Project Manager

mStoner is seeking a project manager (PM) to work with our creative team. The Creative PM will be based in our Chicago office and report to the Senior Creative Director with a dotted line to the project management office. **Primary duties:** - Creates and manages projects within Workamajig, our core operational software. - This includes creating timelines and budgets, managing tasks and timelines on an ongoing basis, monitoring time and expense transactions, coordinating freelancer/subcontractor purchase orders, and maintaining accurate billing milestone dates and amounts. - Optimizes workload and assignments across the Creative team, coordinating closely with designers, UI developers and quality assurance team members. - Participates in company resource planning process and ensures creative assignments are properly setup as allocations in Workamajig (including subcontractor assignments). - Analyzes longer-term project demand, identifying staffing needs in advance. - Participates in monthly revenue recognition process, which is based on percent complete accounting. - Understands the status of tasks within creative projects in terms of actual hours worked and remaining hours to complete. - Proactively and preemptively flags projects that are over-budget and participates in developing plans to address budget overages. - Where appropriate, helps designers complete deliverables for clients, including quality review. - Over time, learns and grows within the creative team, becoming versatile and able to help with a variety of design production tasks in addition to the core project management duties. - Coordinates with strategy and technology project managers and team members. - Ensures a smooth handoff from strategy to the creative phase; and from the creative phase to technology. - While the project manager has some direct interaction with our clients, this is not the focus of the role. - Strategists own the accounts and the client relationships. - The focus of the creative project manager role is to enable and support the creative team and to ensure our work is delivered with high quality and operational / financial excellence.

**Criteria:** - 2-5 years prior experience in project management and/or professional services consulting. Prior experience with higher education, digital, communication, or marketing strategy projects, UI/UX testing, HTML, Adobe creative suite, Invision or Workamajig is a plus. - Experience working directly with designers or creative team and front end developers. - Excellent communication, collaboration and interpersonal skills. Comfortable communicating with people at a variety of levels and can effectively manage across and up. Able to foster relationships and work closely with teammates who are not in the same physical location. - Attention to detail and an eye for quality. - Someone who takes initiative and places a high value on getting things done. Personally organized and provides organization and structure for other team members as needed. - Comfortable working in a fluid environment; brings clarity to ambiguous or unstructured situations and synthesizes disparate information into cohesive plans. - Ability to handle multiple projects simultaneously as well as competing deadlines and priorities. - Comfort and familiarity with basic finance and accounting. Understands and appreciates the financial and operational side of the business and is comfortable analyzing budgets, profit margins and other quantitative metrics. - Embodies curiosity and an interest in learning new things and growing as a professional. - Contributes positively to the team dynamic, employs a positive attitude and outlook toward our work.