There are several traits that a translation project manager should have. These certainly include stress management, multi-tasking, perseverance, resilience and decision making, among others. But don’t get me wrong: you can still be a PM if you don’t have all these characteristics. Just give it time, and the job will kindly provide them to you, free of charge.
The job
Project management involves various activities throughout the day. These activities may vary from company to company, but usually include:
- Reading and classifying source texts
- Considering target audiences
- Preparing documents for translation
- Assigning linguists to specific tasks (translation, proofreading, QA, etc.)
- Communication with clients
Sometimes, the job is pretty cool! You get an easy Word document in a nice subject area with a simple target audience. You know exactly the right people for the job and in the end the client is happy with the files you deliver.
Of course, you usually have more than just one project. You may have 10 or 15 and they will probably be very different from each other. So, you will need somewhere to write down all the delivery dates, filetypes, instructions, etc. Your company may or may not have a dedicated software for this, such as XTRF, OTM or Plunet, but I advise you to also use something personal like an excel sheet or even a notebook (yes, one of those made out of paper, you know?). Why? Because sometimes the Internet people don’t do their job properly and the whole thing stops working. This way, if the worst comes to the worst, you will at least know what you won’t be delivering that day and you can start making calls.
Flying with a screw loose
So, suppose you have your excel sheet set up – I can send you mine if you like. DM me on Facebook – and you have 10 projects under way. All of a sudden, one of your colleagues goes on holiday and the other one is ill, and you are called upon to manage their projects as well. You jump from 10 to 25 projects and from one email account to three email accounts in seconds. This, my friends, is like flying a plane with a loose screw in one of the engines.
You see, project management is like a plane. If you check the entire plane before taking off, there is a good chance you will land it safely. However, one simple loose screw can make the whole thing crash. Same with a translation project: a small problem may turn out to be a huge problem and, most of the time, you can see it coming.
Imagine the files you get are PDFs and the person converting them into Word documents didn’t remove the formatting correctly. You send it to the translator, and they tell you that there are lots of tags. There you have it, your loose screw, and with it comes the PM’s first decision: lose a day with the plane in the hangar to tighten the screw, or risk flying? Send the documents back to formatting or press ahead because of the tight deadline?
Let’s imagine you choose to fly the plane with a loose screw. Later on, during the flight, you may hear from the proofreading team that there are hundreds of tags and that the proofreading may take longer than expected. That is to say that a piece of the fuselage is now coming out and you now have another decision on your hands: land at the nearest airport and fix the plane, or fly to your destination which is just over that hill? I mean, you already lost one extra day to proofreading. Now are you going to delay delivery even more to fix all those tag errors?
Ever adventurous, you fly the plane to its destination. By now you know you are going hand it in late and that the export of those documents will be a tremendous mess which you will probably have to fix yourself. This means that on delivery day (which will already be delayed), the task of exporting the documents and tuning the formatting to make them look like the original PDF files will be in your hands. That and, of course, all the projects that you will be managing on that day.
Delivery day will be one of those where you timidly press your keyboard keys to the sound of Rammstein, and you will probably hear back from an angry client. All because you didn’t make the right call at the beginning of the project and chose to fly with a loose screw. The lesson here is: decisions, however small, are very important for project managers, and we need to learn to make them in a split second.
The PM’s High
When these decisions arise constantly, risks need to be accessed very quickly and repeatedly and you may enter a state of total focus, where your 8-hour job may seem like one hour (which is kind of cool). From now on, we shall call this the “The PM’s High”. For every potential problem, there is a potential solution. The most common ways of dealing with these problems are resolving them immediately, postponing, delegating or ignoring them. But there will always be a decision to be made, even if it is to postpone or to ignore the problem.
So, depending on the problem you are facing, the actions you take will certainly be different, because there are some problems that you can’t just ignore.
Let’s start with quotes. Imagine you have too many requests for quotes to handle because you’re too busy assigning translators to a big project. If you look at your email and you see that there is no way in hell you are going to be able to deliver those quotes in the next 24 hours, you’d better delegate. Don’t keep your clients waiting for a quote for more than a day or they will go elsewhere.
However, if you get word of problems in the translation process – the proofreader reports a bad translation; the translator reports a delay; the translator reports too many tags; the formatting process is delayed; etc. – you had better act on these asap, so I recommend prioritising. If you don’t take action immediately, this plane will crash, I tell you that. In these cases, delegating to a fellow PM is also an option. Just make sure they are aware of all the details of the project and of which screws need tightening.
Another serious problem are complaints. If you are busy and you get a complaint, you tend to get frustrated and leave it till last because you know you will be annoyed with someone (probably yourself), and you want to postpone your own madness. While you could, indeed, postpone the issue, remember that on the other end may be a client who needs that translation asap. I usually try to decipher just how annoyed and in a hurry the client is and, after this quick assessment based on how many UPPER-CASE LETTERS the client’s email has, I either solve it immediately or postpone (no more than 24 hours). Either way, make sure to always send an email just to confirm that you received the complaint, so as to pour oil on troubled waters.
But what can you really postpone? Well, among the noncritical things are those that are not related to clients or ongoing projects. These includes replying to service providers that emailed you about promotions; that teambuilding invitation; replying to job applications from service providers that you may have received; CRM (don’t forget these, though); follow-ups on quotes and so on. But remember: always be prepared to rearrange your schedule when things don’t go quite as you’d planned.
What can you ignore? Nothing. Don’t be lazy.