Here is another excerpt from my in-progress 'What is RevOps?' book, the third part of the chapter about the tools principle in RevOps, related to software and related topics for success. It's currently chapter 5 in the book, after chapters about the definition(s) of RevOps, and the more important principles of people and process.
This blog focuses on the second research question in this portion of the chapter, asked to 35+ experts:
Does RevOps own project management tools? Would you consider project management tools part of the RevOps stack?
The previous blogs answered the question:
Disclaimer for book draft excerpts:
From what you’ve read so far about processes, change management, and other topics about the complex cross-functional, long-term projects in RevOps, it’s safe to say that project management is a big part of RevOps. But what about aligning projects, or work in general, across the revenue teams and company? Usually, this work involves a project management tool. Should this be one of the tools that RevOps manages, since project management is such a big part of the role?
I asked the experts if they would consider project management tools part of the RevOps stack, and the responses were:
You can see these answers were more divided compared to some of the previous questions. Note that some people may be referring to owning the area of project management, and some refer to using the tools of project management, depending on how they wanted to discuss it.
As usual with these research questions, the size and structure of the company played a part in the answers. For larger companies, the project management tools may be owned by a department that covers the whole company and not just the revenue teams. A common theme was that a companywide system and company-wide ownership would be ideal, no matter who owns it. Not just having project management for go-to-market teams. Everyone needs project management.
In general, many of the answers fell into the following topics: Click to scroll down to read:
One interesting ‘yes’ answer that sets the stage was from Dana Therrien, whom you may remember as the ‘godfather of RevOps’ from the history of RevOps chapter. Dana responded, “Well, I created the sales operations sunburst model at SiriousDecisions with another guy called Steve Silver. And it was really just wedges of accountabilities that fell underneath sales operations at that time. And project management was was a major wedge, a major accountability and sales operations. And now that translates into revenue operations.”
And Gianluca Pucacco, Revenue Operations at Stripe, said “I have had project management as part of RevOps functions for the past 15 years.”
Many of the responses stressed the importance of alignment and transparency about what the revenue teams were working on, which requires good project management and project management tools.
Alana Zimmer, Senior Manager of Customer Ops at GoSite, said, “Coming back to people, processes, and systems, if you don't know what people are working on, you can't be aligned and move forward as a well-oiled machine.”
Melanie Foreman, Revenue Operations Manager at Slack, said, “Absolutely. I think it's easily the most important thing, because there's always so much to do, and if you can't begin projects strategically, [then] they're almost dead from the beginning. I think because we have such a granular view of processes and how long it takes to get from point A to point B, project management is the biggest tool that's helped me help build successful teams.”
Alison Elworthy, Head of RevOps at HubSpot, said, “Yes. Project management is a core element of RevOps because it helps you stay aligned as a team. We have a saying at HubSpot: alignment eats strategy for breakfast. Misalignment across teams, the kind that causes friction, can throw off even the best strategies and get in the way of delivering an excellent customer experience. Project management strategies and tools help streamline work and promote this important alignment.“
Crissy Saunders, Co-Founder and Principal Consultant at CS2 Marketing, said, “You know, are they using it in a way where you can get insight into what projects are being used… JIRA, that's a good one. But I do think that it's super useful, especially when there's a RevOps function, to have. Even if it's like different boards, or different parts of the function, having kind of one centralized project management tool is great to keep everyone aligned and get insights into what's going on.”
Since efficiency and improvements, especially related to resources such as time, are a big part of RevOps, some experts said it could make sense that the tools used to track these variables are owned by RevOps.
Mike Rizzo, Manager of Community and Loyalty Programs at Mavenlink and founder of the MO Pros community, said, “I think where RevOps should be involved is if a tool like Mavenlink was involved, where you're looking at your resources and the profitability of your business. In a services business for example, you're trying to understand how your resources are being over underutilized and how that transfers down into your revenue and your pipelines your projections. That's where our RevOps probably makes sense to own at least some portion of that, and make sure that it's deployed and implemented appropriately so that it ties back to the bottom line. But not every tool does that, you can't go sign up for Basecamp and see your burn rates and your bill rates and all that stuff or Asana.”
Another common theme was to make sure project management tools weren’t thought of as the largest part of RevOps, the main tool, or paint RevOps as the IT or support department.
Virinchi Duvvuri, Senior VP of Sales and Revenue Operations at UST Global, said, “It’s such a small portion of it. When I think about the tech stack for RevOps, it's really about enabling that entire chain from lead to close.”
Jerry Bonura, Senior Principal at TwentyPine, said, “As long as they're not viewed as the IT team. I think there's always support things that need to be done from users like, ‘Oh my god, I can't get this report’ or, ‘I want this fix in that.’ I think having a tool to manage the support requests and approach everything [is important.]”
An anonymous tech executive said, “It's a really good question. When I read it, I had a visceral reaction at first, because most project management tools tend to be too simple for really complicated projects or plans, then they're too hard for mere mortals to understand, or there's just too many cooks in the kitchen. They serve a really special, important purpose but back to my simplicity comment earlier, you really need to think about [what] you need in one. To be hypocritical, I'm gonna say you should absolutely have one. But it should be a supporting tool, not a leading tool.”
As project management is a large part of a RevOps team's own work, it makes sense that several experts clarified they would definitely own the tools for themselves.
For example, Sylvain Guiliani, Head of Growth at Census, said yes, as a productivity tool for the RevOps team.
Jenna Hanington, VP Revenue Operations at Experity, said, “This would be situational, in my opinion, based on how many teams are using the project management tools and what type of maintenance they require. Many teams can manage their own project management system on their own.”
Jeff Ignacio, Head of Revenue and Growth Operations at UpKeep, said, “ Yes. Now, they may not be vertical, it might be a horizontal [tool] and a lot of other teams use them. I use a couple of tools myself. I found great success using Asana. I've also used Monday.com in the past. A pretty valuable tool for diagrams and visual workflows I've been using Miro. I know Mural is a competitor...And Lucidchart is an oldie but goodie, folks have found great success using that as well.”
Another answer that depended on company size and structure was if there were other operations teams besides RevOps since project management is a big responsibility of any kind of operations. For example, Nicole Pereira, Founder and CEO at Remotish, said, “I wouldn't say that it's unique to RevOps. I think it's just inherent to operations.”
Spencer Parikh, founder of ioAudio, said, “I got to thinking, who should own it? Who should own the project management system that affects every function of the company? I couldn't come up with the answer. I think maybe the operations team may own it.”
In our conversation, I explained that my company had clients who either don't use anything for project management, or every single person uses a different tool, and none of the tools talk to each other. How do you see what's going on across the whole company at one time?
Spencer replied, “So that's actually a great use case for RevOps. If it is the things that are affecting driving revenue and growth then maybe a portion of it maybe.”
Hilary Headlee, Head of Global Sales Ops and Enablement at Zoom, said, “Change management and project management are close cousins...I think because we are primarily held to execution and execution needs a plan and a plan needs a good person managing it. I think it is definitely a part of that, and that's where we split our tech stack into three key buckets. We put them into what's purely back office like LeanData that runs our operations business, then what is rep facing and then what's a hybrid one. So like Clari plays a hybrid role where it's not only rep and manager facing but we extract and use a lot of our data there for forecasting. Asana would be in the back office. I look at our tech stack again not just as rep facing but also what do we need to run a healthy business. Zoom currently doesn't employ project managers. Our CEO doesn't believe in project management or project managers, so we're all kind of project managers, so we fought really hard for a tool like Asana to come and help us so we could do a better job.”
The transparent view of everything the company is working on is a great benefit to using project management tools. But who needs to view everything? Everyone in the RevOps department? Only the RevOps leader? Only department leaders? Who should have what permissions in the tool?
Maggie Butler, Senior Solutions Marketing Manager, Operations at HubSpot, said, “I would say that project management as a tool is part of the stack. I also think that being a RevOps professional or leader means that you have project management skills.”
During this part of the interview, I explained that this question was included in the interviews because I haven't seen it asked before. And I thought there may be a lot of similarities to a company not having RevOps as a company not having project management across the company to see what's everyone's working on, to prevent duplicating efforts. Even internally at the agency, you can see if one client is trying to solve the same problem as another client and make sure those team members talk to each other instead of spending the same amount of time solving the problems separately.
Maggie then brought up another point many experts discussed about different people or different teams wanting to see the project information in different ways, and some roles may not need to see all the company’s information since it could be distracting. ”But that makes you think of something which is, do those two clients want to look at it in the same way? One of the things that we think about internally is that JIRA is very easily understood by folks who are a little bit more technical, maybe folks who have been working in operations before, folks who might even be familiar with Agile or Scrum. But when you put it in front of a sales rep, they're like, What is this?’ …I do think that in communication, project management sometimes requires a couple different lenses. And sometimes that can be a hindrance when it comes to the tools,” Maggie said.
We then chatted about how maybe management has access to the whole company in the project management system, but perhaps not every individual has viewing permissions for everything.
Lauren Nickels, Director of GTM Operations at Blackline, said yes and talked about how project management tools and opinions can bevery disjointed. “It almost feels very personal to people. I didn't expect so much passion to come from people using certain project management platforms… I think that the challenge with project management platforms is it's still very decentralized. And I think it's going to be, because the needs of different groups.”
We chatted about how people either have never thought about this before, or are very passionate one way or the other.
Lauren continued, “I have a lot of Wrike champions on my side [now]. They're the teams that are getting very excited now that they can see what what it can do. And I do hope to share it with some of the other groups [in the company]. I could just see all sorts of things being adopted in finance instead of our purchasing, [such as] instead of a PDF. Why am I using a PDF? … I can build you an online form in two seconds. People could be filling it out and it goes everywhere and assigns tasks. I have to keep myself in check on not increasing my own scope and stay focused on marketing first, but I do have dreams or fantasies about spreading the love across the organization.”
Adam Tesan, CRO at Chargebee, said no, but RevOps had better be using these tools. “Regardless of what size you are, because there's a lot of projects, especially the ones that are what I call big rocks that are gonna significantly move the needle for the business are cross-functional in nature. And so you want to use a project management tool that the whole organization uses not just the revenue organization. And there are a bunch of different tools like your business intelligence (BI) tool; you should be using a corporate-wide BI tool. There's a bunch of tools like that, that I think are more corporate than the RevOps.”
Matthew Solomon, Sales Operations Manager at Mainsail Partners, said, “RevOps should use project management tools (we use Monday.com) but I don’t believe they should be owners of that internal technology.”
Similarly, Nicole Smith, Revenue Operations Consultant at Winning By Design, answered, "I do not. I think RevOps could use those but I think it’s a tool that could or should be used across the organization as a whole and therefore should be owned by an IT team.”
Lorena Morales, VP of Marketing at Go Nimbly, said not necessarily since, “The tools or is that more of a subculture thing that should be embedded in the entire [company]….because that's the only way to secure transparency on what everyone is doing, all the way from the C level (if it's possible) to the bottom of the organization...it should be a company thing where everyone is responsible.”
Lorena continued, “If you kind of ingrain it in the culture, you're going to start to realize… as a consultancy, our most valuable asset is time. So everything in our [project management system] is not only what we deliver to the client, but all things internally. So when you talk about project management tools, we are really, really good at managing our time with this tool…thanks to these tools, for example, I realized that one week, when the pandemic started, I was overworking like crazy. And my team was able to see that as well. So I didn't have to justify like, ‘Hey guys, I need to take one day off because I am very close to burnout.’ So that's also that's why I'm telling you that it needs to be part of the culture. With us, it is especially important because we also need to know exactly how many hours we're delivering to our clients, and what workstreams are being worked in, in which timelines.”
Andy Mowat, Vice President Growth Marketing & GTM Operations at Culture Amp, said, “RevOps focuses on GTM systems that manage customer data. Project management tools should be standardized company-wide.”
Mallory Lee, Senior Director, Operations at Terminus, has a slightly different response and mentioned different teams owning vs. supporting the tools. She said, “This is owned by our onboarding team and supported by us.“
Julia Herman, VP Head of Global Sales Operations at ABBYY, said, “I think, again, ideally, this is something that you manage as a company. So I would love a project management tool to be used company-wide, because sales operations is so ingrained in every department that we don't want to be using our own project management, or we really need to make sure [if] something that's being used by us also… has access from finance to product to sales [to use it]. So ideally, there should be a company wide tool.”
Rosalyn Santa Elena, Head of Revenue Operations at Clari, said, “Yes and no. I think of some of the project management tools as we would be a user, but it may not only be isolated to the revenue team. Something like, if you think about a document manager, a DocuSign or PandaDoc or whatever you're using for signatures. That might be something that the sales team or revenue team would utilize or leverage, but we wouldn't be the only users. It's just like potentially a training tool or like Zoom, a video conferencing tool, it would be more of a corporate tool where multiple departments might be using it. I can see sort of the project management type of tool being similar… Depending on who the users are, I think whenever it's the revenue team [as the users of the tools] that seems to fall into the bucket of, ‘Okay, RevOps should manage that because the users are sales,’ but that may not necessarily be the right team to manage it.”
So you can see the divided opinions on the owners of project management tools, and likely project management itself as a responsibility, but in general, the majority agreed RevOps should definitely be using project management tools. And ideally, the entire company is using them for efficiency, transparency, and cross-functional alignment. If it is a larger company with an IT department that owns technology across the company, not just for the revenue teams, then IT may be a better owner of project management tools if the amount of maintenance and individual needs of the departments vary significantly.
Thank you to all the experts for their thoughts!
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