Managing Your Partnership

Project management is an essential part of any undertaking, especially collaborative partnerships, but there is no one "right" way to do it. Stations and their partners may find they have different ideas of project management, depending on their internal styles of communication and management. To help things run smoothly, stations and their partners must come to a clear agreement about how to run their project, beginning with these key elements:

• partners should share an understanding of how a complex project will evolve;

• partners should set up a management team that includes key players from both sides of the partnership;
• each station and partner should have a team leader who has authority to represent his/her organization in the partnership;
• an overall project manager should coordinate both teams' efforts;
• each partner should have its own plan of action;
• a master plan should encompass all of the collaborators' plans;
• each partner should have its own timeline; and
• a master timeline should encompass all of the collaborators' individual timelines.