In February 2020, mere weeks before the world shutdown due to COVID-19, a group of journalists met following SRCCON:PRODUCT to think about how to meet the needs of newsroom product-thinkers. The result was the formation of the News Product Alliance, of which I was a founding member.
I can remember being in the meetings thinking, “What in the world am I doing here?” I wasn’t trained in product management. I didn’t know how to code and couldn’t tell you the difference between a scrum and a waterfall. What I quickly found out is that I wasn’t alone. Few of us had proper product or project training. In fact, most of us were doing the work without even realizing it. Many of us were newsroom project managers, sans title, training or realizing we were doing that work.
Every newsroom has someone herding cats, making sure trains run on time, visuals get assigned, designers and developers on the same page and the stories are published across every platform. If you are that person, odds are you don’t identify yourself as a project manager.
Robin Kwong (Courtesy)
Robin Kwong, New Formats Editor at The Wall Street Journal, wants to make sure editors, reporters, visual storytellers, audience engagement and digital teams have the opportunity to understand the work they are performing and learn core project management skills.
Kwong has partnered with the UK-based Association for Project Management to release his comprehensive guide, “Project Management for Newsrooms.” Kwong is also an APM honorary fellow.
I spoke to Kwong about the role project managers play in newsrooms and why this work is important to him. The following is an edited version of our conversation.
Tony Elkins: To start, can you explain the difference between product management and project management?
Robin Kwong: I’ll start off by saying, in practice, the lines are sometimes quite blurry. I think the skills involved in being a good project manager often lend themselves to helping you become a better product manager, and vice versa. That caveat out of the way, projects by nature are finite and out of the ordinary course of business. They are unique and transient. Products tend to be quite user-focused. Often the user is the actual customer, and for internal products it’s the actual staff.
Projects are unique, transient endeavors where you’re working toward a set of commonly agreed goals. With products, you’re creating a service or good that, hopefully, meets a user’s needs. Products tend to evolve over time while successful projects have an end and you move on.
Elkins: Who’s this guide for? Who did you have in mind when you created it?
Kwong: This is written for people that might not have a lot of training or experience in project management and might not even sort of think of themselves as project managers. What spurred me to do this, besides my own experience, was the trend of editors and reporters being asked to take on more, and sometimes what that more is, is being tasked to run projects. The people giving them the work, and they themselves, might not necessarily recognize the situation they’re in. And once they do recognize it, they look around on the Internet and find there’s not a lot of things specifically addressing project management.
Elkins: If you’re in a traditionally siloed role in the newsroom, like an editor, reporter or visual storyteller, what are the first steps you should do if you find yourself being tasked with this work?
Kwong:One of the things that I try to highlight and emphasize in the guide is (that) it will be a lot easier if you have a more relational, rather than transactional, relationship with your team. Building a long-term relationship across the newsroom is really important. Make contact with as many people as you can, especially if your day-to-day work doesn’t lend itself to you being in touch with someone like a graphic designer. You have to make the effort to connect, especially when there’s not an immediate ask or demand. That helps build up a network of relationships you have across the newsroom.
Elkins: How does someone begin to bring all those parts together once you form those relationships?
Kwong:By far the most important thing in my own experience is just clarity of what you’re trying to do. Part of that comes from the fact that newsrooms aren’t natural project environments. People find themselves dumped in the middle of a project, or they’ve been asked to do a thing that evolves into a project. It’s not necessarily an environment where projects are always started with great clarity.
A large part of your role as a project manager is to generate and communicate. Some of the really basic things include just asking a lot of questions like, “What are we really trying to achieve here?” At least one person should be the keeper of the core idea – someone who knows with extreme clarity what exactly defines (the) project. That’s something that will help make a lot of decisions down the road easier because you can always refer back to it. So, “If we need to make this change, does it completely change the core? Or, is it completely irrelevant to the core ideas?” Knowing that makes it easier to make subsequent decisions.
Elkins: With a lot of these projects, the reporter goes off and writes their story, it goes to the editor, and photos and graphics get assigned after the fact. If you’re in this type of newsroom, how do you change the culture if you want to take this new role on?
Kwong: There’s a part of it that’s cultural and structural change within an organization. I think the best way to reach that goal is incrementally, by executing each individual project well. If the environment doesn’t exist, you do one project. People are like, “This actually was pretty good. Maybe we should do another.” You do others over the course of years. Then someone says, “Maybe there should be a role for someone.”
Elkins: For newsrooms that make this culture transition, what are some outcomes they might expect from empowering project managers?
Kwong: The big pie in the sky outcome is your organization gains a much better capacity to learn, grow, adapt and respond quickly to whatever new things come up because you’ve grown those project management muscles. Much like the big sell for product management is understanding and serving readers, I think project management is about helping the organization learn how to grow and be more adaptable.
I think one of the outcomes is you save a bunch of effort. Poorly run projects, kind of like poorly run meetings, suck up so much of people’s time, energy, and resources you almost might as well not do it. Doing them well will save you a lot of headache, time and effort.
Elkins: Let’s say I’ve got a big project coming up, and I see this guide. What would you like that person to take away from it?
Kwong:I’m hoping they don’t feel it’s a big, scary thing, that it’s intimidating. I hope the guide helps them see the contours of where the edges are and what the things are you have to do. I hope it gives you an overview of the process. “What does it look like from the beginning to end?” I think often, without a guide, you only learn that at the end, after you’re done. You’re like, “Oh, wait. That was the whole project. Those were all the things that I needed to do. And also, I forgot these few things that I really should not have forgotten.” I’m hoping it serves as a painless preview of what you’re about to get yourself into.
Kwong gives some of the pieces a project manager should have in place before formally kicking off a project:
- A clearly articulated core idea for your project
- A set of goals for what you hope the project will accomplish
- A sense of the scope of the project that arises from the core idea
- “Green light” in the sense of commitment from core team members and no active objections from the veto-wielders
- A clear mapping of the roles and responsibilities needed for the project team, and participation from the people to fill those roles
- A rough sense of the to-dos and the key milestones in the project timeline