: Managing the Agency)

 

Once you’re hired an agency, then what? Well, if you’re looking to reap the benefits of a successful project, your active involvement is necessary.

By working closely with your agency, you’ll be able to represent your internal clients’ needs while providing the agency with important direction. Indeed, your involvement can help the agency be more successful. Read on to learn what to expect from working with an agency once you start the project.

 

You Have Hired an Agency. Congratulations! Now what?

First, define your internal team. If the project is fairly small, one person can easily handle all the tasks. For larger projects, think about assigning roles for the following functions, although one person can certainly have more than one role:

• Daily Contact: The person who will be the agency’s daily contact for questions and approvals, facilitate contract details, and also coordinate any conference calls or on-site meetings.


• Senior Project Manager: The person who has approval authority for questionnaire or discussion guide designs. This person also will approve any presentation materials prior to the final presentation (if applicable).


• Content Expert: At least one person should be assigned to provide the agency with access to the following:
• Previous research


• In-depth industry expertise

Client-side project management plays a critical role in project success. A good client-side project team can have a huge impact on overall project outcome. Yes, the agency is doing its “work,” but there are several points where your involvement will make it—and ultimately the entire project—successful (see Table 8.1).

 

Table 8.1a Client Roles and Responsibilities
Project Stage	Client Roles and Responsibilities
Definition	Define objectives, participate in hypothesis development, approve content priorities. Coordinate internal team as needed to get buy-in on these items. Get agreement from internal clients on success criteria.
Kickoff	Obtain contract approvals, PO numbers, and any other accounting or legal requirements.
Design	Approve and provide feedback on research instrument drafts and sampling plans. Coordinate internal feedback and approval as needed. Manage potential in-house research vampires.
Data collection	Quantitative: Review progress reports; make sure you are comfortable with the quotas and how they are being met. Qualitative: Review progress reports; if IDIs, listen to first three to five as a QA check. You can either listen in real-time or request audio files. I prefer audio files—it gives you the flexibility to listen at your convenience, and to replay as needed. If focus groups, you should attend.
Reporting	Even if the agency is writing the report, the client still has a role. You can ask to review the report outline before the report is started (or, you can choose to entirely trust it, and that’s certainly fine, but it is often best to get a heads up in case it is taking the report in a direction that you know will be hard for your internal clients to digest). Provide any templates to which you require adherence. If this is applicable, be sure to provide these early in the process—otherwise you might experience delays if it has to apply your templates after it has already started report development.
Final presentation	Coordinate meeting facilities and attendees. Advise the agency you will want to see a draft of the presentation three to five business days prior to the meeting (if applicable). Arrange for an executive endorser to be present at the meeting. Prepare the endorser to make sure she or he is ready to make a statement about why the research is important and how the team members should seek to apply it.
Throughout	Keep internal clients informed and set realistic expectations. As needed, and this varies by company, keep internal clients updated on schedule, content, and other expectations. In many companies, this is done biweekly, but in others internal clients are only updated at key milestones.
Post-project	That’s right; you are not done, even if the agency is. Upon project conclusion, your key tasks are the following: Gather feedback from internal clients and colleagues. Provide feedback to the agency. Post reports or other deliverables on servers, in corporate libraries, etc. Complete internal requests, which may include audience-specific reports, one-off requests for charts, or options for follow-on research. Celebrate!

 

Escalation Process

It is also a good idea to have a preplanned escalation process. In the event that the project has any challenges, you’ll want to have a clearly defined plan as to how and to whom to escalate.

For example, if the data collection process experiences significant challenges such that some quotas won’t be met, who in your organization needs to know? Who will need to approve a fallback plan for substitute quotas? Having some plans for this ahead of time will ensure that any obstacles can be swiftly overcome.

Similarly, you should ask the agency what its escalation process is. In the event you are not happy with progress, to whom in its organization can you escalate?

 

Working with the Agency at Project Initiation

Once you select an agency, a few things will happen, likely in this order:

• The kickoff meeting. First, the agency will set up a kickoff meeting. For projects under $50,000, this could easily be done by conference call or Web conference. For larger projects, the kickoff is usually done in-person. At the kickoff meeting, you can expect an agenda similar to that in Table 8.2.


• What about videoconferencing? If your organization has the facility and is comfortable with it, great! Some agencies have group videoconferencing systems or access to them. As long as the conference can be set up for group viewing (as opposed to just a “talking head” on individual PCs), and preferably has whiteboarding, it can work.


• Project schedule. After the kickoff meeting, the agency will deliver a schedule with target milestone dates. This schedule will also usually specify dependencies, such as what milestones require your involvement. After all, the agency cannot stay on schedule during questionnaire design, for example, if your team is on vacation that week and unavailable to provide feedback or the necessary approvals.
• It is important that you carefully review this schedule and approve it. If you feel some dates are overly aggressively or oddly lax, ask about it.
  
  Also, be sure to watch for potential schedule conflicts. Is the target date for the final presentation in conflict with a major company event on your side? If so, you might want to request a change—you don’t want your internal colleagues distracted when the results come in.
• Work begins. At this point, the agency starts the real work of designing a questionnaire or discussion guide, and finalizing sample criteria such that lists can be ordered.


• Weekly status reports or project team meetings begin. Weekly status updates will be delivered using some combination of the following methods:
• Weekly written memos


• Updates to a shared, online project calendar


• Weekly status calls

 

 

Table 8.2 Sample Kickoff Meeting Agenda
Agenda Item	Description
Introductions	Agency and client introductions of key team members; individual roles are explained.
Review of objectives and hypotheses	These three parts might seem redundant with the proposal. They are. However, it is always wise to reiterate the key project parameters live to ensure complete agreement.
Review of methodology
Discussion of sampling plan
Success criteria statement and other client-side requirements	Be clear with the agency by using the kickoff meeting to state and document your success criteria. “We will consider this project a success if at the end, we ….” Advise the agency of any special requirements such as adhering to slide templates, using logo treatments, and who should and should not be copied on memos.
Examples or samples from relevant studies	Agencies will often show some examples of end deliverables from similar projects to start to gather feedback and set expectations for the final reporting format, content, and style.
Research content brainstorming	If applicable, the agency may use the kickoff meeting to facilitate some brainstorming about key hypotheses.

 

This is an excerpt from the book, "How to Hire & Manage Market Research Agencies," which is available on Amazon. Published by Research Rockstar LLC. Copyright © by Kathryn Korostoff. All rights reserved.