The Project Team: Who Does What?
posted 02/16/08
Okay, so here’s an outline of the types of Barbarians that may (or may not) be assigned to your project. Every job is different, of course, and team size varies from 1 to 15 or so. But they generally fall into these roles. Now, bear in mind, these are the roles people play on the project, not necessarily their title. We have many people @ the company whose title is “Art Director,” for example, but you won’t see that on the list below. Ditto “Senior Writer,” and “Interactive Designer.” Who plays what role varies dramatically by project – we put the right people into the right role for the job, regardless of their title. Though of course the “Engagement Partner” is usually a partner. You get the idea. Anyway, the roles on a project include:
- Senior Producer/Producer: A producer manages the project day to day, and gets it done. They make sure everything’s done on time and on budget, and they manage scope. They’re the ones that tell you when things will be done, and they’re the ones that coordinate internally, making sure that we get things done. They are usually involved from the new biz phase on, and have helped scope and architect the SOW, though there are times where one producer scopes a job and another one runs it. They’re the person you’ll get to know and love, and are responsible for pretty much everything on your project. A senior producer is, well, a more experienced producer who costs more. We tend to use these on complex projects, especially on complex projects that are with first time clients and people don’t know each other as well yet. This gives all an extra layer of protection as we learn to rock the shack.
- Assistant Producer: Sometimes, on very large projects, we assign an assistant producer who, well, assists the producer. This is common on projects that have weekly meetings, require detailed meeting notes, or perhaps the coordination of a million different parties (agencies, clients, technical agencies, hosting companies, other stakeholders, etc. )
- Client Service Executive: This is the person who will make sure everything’s groovy. They’re the one person on the team that is there for ALL of your company’s projects, while everyone else might be there for just one. They are the ones you go to when you have a concern, a complaint or a compliment, though you can go to other people if you have compliments, that’s fine. They’re the one who can cut deals and speed things up and all that jazz – all that “business relationship” stuff that the producer may not care about because they’re busy focusing on getting the thing done. They’re also the one you probably want to chat with regarding any new projects you have – they’re like your permanent Barbarian buddy. Sometimes, though not always, this is a partner.
- Engagement Partner: This is just what it sounds like. The partner at the Barbarian Group who is the “buck stops here” designee. The one of four big kahunas who will keep an eye on your project and is the ultimate person, here at the company, everyone needs to answer to on the project. Most likely, you originally met them at a bar, on a yacht, or at an awards show. That’s just how they roll.
- Creative Director: This is the ultimate creative authority, on our end, of course, on the project. It’s sorta like a creative director at an agency, but they may not be super hands on. It’s part of our whole process of having multiple people look at a project and make sure everything’s as awesome as it can be. Normally, they’ll be in key meetings and presentations, but generally speaking, they are pretty hands off on the client side, and leave most of the responsibility to the:
- Creative Lead: This is the person at our company who is the chief creative stakeholder. The person with the idea. The one with the vision. The one whose job it is to make sure this project can be all it can be. They are the real star of the project. It’s their baby, really. On our end, that is. I mean, you guys are the real stars, of course. Of course.
Designer: The person on the team who is responsible for the visual graphic design on the project. You get the idea. - Copywriter: The copywriter is the person on the project who is responsible for the written communication on the project. Now, we’ve already discussed our views on copy, but the important thing to keep in mind is that we find in many situations we find it necessary to include a copywriter on a project even if you have one, in order to write all the copy for the web that you may not have thought of. Like “click here,” or “please select up to three items from the list at left. Command-click to select multiple items.” Do you really want your rock star creative copywriter writing that sort of stuff? No, neither do we.
- Flash Programmer: The Flash programmer, well, programs the Flash. I suppose it’s worth mentioning here that we don’t divide our flash programmers between “animation” and “coding” programmers. We only hire prodigies who can do both really well. It’s probably the number one reason our company isn’t 200 people, other than the fact that that seems kinda lame. They are some of the best in the world at what they do, and generally their opinions should be trusted, though occasionally candy makes them a bit less intractable.
- Interaction & Game Designers: If your project includes the need for some seriously challenging interaction design, or requires game design, we may assign one of these specialists to the team. They usually come from within our ranks, though in very specific circumstances, we may work with a vendor.
- Information Architect: The Information Architect is responsible for, well, the information architecture. I think we covered the basics of this up in the interactive production tutorial, but they’re the ones that make the sitemaps and wireframes. They think about it all a lot, too, they’re not just drawing pretty line drawings. They are smart as whips and have enormous experience knowing how to present information in manageable manners (alliteration!) for the end user.
- Technical Director: The Technical Overseer is the head honcho on the project from a technical point of view. They are the counterpart to the Creative Overseer. They, too, leave most of the responsibility to the:
- Technical Lead: This is the hands on, day-to-day, technical go-to person on the project. The one who’s running the show on the backend.
- Senior Developer/Developer: This is a member of the technical team who does application and backend development on your project. Often the technical lead and the developer are one and the same. On larger projects, there may be multiple developers under one technical lead.
- HTML/CSS/Markup Coder: Slightly different from application development is markup. Markup is code that goes on the client side of your web experience – mainly consisting of HTML or CSS, though could also include, perhaps, Javascript (not really a markup language, but you know. Whatever).
- 3D/Maya Artist: A person who does 3D work for jobs that require it. Fiendishly specialized and complicated, with expensive software. For some reason these people seem to enjoy paintball a lot. And hang gliding. We’re not sure what the deal is.
- Digital Video Specialist: Digital editing, digital chopping up, motion graphics, title design. We do it all. We got awesome people to do it. And this is what their name is when they’re on the project and what we list them under on the pricing. Now you know.
- Video Technical Director: This is the person on the team in charge of the technical aspects of a video shoot. There are technical issues for the internet, for Flash, for computers, that are different than for your television. Frame Rates might be different. Alpha Channels may need to be preserved. You might even have a weird aspect ratio where the video is tall and skinny. It’s our experience that most ad art directors, and even most video directors and production houses haven’t had a lot of experience with this stuff, so we have this team member on the set to help with those issues.
