Fake it ’til’ you make it . . . as a traffic manager
Tamra Hughes from communications and technology company Vivid Group on how she links people and projects.
What exactly does a traffic manager do?
On my left I have people who ‘need stuff done’ and on my right I have people who ‘do stuff’. I sit in the middle and connect the two. In a nutshell, it’s about regulating the flow of work between the accounts team that work directly with clients and everyone else in the agency. It’s about reacting to the here and now while planning many months into the future. To do this effectively I need to start by extracting the key bits of information from the people who ‘need stuff done’ and marry that to the people who ‘do stuff’. I then translate the task for a range of audiences – technical, design, project managers. All this while meeting our clients’ expectation of timing.
Describe a typical day on the job.
In essence I manage the web production ‘machine’. I start the day with all the parts aligned, all the team know what they are working on for the day. As the cogs start turning – people call in sick, project details change, urgent requests are made – the parts are no longer aligned. A large part of the day is spent realigning existing resources to meet promised deadlines and then managing new incoming requests to ensure that the parts are aligned again for tomorrow, the next day and months into the future.
What is the greatest challenge of your role?
In my world, people are boxes and projects are colour. Most days I just don’t have enough boxes to apply all the colours to.
Who are the most important people to know?
Every member of the team is equally important. Without them the machine just doesn’t work to the best of its ability. A good traffic manager can understand exactly where the accounts team are coming from (and the pressures on them from the client side) and also the realities of what’s possible in terms of technology and creative development. At Vivid we have a mix of creative and technology across social, mobile, web, intranets, extranets and so on, so you need to know your channels. It’s definitely a juggling act at times.
Is there any lingo or terminology we need to know?
I need to know how to speak ‘designer’, ‘developer’ and ‘client’ and each comes with its own dictionary. UAT, UI versus IA, RGB versus CMYK, HTML versus CSS, CRM versus CMS. ABC etc.
What advice would you give someone wanting to get into this line of work?
Get your hands dirty at the coalface. To be able to manage the moving parts effectively you need to understand how they work and the dependencies they have on each other. You need to be mercury with a teflon coating so you can manage change fluidly without absorbing natural resistance or frustrations along the way.
What’s the best part about your job?
There’s rarely a dull moment.
Tamra Hughes is a production manager at Vivid Group.
- This article first appeared in Encore magazine. Download the iPad edition, now free.
