Joa Pope - WBC’s Creative Ops Guru - Shares What Makes Great Creative Ops Teams and What to Look For in Top Project Managers. (Hint: High EQ is Greater Than Process Discipline

Joa Pope is one of the country’s leading experts on creative operations, project management, martech systems and more. As Senior Operations Change Leader at WBC, Joa helps clients get the most out of their creative ops investments. In this episode, Joa talks about the difference between project management and creative operations - and how to choose the right creative workflow management system. 

  We talk about the critical skills for operations talent and leaders: How project management skills are critical - but more than that how relevance and communications matters most. “Great operations people have to be very well versed in the organization - all the roles - and how to knit them together efficiently.”     In this Episode:  

• Learn about the key differences between project management and creative operations.
• Learn how project management is about process, but more than that, flexibility and communication so it works for the variety of different stakeholders. 
• Great PMs have a high EQ - and they’re great communicators.”
• The best teams utilize project managers not as the meeting scheduler or note-taker but as a driver of efficiency, flexibility and communication. 
• To get the most value from creative ops, learn how to staff creative ops roles appropriately, provide the right significance in their role on the team, drive cross-team support for operations. 
• Are project managers necessary? It depends whether you want your creative team owning schedules, getting vendor quotes - or do you want them creating, connecting and writing great content.