Project Manager

mStoner is seeking a project manager (PM) to work with our creative team. The Creative PM will be based in our Chicago office and report to the Senior Creative Director with a dotted line to the project management office.

Primary duties:

• Creates and manages projects within Workamajig, our core operational software.
• This includes creating timelines and budgets, managing tasks and timelines on an ongoing basis, monitoring time and expense transactions, coordinating freelancer/subcontractor purchase orders, and maintaining accurate billing milestone dates and amounts.
• Optimizes workload and assignments across the Creative team, coordinating closely with designers, UI developers and quality assurance team members.
• Participates in company resource planning process and ensures creative assignments are properly setup as allocations in Workamajig (including subcontractor assignments).
• Analyzes longer-term project demand, identifying staffing needs in advance.
• Participates in monthly revenue recognition process, which is based on percent complete accounting.
• Understands the status of tasks within creative projects in terms of actual hours worked and remaining hours to complete.
• Proactively and preemptively flags projects that are over-budget and participates in developing plans to address budget overages.
• Where appropriate, helps designers complete deliverables for clients, including quality review.
• Over time, learns and grows within the creative team, becoming versatile and able to help with a variety of design production tasks in addition to the core project management duties.
• Coordinates with strategy and technology project managers and team members.
• Ensures a smooth handoff from strategy to the creative phase; and from the creative phase to technology.
• While the project manager has some direct interaction with our clients, this is not the focus of the role.
• Strategists own the accounts and the client relationships.
• The focus of the creative project manager role is to enable and support the creative team and to ensure our work is delivered with high quality and operational / financial excellence.

Criteria:

• 2-5 years prior experience in project management and/or professional services consulting. Prior experience with higher education, digital, communication, or marketing strategy projects, UI/UX testing, HTML, Adobe creative suite, Invision or Workamajig is a plus.
• Experience working directly with designers or creative team and front end developers.
• Excellent communication, collaboration and interpersonal skills. Comfortable communicating with people at a variety of levels and can effectively manage across and up. Able to foster relationships and work closely with teammates who are not in the same physical location.
• Attention to detail and an eye for quality.
• Someone who takes initiative and places a high value on getting things done. Personally organized and provides organization and structure for other team members as needed.
• Comfortable working in a fluid environment; brings clarity to ambiguous or unstructured situations and synthesizes disparate information into cohesive plans.
• Ability to handle multiple projects simultaneously as well as competing deadlines and priorities.
• Comfort and familiarity with basic finance and accounting. Understands and appreciates the financial and operational side of the business and is comfortable analyzing budgets, profit margins and other quantitative metrics.
• Embodies curiosity and an interest in learning new things and growing as a professional.
• Contributes positively to the team dynamic, employs a positive attitude and outlook toward our work.