Category: Project Management

Why you should (or not) add a PM to your investigative project

Why add a PM to your project? Or when not to? That’s the question…

Although most research projects are carried out with a small team of two to four journalists, the number of projects that are inter-regional, international and / or multidisciplinary is growing [The state of collaborative journalism 2020]. More and more subjects are cross-border because they involve international money flows, large data sets are found or specialists are required. But topics in a city also have more impact if they play the same role in other cities. It gives an extra dimension and appeals to a larger audience. Especially when it comes to topics that have a national character, such as public transport or healthcare. In those cases you can grow as a team up to ten, twenty or more people. Who is going to manage that project?

Big boys

Organisations like ICIJ (International Consortium of Investigative Journalists), OCCRP (Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project) and Investigate Europe never started their first project with “Oh, let’s hire a project manager.”. As in business, most organisations, which are not used to setting up large projects, do not turn to a PM to prepare and execute the project professionally. Growing companies start their projects with small teams, in which someone takes the lead in a natural way or takes charge of the implementation and delivery from a self-evident role within the team. As customers become more important and demanding, the project teams grow and so does the added value of a person with a specific role that is solely concerned with managing the project.

Sometimes a company becomes so big and the projects are so numerous that there is an excess of managing people and the role is not so much of added value, but standard and sometimes becomes without content or value. The trick is to keep thinking whether this specific project really needs a coordinating role with this specific team.

When you are confronted with a project that is just a little too big to handle as you are used to, this can prompt you to consider someone with the role of being responsible for things like meetings, action lists, document management etc. It seems logical to choose someone within the team to take on these tasks, but the result may be that the person gets into a conflicting situation: at the same time contributing to the research (and having their own opinion) and being the coordinator of the team. This can lead to situations where either the role of coordinator is compromised or the role of investigative journalist.

To PM or not to PM

Success stories of teams of investigative journalists can certainly be found where someone both contributes to the investigation and takes on the coordinating tasks. This is mainly in small organisations where projects are clear and the team is not too large or complex. However, for larger teams or more complex journalistic projects, a coordinator best be appointed. This is certainly the case when many people from all corners of Europe, for example, work together on a subject.

How to decide whether you want to name someone in the team the coordinator or add a project manager to your team? It is a hard question, since it depends on the complexity and size of your team, skills and capacity of team members. If you decide to let someone within the team of journalists pick up tasks as planning, stakeholder management, alignment with outlets etc does this person have the right skills and experience? Will this role interfere with other roles this person will have within the team? For example, can the coordinator or project manager stand firm if one of the journalists isn’t delivering? Or is this persons opinion going to get in the way of being a neutral party within the team?

If the team is large enough and budgets are put together, figure out how much time you would need to organise and put that next to the investment a team member would have to make, at the expense of research. Then add those hours to the budget request, so you can hire someone for a few hours a week or month to outsource those tasks to someone who can do it efficiently and effectively. This way everyone is maximising her or his capacities!

Tip: if you add the time and costs of a PM you think you need executing your project, funding parties will agree to pay for that part of coordination of the team. It will give assurance that journalists will be focused, the coordination is in good hands and deadlines will be managed. All team members can focus on what they do best.
For more information and some examples:

Elisa Simantke (Investigate Europe) is the editorial coordinator of Investigate Europe. You can watch an interview by Dóra Diseri (n-ost) with her on Facebook 3rd of June 2020 about best practices and case studies of her multinational team. Discussion about the roles and challenges of collaborative journalism amid the coronavirus pandemic and best practices of her cross-border editorial team. Investigate Europe is a team of experienced journalists from nine European countries who are working as a multinational team and tackling the usual national bias by sharing, merging and crosschecking facts.. (Facebook n-ost)

Marina Walker Guevara might be the best known Project Manager in Investigative Journalism. She was the deputy director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, an independent network of reporters who work together on global stories. Walker Guevara has managed some of journalism’s most consequential investigations on global corruption, including the Panama Papers, which involved more than 370 reporters in 76 countries and shook governments and businesses across the world. Other investigations include Swiss Leaks, Luxembourg Leaks and Offshore Leaks.  Here is an interview with her about the Panama Papers, a changing world for journalism and her role in this investigation.

“We have realized over the years that the old model, with the lonely wolf, investigative reporting, haunting information andd scoping others is no match to the challenges of the world we have today.”

Marina Walker Guevara

What is a Project Manager doing in Investigative Journalism?

What is a project? And what is a Project Manager doing?

We have to start with another question: What is a project? It looks like kicking in an open door, but it seems appropriate to agree on what a project is and what is not. A project is a set of tasks with a specific budget, timeframe, goal, people, deadline and result. By appointing people who form the team, a deadline and a budget to realize the project, you step outside regular work. It can be a number of hours per week that someone spends on research and publication or full-time. The condition is that the regular work must not hinder the project. That is why you make clear agreements with the team, managers, client and the person who ensures that these agreements are met: the Project Manager (PM).

The PM

The Project Manager is not so much the one who determines what the project is about or how the research should go, but is more of a facilitator who ensures that agreements are kept and that the team receives timely and appropriate support in their work. This is a standard way of working in the business world and is not very different in journalism. Of course, the PM can ask sharp questions, ensure that quality is guaranteed and fact-checking takes place. But this is also part of that facilitating role. Especially when it concerns a cross-border project or when different editorial teams are involved, journalists each have their own editor-in-chief to coordinate the publications.

Managing investigative journalism projects can be more daunting than the reporting, and with increasing amounts of data and even cross-border collaborations, it can make or break the story.

Adiel Kaplan, 26-09-2016

ICIJ received more than 260 gigabytes of useful data across four major databases plus half a million text, PDF, spreadsheet, image and web files. After the initial analysis, a team of 86 investigative journalists from 46 countries worked on one of the largest cross-border investigative partnerships in the history of journalism. This project would never have been possible without collaborative research. But in addition to the extensive team of journalists, programmers and data analysts and project managers also formed the core of this massive project. Without them no Panama Paper reports!

Product Manager

Tanya Pampalone wrote an article for GIJN in 2017 about the role of Product Managers in journalism. She quotes Professor Cindy Royal, who in 2015 already stated that newsrooms are starting to learn that the role of Product Manager is exactly the role newsrooms didn’t know they’d been missing. Of course it is possible to shrug off the role as “tech support”. Stimulating the building of digital products that support journalism involves so much more than just facilitating stories, it is as much journalism as traditional stories, Royal says. Pampalone adds, “As investigative journalists increasingly use complex data, collaboration platforms and interactive technology, the importance of working with a product manager will only increase.”

Royal emphasizes the difference between a product and a project manager: “Sometimes the terms project and product management are used interchangeably. But they are different roles, even if they are handled, in some manner, by the same person. Project management is specifically focused on delivering project functionality – features, scheduling their execution, and making sure a timeline is adhered to. Product management encompasses the broader strategic implications of the entire digital product.”

Royal believes that this role, Product Manager, should be taught in journalism school and not in the tech department. If that’s true (and I think so), why not also add the Project Management role to the journalism school curriculum? If a product manager is crucial in analyzing data, creating platforms and creating apps so that investigative journalism can grow and grow stronger, why not invest in project managers who (together with the product manager) ensure that the best technology is used and journalists can flourish and maximize their talent in an environment fully equipped to support them.

Editors

Since editors have been the first choice to take on managing projects for decades, changing habits can be tricky. But these hard-working editors don’t always have the right skills or experience to perform such assignments properly, Royal explains. It comes down to software development, but with a strong emphasis on content. This does not apply to the role of Project Manager. Editors do not logically have the skills to manage projects, but Project Managers do not have to migle in content per se. may be I need to explain.

“I sometimes think that the words journalism and management said together can be seen as an oxymoron. We manage chaos.”

Walter Robinson, editor-at-large at The Boston Globe, who spoke at the Uncovering Asia 2016 conference in Nepal
Discussion

In Project Managent there is a discussion about whether you should have extensive knowledge in the area where you manage your projects or not. I don’t think it’s necessary, but it certainly helps. The project manager is not so much directive, but facilitates specialists who must inform the PM about what is important and what is not. A PM must be able to manage any project, regardless of the scope. Having said that, I do believe that a PM in journalism should have knowledge of journalistic processes and understand how newspaper and television editors work. It is therefore logical to add this subject to journalistic education and not the other way around.

What should a journalist know about managing projects? And what does the management of newsrooms need to know about project managers? How can an editor be trained to be a good project manager within the editorial team? Lots of tips and tricks are shared online and at conferences, but I think it’s time to professionalize this specific role for each journalism project. Whether it is a large or small project: make use of the available knowledge, experience and skills! Train your people in Project Management to become a professional.

If you are not done reading about this subject yet: