Project management in AEC firms generally doesn’t go beyond the technical aspects of the business, such as schedules, budgets, and quality controls that keep a building on track. Marketing rarely gets the same discipline. Even though marketing teams juggle their own budgets, deadlines, and quality standards every week. Listen in as Katie Cash talks with Meredith Schroeder, Director of Operations at Smartegies, about why AEC marketing departments need real project management systems, not just good intentions and a color-coded whiteboard.
Marketing workflow visibility comes up early as the clearest sign that a team has outgrown its current systems. Meredith shares the telltale signs of a reactive marketing department: missed deadlines, last-minute requests, and no single place to see the full workload, and explains why a new tool or process document rarely fixes the problem on its own. She and Katie also dig into proposal management, tracing what it takes to coordinate a dozen internal contributors who do not report to marketing while chasing a must-win RFP deadline that never moves.
AEC marketing operations round out the conversation with a practical look at staffing versus workflow problems, and how time tracking data can show whether a team truly needs more people or simply needs better prioritization. Meredith closes with her five core project management practices: creating alignment early, building timelines around reality, making it easy for others to contribute, making the work visible, and owning the deliverable, along with her top tip for listeners: start before you start.
Key Takeaways
- Marketing departments deliver against budgets, schedules, and quality standards just like technical teams, and benefit from the same project management discipline.
- Reactive, last-minute work is usually a visibility problem, not a staffing problem. Get the full workload in one place before deciding you need to hire.
- Internal clients respond better to specific, well-resourced requests than to vague asks dropped on short notice.
- Time tracking by task, not by a single daily bucket, reveals where a marketing team’s hours actually go and whether workload is balanced fairly.
- Meredith’s five practices: create alignment early, build timelines around reality, make it easy for others to contribute, make the work visible, and own the deliverable.
Connect with Meredith Schroeder on LinkedIn.
Connect with Katie Cash on LinkedIn.
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Transcript:
Check out the transcript for this episode here.
