PM Chat x Jason Leung
Based in Vancouver, Jason is the Director of Project Delivery and Strategy at Colony Digital.
“Guts doesn’t just mean making tough decisions, but also guts across the board. It takes guts to be humble. It takes guts to swallow your pride or ego. It takes guts to put people before the project. It takes guts to ask tough questions or break difficult news. It takes guts to know when to step forward and when to step back. ”
You pursued a BA in Arts & Science in University. What skills and early experience did you need to demonstrate in order to secure a coordinator position after university?
I am going to be honest up front - I was a terrible student in university. I hated studying, I hated sitting in class, and I hated trying to stay inside the lines on Scantron sheets. That's not to say I didn't learn much. Where I learned the most is my extracurriculars and getting involved. I probably got a bit…too involved.
I worked every job possible in university from the bookstore to the alumni fundraising, ran frosh for two years, was part of the arts faculty government and was running sponsorship for one of the major model UN events on the North American circuit.
It was busy and my grades suffered, but it taught me so much when it came to how to manage my time, juggle communicating with different people, context switching, and this is going to sound cheesy, but really how parts of the real world worked. The soft skills are so important as a PM and I credit getting these reps in early and in a ton of different scenarios as the big reasons why I was able to hit the ground running and find my first job that I loved and was excited about.
What later inspired you to pursue project management?
I would say it came from two places. While I was growing up, my Dad was a project manager in the IT space, so it was always a job title that was on my radar. But no, that doesn't mean I grew up dreaming I would be a PM when I grew up (dream job was space cop, if anyone was curious).
As PM's, we know the title only means so much - it's a lifestyle and a manner of thinking, and it was really my time at Deloitte that crystallized that way of thinking for me. They emphasize every member of their organization having project management training because the skills are so transferable to every aspect of life. I really took that to heart, and realized essentially all the things I was proud of and most excited about doing were project or program management at its core. I formalized all of it through a certificate program, and ultimately, getting PMP accredited.
With your first experience as a PM at Blender Media, did you find a steep learning curve in any specific areas?
Definitely a steep learning curve. I stepped into a space where I had a lot of the foundational soft skills, but needed more of those reps and needed more technical hard skills and knowledge.
Managing people and clients in an environment where you don't have confidence in the technical or subject matter expertise is crippling to confidence and how you make decisions and conduct yourself in front of internal and external stakeholders. But it's a process and its something that PM's will go through and continue to go through. You learn to calibrate or manage those feelings better but one thing you learn is you will always encounter new scenarios and challenges and these feelings are natural.
At the end of the day, understanding yourself, your emotions, and making sure you're managing from within first before managing the work and others helps with dealing with all of it.
What are the key skills a senior PM needs to have to be able to work across multiple challenges?
I think there's a lot of key checkboxes I could mention : people skills, negotiation skills, communication and tact, context switching, problem solving, self-awareness, creativity. I think those are pretty well covered and the ones that come up top of mind when people think about PM skills.
I would say one of the things I would add to the mix: guts. And this isn't a you got it or you don't. We all have guts.
Guts doesn't just mean making tough decisions, but also guts across the board. It takes guts to be humble. It takes guts to swallow your pride or ego. It takes guts to put people before the project. It takes guts to ask tough questions or break difficult news. It takes guts to know when to step forward and when to step back.
It's definitely not a trait, it's a muscle, and it's definitely a skill we can all develop.
From your experience, what are the consistent challenges you’ve seen when working internally with digital agency teams?
If I had to identify a theme, it's balance. Or you could even characterize it as conflict.
It's the constant struggle between establishing process and SOPs but being reactive to trends or adaptive to changing conditions or challenges.
It's the desire to standardize everything or committing to learning the rules and when to break them.
It's the give and take between client work and internal projects and improvement.
It's the portfolio project vs the ones to help generate revenue.
It's the "should this email have been a meeting" , or "should this meeting have been an email".
An agency that can successfully manage that push and pull by creating a culture where open and meaningful conversations solve these balance issues together should be able to overcome a lot of the major challenges that come their way.
What about when working with clients? Whether a client is easy or high maintenance, what can PMs strive to do better?
Communication, empathy, and trust building.
We work in a human business crafting experiences for other humans. Within agency, clients hold the key to everything but as humans (though some, I'm not so sure about), they have thoughts, opinions, bias, feelings, good days, and bad days. For every successful process or standardization, I'll introduce you to a client that shatters it and will haunt your dreams.
With that in mind, building a relationship based on trust is ultimately the key. It has a halo effect on everything you do, and unlocks all the opportunities an account, project, or a product might have.
How that looks and feels will obviously be different for every client, but communication and empathy is the common thread that enables a good PM to lay down that groundwork.
What factors made some of your projects standout as successes to this day?
I would say understanding what's important to the client and reconciling that with execution needs and the working team and trying to wear all the hats that come with that and never losing the drive to make the effort to gain that understanding.
Project Managers are, particularly ones that play that blended role that includes account management, need to be advocates and protectors, for every stakeholder on the project both internal and external, and their vested interests.
The projects where I've found the most success are ones where there are the strongest personal connections and as an extension, strong advocacy for everyone's needs. That shines through in passion and excitement, deeper collaboration, and project engagement.
How can PMs better navigate ambiguity at the start of a project? Especially if they are not directly involved in the sales process of scoping out initial proposals.
It’s always important to internally have the important conversations to try to move towards a team scoping process at the organizational level if it doesn’t exist in any form - it really can’t be overstated how important this is to ensure the successful transition from biz dev teams to execution. While changing agency or organization-wide processes is a taller task to get PMs more involved in the business development, there are smaller ways to try to insert that expertise into THEIR processes. For example, building strong relationships with the BD and Discovery/Pursuit teams, providing them with a toolkit such as questions, documents, or examples to frame their discussions may help increase the level of detail gathered in these early stages.)
When PMs are left in the lurch like that in lieu of team scoping processes though, it’s important to find other ways to still successfully deliver projects with lots of unknowns.
What this usually means is trying to use the earlier steps or phases (depending on what you’re executing or delivering) to try to make up and build up that knowledge base rapidly. Sometimes I’ve used a mix of formal tools, like pre-kick off questionnaires, more robust or multi-part kick-offs, and stakeholder interviews, or even more informal tactics like meet & greets or socials to gather information.
As project plans get built out, identifying the risk factors based on the known unknowns can help identify required contingency or mitigation plans and how ultimately the timeline and execution comes together. Using ball-parking and expectation setting are also ways to subtly communicate to the client that there is ambiguity that is impacting the project (that they may not have even realized), and create safe buffers for changing budgets and timelines as ambiguity clears over the course of the project.
One thing though is there is a certain degree of ambiguity that PMs (in a number of digital spaces, but not all) should be comfortable with. We all know unknown unknowns are the PM’s dreaded enemy, and in a world where things continue to change faster and faster, the only constant, as they say, is change. A PM’s ability to anticipate it, and the manner in which they deal with it is ultimately what’s most important.
Any key challenges you’ve faced in some of your projects that you remember? What solutions did you implement to allow the project to move forward?
The most difficult challenges I've found are scenarios involving unknowns, particularly on the client side. Some of the projects that have gone the most sideways for me are ones where clients have purposefully withheld information, details, or any contextual pieces that would help our project team deliver something to spec. I think we all know the feeling of working without a brief or needing to "figure it out" or "just having fun with it", but it's even more frustrating when it's done purposelessly. It ends up being a game of chasing a ghost, a spiteful spiteful ghost that lives on your budget, resourcing, and sanity.
Building trust, like I mentioned, is one tactic - identifying allies on the client team and trying to "separate them from the herd" so to speak, sometimes works to create that internal advocate. The other is if you can identify this stakeholder(s) risk early, just mitigating it with contingency plans throughout within your project's scope, resourcing, and budget means.
Any daily good habits that you practice that allow you to keep killin’ it as a project manager?
This is a cop out, and there's already been a lot of digital ink spilt on this, but for sure, self care, specifically, taking time to recharge your sanity, social battery, and creative juices. For me that's hockey, seeing friends, and enjoying a good craft beer.
On the day to day, making sure to find the things in your job that give your energy and making sure there are enough of those things in your day or your week. It's like sleep debt. You can get by a few weeks or months depriving yourself of the things where you feel most empowered or most energized, but you can't put it off forever, or maybe you're in the wrong role.
What causes burn-out and performance loss for you?
For me, as a project manager and team leader, I have a habit of taking too much on emotionally. Every job or project should carry a bit of healthy stress or nervousness to create that level of urgency, but it's easy to let a lot of that pile up, especially if things start to go wrong or challenges start to build up.
Like I mentioned earlier Project Managers are taught to be leaders and protectors of the team, the timeline, the budget, the scope, and I usually start to burn out when there's too much to protect, and not enough shields to go around.
Ultimately, having strong relationships with the team and finding release valves through delegation, calls for help, or even straight up venting is a big step in the right direction for me to start to get back to steady state.
Do you see any trends or shifts in how Project Management is approached today v. 5 years ago?
I think we've started to see a deeper interest and growing respect for the Project Manager practice and profession, particularly in digital. As digital becomes more of a common trade and more folks transition into the space from school or other career paths, they bring in new perspectives and ideas from their own lived experiences to how things can and should be done to continue to evolve the discipline, which I think is key to moving project management forward as a whole.
The broader re-definition and delineation between project manager and producer as well, which I think had lent itself to PM's to having even higher impact with the teams and organizations that trust and give them the responsibility and autonomy to lead the team and project, which is awesome.
