Planning for Strategic Growth? Q&A with Major Publisher

Johannes Leistner is the portfolio manager at FVW Mediengruppe, the leading German publishing house for business to business tourism for more than 40 years. He is using Daptiv to keep everyone on track as FVW implements a new strategic growth plan. We caught up with Johannes to learn more about the challenges he’s dealt with in starting up a project and portfolio management program from scratch.

• MTWblog: What type of project management work were you doing prior to starting with FVW Mediengruppe? How is it different from what you are doing now?

Prior to my engagement for FVW Mediengruppe, I was working as a project manager for Opodo.de, an online travel agency and prior to that, AOL Travel. Unlike my work now, we didn’t use a collaborative software solution for our project work. Everything was handled using Word documents or Excel sheets. The biggest difference to my prior work is that I did the project management myself, in contrast to my work now, in which I have to train and manage the project managers.

• MTWblog: What types of initiatives and projects do you handle at FVW Mediengruppe?

We have to manage various types of projects. They range from initiatives with a runtime of two weeks and only three people involved (i.e. this could be a special online marketing campaign) up to long term projects with significant budgets (i.e. launching a new content management system for the editorial department). From time to time we also follow “subjects” which we would consider day-to-day work focused on optimization opportunities.

• MTWblog: For FVW Mediengruppe, how has a strategic growth initiative changed the way the company does project management?

This is an easy question to answer: the growth initiative was the reason that FVW Mediengruppe started doing project management in the first place. To explain this, I have to tell you the background story. The FVW Mediengruppe is a well established publishing house for print magazines and books in the b2b tourism market. They have been (and still are) the market leader in Germany for over 40 years now. There was no need for project management since they knew what they were doing. The growth initiative’s target is bringing all of the company’s products online and adding valuable features for our customers. So suddenly they were facing a huge bunch of new projects in a field in which the company had no expertise. This was the point where we started to use project management. And of course this had to start from scratch, since there were no trained or experienced project managers on staff.

• MTWblog: What are the most challenging aspects of your job?

Having read the above you might already imagine what the challenging aspects are. I joined the company in the beginning of 2009 at the point where they realized they would need professional project management. Back then they had already started the online growth initiative and created a long long list of projects. In my role as a portfolio manager I not only have to make sure the company does the right projects but I also have to train the project managers, colleagues which had no prior project management experience. This training aspect is the most challenging part of my job, also because I have to deal with colleagues from the age of 25 to 55.

• MTWblog: What are some generational differences you’ve run across when working with a wide range of ages at FVW Mediengruppe? How have you dealt with that?

The biggest issues when working with a wide ranges of ages is that you cannot simply tell the older group to use a certain tool or to follow a defined project workflow and expect them to do it. They have to be convinced that this is the best solution for them, they want to know more details and the system has to prove itself quickly. In contrast, the younger half of this group will simply accept new tools without complaints and will simply use them. The older half definitely needs more support and convincing. I know this is not a big news, this is common sense. But often one tends to forget about the simple things…

• MTWblog: How do you personally present the concept of project management to colleagues who have never been exposed to it before?

I always use simple examples to present the project management process, such as “how to build a house,” which is comprehensible for everyone. I think everybody naturally uses project management concepts, though on a very basic level in most cases, and once you manage to address this level it usually works to make them understand.

Patience! There is no way of setting up a project management culture over night – of course this is common sense, but sometimes you wish it would work at least in 3 months. Many times this year I came back to the point that we need patience if we want to come up with a sustainable PM culture.

My simple advice is: go and use it, as this will be the future for tools and software in general! And as a part of the concept of “lifelong learning” you always have to adapt yourself to new tools and software.

I would like to read more best practise examples about how to introduce an on-demand project management tool (such as Daptiv) and project management standards, into companies who haven’t worked with PM before. But anyway, you are doing a great job with this blog! Congratulations!

Johannes Leistner is the portfolio manager at FVW Mediengruppe, the leading German publishing house for business to business tourism for more than 40 years. Before FVW, he was a project manager at Opodo.de, an online travel agency and prior to that, AOL travel. He is also passionate about wedding and travel photography; visit his blog at www.williwieberg.de or follow him on Twitter.