Project Manager

The role of Project Manager

“Briefly called Pack Leaders, it turns out panthers don’t actually travel in packs. Therefore we’re back to the familiar term of Project Manager.”

• The main responsibilities
• The payment schedule
• Frequently asked questions
• The normal project process

Getting started:

• Kickoff meeting every Tuesday at 10:00 CET and 19:00 CET
• Kickoff meeting every Thursday at 16:00 CET
• Sign up here

Main responsibilities:

1. Guaranteeing quality in your language
2. Daily deliveries according to our proven process
3. Managing a team of at least 10 active writers weekly for subscriptions

“Copypanthers obviously also has smaller projects in the pipelines, we manage these on a case-by-case basis and assign them to PMs and experienced proofreaders to manage.

Payment schedule:

1. 10% of the sales value of all delivered texts in a week, prepared on Friday’s and paid weekly
   • Daily deliveries (Mon-Fri), at least 10 active people per week and no complaints from the client regarding quality.

“Missing any of your main responsibilities as a Project Manager means that you have a problem you need to address right away. Waiting very often means loosing a client’s trust and might very well even result in not getting a follow-up order.”

2. If you have a consecutive week/week(s) -after we have given you a heads up- where you can’t manage to deliver on your main responsibilities your payment for that week/those weeks will be 6% of the sales value of all delivered texts in that week. The reason for this is that we have to start talking to the client, answering internal questions, etc. (i.e. spending time that also costs money).
3. If there are quality complaints from the client, we have another PM or someone internally who speaks the language confirm if there are really problems with the quality. If this is confirmed, you will not be paid for theses texts. If this is reported more than 5 times/ 1000 texts (0.5%) you can not be active as a PM anymore. No exceptions.

• So how much can you earn?
  • If you have 10 writers, each writing 1 text per day, the PM makes 1785 SEK (±170 EUR) per week, paid weekly
  • If you have 10 writers, each writing 2 texts per day, the PM makes 3570 SEK (±350 EUR) per week, paid weekly
  • If you have 10 writers, each writing 5 texts per day, the PM makes 8925 SEK (±890 EUR) per week, paid weekly

Frequently asked questions

• “Can I manage more than one subscription?”
• Yes! For two subscriptions you need at least 15 unique people active per week, for three you need at least 20 unique people active per week, etc. The requirements are still valid (min. 10 people per project weekly, daily deliveries, guaranteed quality).

• “What if I get sick or go on holiday?”
• Like any manager, you need to arrange holidays so that there is no impact on your ongoing responsibilities. If you’re sick, you need to inform your team and delivery/operations team contact so that we can inform the client. While you can’t help getting sick, the system doesn’t discriminate against reasons (the client still needs his texts), so you will still be ‘warned’ if you miss any of the requirements that week.

• “What if people I train leave, go to another PM or want to become a PM themselves?”
• People sometimes leave, in any organization/team. Sometimes people leave because they’re unhappy, sometimes because they see better opportunity somewhere else and sometimes without any reason at all. As the manager of your team, the only thing you can do is talk to people and try to guide this in the best way possible. If someone aspires to become a PM themselves (which is a good thing, because more PMs means more capacity, which means more work to go around), you probably want to involve your delivery team contact to make sure that with the three of you you agree on a timeline that fits everyone.

• “When will payments be processed for my team?”
• All subscriptions are paid out weekly. Projects can start any day of the week, seven days after the project start we prepare the first payments. Processing through PayPal is done once a week.

• “Carrots and sticks”
• We like carrots, and we don’t like sticks. That doesn’t mean though that we all have responsibilities working in the real world. Our terms are all based on the experience we have build up over the last years with hundreds of clients and millions of words. Getting in a new client for example takes hundreds of euro’s, as does running the Copypanthers organization. Therefore the aim is always on keeping the client happy and making sure they continue ordering from Copypanthers. As a PM you have a big role in that, and obviously you have the advantages of it as well.

• “What if my project is paused? Do I still get paid?”
• Clients, together with the operations/delivery team, sometimes decide to pause a project to update instructions, clear up a back-log on the clients side or to adjust the project to account for changes in the client’s strategy. A pause can take a few hours or several days. If this happens, we re-start the ‘weekly’ cycle with a two work day delay and either pay out the cancelled weekly prematurely or move it to the next weekly (agreed with PM). For the cancelled weekly we don’t look at the requirement of number of active people in that case. As project manager you need to be very involved if your project gets paused; discuss with your delivery team contact and/or the client what the estimation is and what you need to tell your team.