How Project Managers Can Use Video to Save Time and Improve Communication

Don't be afraid of video. You will be surprised about the power that it can bring, the efficiencies that it will give you and the time that you'll get back if you make it an integral part of your tools. Good morning, good evening, good afternoon, wherever you are and wherever you're watching from. My name is Matt Pearce, host of the Visual Lounge, and today we are going to be talking with Christopher King. Chris or Christopher? Chris is fine. Chris.

Perfect. And we're going to be talking about something. We're going to try something new on the show. We're gonna be talking about tell me about your job and the problems that you have. We need a better title. It's already too long, but tell me about your job and let's see how visuals and video apply to what you do. So Chris, thank you for being here. Tell us a

little bit about yourself. Thanks, Matt. So I am, uh, Chris King. I've been in the business for a long time, uh, since the late 20th century.

Um, yeah. So, um, I've done a little bit of everything, but I find myself these days doing a lot of project management. So, um, I got a PMP. Certification some years ago, and it was probably the best career move I ever made because I've never met an instructional designer that can actually meet a deadline. I love them, those creative types. But so, so it, it, I found my niche really is what it was. So I can speak instructional design, I can speak

design and development. But I also have that heads up kind of here's the schedule, we gotta stick to this, communicate, communicate, communicate. So that's really where I spend a lot of my time these days working on some projects for, for different clients. So I'm going to ask you a

little— I want to ask a little bit about project management and, and you. Did, did you find, even before you're a project manager, are you kind of the analytical, really break things down? Were you, were you the party planner that you like, yes, I have to have everything in all the boxes in the right place, check, check, check? So party planner, yes.

Uh, OCD, no. Okay. So I am a gist kind of guy, not a details kind of guy, which is very interesting because like as a project manager, you you have to have the gist down, you can always get a partner who is the details person. So I find that my best pairings has been— or the best, the best contracts that I've been on, or, or, or projects that I've worked on have been where I've been paired with somebody who is detail-oriented. So having a team to work with actually helps, as always, to fill

out the, the weak spots and knowing your weak spots. So now I, I will say that Under pressure, I get into the details. So when, when push comes to shove, I do get down into those details. And so I find when we're starting up a project, the pressure is on to get everything up and moving, to make sure we have the schedule straight, make sure we know

where we're going. So that's where I really do focus in on the details. But as the work starts, and, and in PMP land we call it monitoring the work, moving from starting to monitoring, now I can just kind of relax and just let the flow go. And it's all about communication. I mean, 80% of a project manager's job is communicating. Yeah, I, I have a, the benefit of working with this really fantastic project manager and he, uh, yeah, I mean, without him so much gets lost and

not moved forward cuz we are the creative types. We, you know, and we, it's not that we don't try. So let, let, let's, let's talk about communication a little bit because I gotta imagine depending on the team, the project, there's, there's all sorts of different communications. So tell me about your maybe 2 or

3 of your most common types of communication that you have to roll with on a regular basis? Reports, number one. I mean, we, especially on projects that are bigger, they've got more contractual deliverables. And so therefore people are wondering where we are on those deliverables all the time. So it is weekly reports, sometimes daily reports if we're getting down to the wire. And so reports, number one. Two, status from the team. So it's, that's a lot of listening, not so

much talking. But you need to actually be able to hear what everybody's saying, hear where the stress points are, find out where the blockers are, and do your best to remove those. So it would be reporting and listening to the team, and then being able to articulate the vision, whether it's to the stakeholders, whether it's to the team, whether it's to your

boss, whether it's to your, you know, whoever. You need to be able to articulate the vision of the project so that you have a really good understanding, or you're able to communicate that understanding of where we're headed. Because that's ultimately the best part because no plan survives contact with reality. Yeah. And, and so, you know, being able to pivot and roll with the punches, that's all, that's what project management is. So in that communication, what do you find

is the typical format? Are you meeting with your team a lot? Are you doing email statuses? Are you— I'm assuming there's project management boards, whether Trello, Asana, all whatever tool that is of the choice. Yeah. Tell me a little bit more. What does that communication actually break down into? Yeah, so, so like for instance, the big project I'm on right now, we use a tool called ClickUp as our task management tool. And so ClickUp allows us to, to just assign

tasks to people. So it takes some of the question about what am I working on this week that takes it off the table and just say, hey, go to ClickUp. And then we use a lot of Excel and a lot of PowerPoint. I mean, it's not— there's nothing fancy about this, you know. And I think, I think Excel is probably the most challenging just because it can get really complex. Yeah. So when you're, let's say you've got, you're working with a team member and you've

gotta communicate something. How does, what format does that take? Does that, is that, do you use like, are you a lot of email, Teams, Slack? Like day to day, where, where's your, that regular conversation happening? The regular conversation on this team, on this particular project is Slack. Uh, I mean, but you know, anything, any of that asynchronous kind of

chat. Um, so Slack is a lot of the conversation, which has its own set of challenges because it's really easy to lose the thread. Oh, it's so easy. Yes. I love, I do actually love Slack, but it's, that is the bane of my existence that someone said something and it wasn't in a channel where I can easily, it's in a conversation, but there was more than one person who was in the conversation. We could have a whole diatribe about,

oh God, Slack. Yeah. So Slack, if you're listening, please buff up your AI search tools so that it gets better at that. So, you know, I think, I think one of the challenges we have is the weekly reports. So, I mean, we're this, this particular project that I'm on is a multi-million dollar project. So, and we've got a team of, I don't know, it's probably about 25 people. So, um, keeping all of the— keeping everything in mind is part of the

challenge at my level. And so I, for instance, my details guy, the project manager— I'm acting as program manager, and the project manager is really a details guy. He's down in the weeds all the time, and it's great. And one of the ways he, uh, we, we keep in touch is a weekly report on, you know, what are the financials, what's the progress we're making, how many hours did spend, how many are left, those kinds of things.

And what's interesting, I think, for your perspective is we've started doing a video of him walking through the spreadsheet each week. And it can be anywhere from 10 minutes to 20 minutes of him just talking about, here's what happened this week,

here's what's going on, here are our financials, here's where we're spending more, here's where we're burning hot, here's where we're blocked. And having that as a I can listen to it, watch it anytime, or I can go back and dig into it, and then I know exactly what kind of questions to ask him later. That's been a real boom to this whole thing. So let me— I want to ask about that because it is super interesting, and it's an approach we use often in my

organization because of the tools that we make. But what is the requirement? Do you say everybody on that 25-person team, do they all need to watch that video? No, that particular video is really just for the project management office, right? So I'm using air quotes, right? So it's the program manager, the project manager, and then the instructional leads. So, and there's the design lead also. So the leadership team is learning strategist, project manager, program manager, dev lead, and then the

boss. So in a practical sense, it sounds like this is whether you started this from the beginning or maybe you adopted it Why did you decide to go with video to solve that particular communication problem? It was a matter of, of that 20-minute review of what we were talking about was eating up 20 minutes of our 1-hour leadership meeting each week. And that was definitely something that could have been outsourced so that everybody could watch it before the meeting and then you

come with your questions there. So it was, it was born out of how do we make this meeting more efficient? Rather than spending a third of it going through the financials, right? Just, uh, as a— just kind of everybody sit there and listen isn't really effective when that leadership meetings are really great for decisions, right? Exactly, exactly. And getting down

to, you know, where do we need to be paying attention? And that report, the video report, helps us understand where do we need to pay attention, what needs to be on the agenda for the leadership meeting so that we are spending that time

and able to make more decisions. So with With that in mind, have you adopted video in other places of your communication with that, your, your team or within the organization to do similar things? So, similar to making the meetings more efficient, when we do a kickoff for one of the sub-projects on this project, and by sub-project, I mean, of course. So, yeah. Yeah. So, we're, we are, this project, we're building 46 e-learning modules. Not very many. Not a lot at

all.. But each one of those has a certain lead subject matter expert. So we got to get our lead SME up and, and some of them have never done e-learning before. And so we actually created a video that says how to be a good SME. I love that. Right. And so that was one of those things that was born out of, well, we've got an hour with this lead SME. We got to get them up to speed.

Hey, let's send them a video that talks about what our expectations are and then they can come with those questions to our meeting where we get them launched and get them pointed in the right direction. So, I'll just interject here that I just actually did a video on the podcast about what I as a subject matter expert want to hear from my instructional designer. Oh, because often we, you know, we talk about, oh, you can have your SME record their stuff, but like, what do I need to know? So

interesting that you are actually doing that. And I, so I love that you're providing that information in the, in the video communication, you know, obviously great idea. It makes a lot of sense. Is there, are there challenges that you find, like by using video, things that you're like, oh, I wish I could do this or that? The screenshot, I mean, being able to capture the screen, I think is the biggest thing. And, and we are lucky that we have some of your tools

in-house already. So thank you. Yeah, absolutely. Um, but that makes it easy. So it's, it's really interesting actually, because I don't have those loaded on my machine. I know, I know. So, um, so it's interesting when I want to make a video explaining something or talking about some challenge that we're up against, I have to go to my standard set of Windows tools, which are not as good as yours. And, uh, you know, I've got those kind of challenges. So having the right tools

for everybody to use would make this process a lot easier. Yeah. And well, we appreciate the, the comments, but the reality is like having a good tool is the important part, right? Right. And so if it makes you able to, to communicate, do you think, um, Do you think people are down? Kind of, that's so hip of me. Are you down with this, guys? Are you down? Are people like, are they liking having the video communication or are there challenges on

the receiving side? Because I know I'll just be 100% blunt here. I work at a company, we make so many videos. At one point, especially I think kind of mid-COVID, we're communicating asynchronously so much. I'm like, I can't watch any more videos because that's my job now. It's just to watch videos about things. So there's a balance there. But I'm curious, like, how people are responding to that. Like, how did the SMEs respond to being, saying, hey,

here's a video? Yeah, they, they actually loved it because same reason that I love being able to review the weekly report on a video, they were able to stop it, pause it, rewind it, um, listen to it at 2x. You know, that's what I do with our weekly report. So that 20-minute report only takes 10 minutes for me to listen to. And it's pretty funny to hear my project manager talk it that fast. You just had some helium Here's a fun tip. Slow it down to like

0.5. I have a call. I do not drink, but my colleague does. Like, when I give a video, he's like, I slow you down. You sound really drunk. I'm going to try that when I get back. If you want to hear your colleagues in a whole different light. Yeah. Not efficient, but fun. Fun. Fun. I think what you were describing is more a volume issue and just being overwhelmed with the volume. We're definitely not there. And so I think video still for us, for our team, for the subject matter

experts, still has a little bit of novelty to it. So it's not a routine thing. And I think that helps. That helps make people want to listen to it or watch it. So we've talked a lot about communication, and I think that, like you said, that's 80, 90% of your role. Are there other places in your job where images and videos come into play? So, I mean, I'm here at a conference. I'm going to be presenting tomorrow. So I have to do video or images on my slides all the time because

nobody wants to see just words on a, on a slide. What? I know, I know, it's weird, it's weird. Just try this, try this once, Matt. Okay, um,

I'll try it. Yeah, yeah, put some pictures on there. So, um, so yeah, I, I'm constantly trying to find other ways to get images, um, you know, and, and without saying the word, the, the letters that everybody is saying here, I mean, there are some tools out there that will let you get there, but I'm finding that finding the right prompts for to create the thing that I have in my mind is not easy. And so it takes a

lot of iterating to get there. And I'm starting to wonder if, yeah, I finally get to where I want, but was that actually more efficient than just going to the, you know, to the library of images and, and we're browsing through the image library. So, so for you, are there criteria in your images that you, you gravitate towards? So for a long time, I know I was looking for very real, kind of photos, and then I would do this whole

masking thing kind of. And now I've kind of gravitated to maybe not so big, full cinematic pictures and smaller kind of some things. But so is there something that you are trying to do in your style, and does that change over time? I think my style is more icons, and it's less, less big pictures like the cinematic pictures that you're talking about. Um, for me, it's icons, it's arrows, it's paths, it's helping people kind of connect the dots.

With the, with the thoughts on the slide. And so for me, it's more about, you know, how can I get something that doesn't look like it's Wingdings? What? Why not? The inventor of Wingdings would like to have a word with you, Chris. He's standing offstage right now. No, I mean, I think that makes sense, especially if you're talking process and, you know, project management and those kind of flow. I'm, I'm guessing you're dealing with a lot

of flow in what you're talking. Yeah. Yeah. What, I mean, what I, what I present on generally is about process improvement. It's about performance support. It's about workflow learning. It's about, like, the presentation I'm going to give here is about helping L&D managers dig deeper into the course request so that you're not just saying yes to the course because training doesn't fix everything. I know this is going to be a shocking thing

to your audience. No, I don't think so. I think most people know it doesn't fix everything. It doesn't. But when we say yes, when somebody comes and says, I need a course. We're just helping people think that L&D doesn't do a good job because we're telling them we're gonna give you a course even though we know it's not gonna fix the problem. So for those kind of slides, this is all process. It's all, you know, it's all, here's

the flow of the conversation that you need to have. So it's not a lot of big pictures or, or cinematic images or waterfalls or rainbows or whatever. What's wrong with rainbows? Nothing. Nothing. Okay, Chris, I wanna ask you, so you, you obviously got some great workflows, you got some great use cases for, for video and

images. If you could add into your, whether it's you or your colleagues doing something else that used images or videos, is there something you would want to do or want them to do to make your guys' work more effective, more efficient, or maybe just a little easier? So I think the area where we're really kind of experimenting with video right now is, uh, a practice module that we're building for our client. That is going to be,

it's basically a chatbot practice. So there's AI behind, you know, ask a question, the AI asks a question, you respond to it, and then the AI gives you feedback on how your response was. For that, we have video. We have video of someone, like you knock on the door, the door opens, somebody's there,

they say the script. And right now it's AI-generated video. What would be really interesting to me is if we could procedurally produce that AI video so that it is actually responding to the response and therefore changing the emotion, changing the facial expressions, changing those kinds of things. So having the ability to, to kind of craft that on the fly, that I think that's the

future for, for the kind of work that we're doing in this industry. So yeah, so it's like the old days of the responsive, like you kind of choose your own adventure, right? Like, yeah, but it would be dynamic enough to be able to say, well, this person responded poorly. So this is how they— right. So now the person on the door is going to get mad because you just call them

fat or whatever. Oh boy. Yeah, yeah, right. So, so these are the kinds of things where, where video in the actual deliverable, I think, has a real place because the— we're visual creatures. So having that video to respond to, being able to see the micro expressions, being able to read facial expressions, I think that's

really important for the learner. On the back end, being able to do these video reports, I think, or even just, hey boss, here's the problem that we have, you know, hey boss, we're, we've, we've already burned 300 hours of our 3,000 hours and we haven't even, we've only done 60 hours of actual work, so where are we going

to put these extra hours so that we don't burn up, right? So that kind of explanation, here's what's going on, here's my recommendation, and being able to just produce that and send it off to the boss like an email will make things a lot easier for everybody to kind of get on the right page and be able to make those decisions. Well, I want to get kind of towards wrapping up here, but I do want to ask, so we've kind of talked about like what you would like to have. We talked about

what you're doing. What advice would you give to someone maybe in a similar role? You know, they're maybe they're hesitant, maybe their organization's a little shy or, you know, they're like, ah, we don't know about video people, you know, cuz it's, cuz the reality is even though you can watch it 2x speed, it's still time. There's still commitment there. So someone's gotta make that video. That's time, right? So what, what advice would you give to others about using images and video in the work

that type of work that you do? So from a project management perspective, Matt, I think, I think the, it's, it's the Nike approach. You gotta just try it once. So just do it and see what happens. It doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't, you can do it all in one take and all the ums and ahs. It's okay. It's even okay if you lose the bubble in the middle of explaining people to that. Makes it kind of

human. It makes it a little easier to, to watch, and it certainly grabs attention if people's attention are wandering, if you, if you lose the bubble in it. So I would just say try it. If you, if you are a little hesitant about it, just put it out there and see what happens. And I think you'll be surprised about how, how people respond to it. You know, we're going through a system migration going from one tool

to another tool. And our, uh, I guess he's technically a program manager as well, but he just made a video talking about some changes that were going to be happening. And it was so helpful because we weren't going to have a team meeting, all, you know, all 30 of us to talk about that one thing. Yet he could get that information to us. We could see what it was going to look like and how these two things are going to be different, but yet the same. So I agree with you that you got to try it and

it makes a big difference. But with that said, we're going to have a little fun here. We're going to go into what I call our speed round questions. All right, here we go. So we're going to— I got 12 questions. Normally I have a 12-sided die that I roll, but I didn't bring it with me because I've

tried to stop being that kind of nerd. I have in the past, but— Where's Rachel Arpin when we need her? She would have one for sure. So I'm going to let you pick randomly between— let's start with 1 question first. So between 1 and 12, pick a question. 11. Number 11. Okay, this is perfect on topic. If you had to pick an image that represents you, what would it be? Gosh, it would be a backpacker. A backpacker? Yeah. Why? Carrying heavy loads all the time, Matt. What can I say? No, I love

being outside. I've been backpacking a lot, and so it is a happy place for me. So, favorite backpacking trail, place to go? I've been out to Philmont, which is the Scout Ranch in New Mexico, and spent 12 days in the backcountry there, and that was life-changing. I imagine. I hear great things. Okay, now, 1 to 12, but not 11. 3. Number 3. What piece of advice do you wish you could give your younger self? So think, picture younger Chris. What do you need to tell

him? That girl that you're really interested in? Don't. All right, so professionally, I would say— That's fine. I would say it's— oh gosh, I'm gonna sound like a dad here, but pick the thing you love and do that. So it took me a while to find L&D, and once I found it, it was a perfect match for me, but it took me a while to get there. So listen to what you have the energy behind and follow that energy. Love that. Okay, one more question. One more number. Oh, lucky 7.

Lucky number 7. Oh, what's a hobby or interest you've always wanted to pursue but haven't had the chance to yet? Obviously not backpacking. Blacksmithing. Blacksmithing? Really? Yeah. What would you make if you could blacksmith something? What would you make? Wrought iron fences that are really fancy. Oh, like the curved and they're pouring into sand. Yeah, that would be super cool. And I don't know that it would save you time or money, but it would be cool.

That's right. This would be just doing the thing. Well, Chris, I super appreciate you coming on the show, talking with me and going through the chaos that is a live event. We're so glad that people are here and at Training Magazine allowing us to do this, all this on an awesome

podcasting stage. So if people are interested in learning more about what you do, maybe connecting with you, obviously you got some great sessions going on. Where can they find you? The easiest place is LinkedIn. So, uh, look, look me up, Christopher King. I'm in Arlington, Virginia. So that's probably the— there's a lot of Chris Kings out there. Matter of fact, I went to high school with Chris King. It, it drove the pharmacist in town crazy cuz his

middle initial was different than mine. That was the only way he could tell us apart. Never mind. So Christopher King is out there. That's why I use the full Christopher King. And just look me up on LinkedIn. Okay. And I'm sure if they want some advice on program manager for L&D, they

can connect with you and get some great, great information. Yep. Well, one, one way we like to end the show, like every single time, is we ask people, Chris King, we don't say that to everybody, but we say it for you, Chris King, what is your final take?

My final take is don't be afraid of video. You will be surprised about the power that it can bring, the efficiencies that will, it will give you and the time that you'll get back if you make it an integral part of your tools. Fantastic. Well, thank you, Chris. Thank you, Matt. All right. For everybody that's listening either on the podcast or

watching the video, we've been at Training Magazine. It's a great conference and they've given us a great space to be here on a podcasting stage. So I wanna thank Chris King, Jeff Weaver for helping put this all together. And I just want to say, whatever you're doing out there, you heard Chris talk about doing this thing about just try it, right? See what video can do for you. You'll be surprised at the many varied uses that you can find for video, including

the status update, team communication. I mean, even just showing somebody that something's going wrong in a system or tool can be amazing. There are so many uses for video. I want to encourage you to continue to find those, explore those, And if you've got one that you've done or want to talk about, let me know. I'd love to hear it. You can email me at thevisuallounge@techsmith.com. We'd love to hear from you guys. Leave comments and questions and things in

the comments below. And with that said, we hope you take a little time to level up every single day. Thanks, everybody.