Project Manager

About the role

As a strategy and design agency, VSA blends consumer insights and data with human-centered design to activate meaningful, motivating and measurable experiences. The Project Manager supports senior-level project managers on a given client, potentially across multiple clients, and may manage smaller projects independently. They are responsible for the overall health of projects, including day-to-day communications, financial management, resource allocation, risk mitigation, and internal and external relationships.

Responsibilities

• Support senior-level project managers on a given client/program or across multiple clients/programs and/or oversee and direct multiple individual projects.
• Ensure projects meet or exceed internal team and client expectations, including being on time and on budget.
• Interface with senior marketing, technical, and executive management at the client to ensure the solution is understood and addresses the customer’s business requirements.
• Contribute content and presentation of key client deliverables as needed to ensure relevancy, strategy, quality, timeliness, and adherence to SOWs.
• Manage and control project scope and the change control process to ensure that projects are executed according to agreed-upon scope, schedule, and budget.
• Supervise and raise awareness of all project issues and risks, working with appropriate team members to develop solutions.
• Communicate relevant project information to the client, such as status, risk, issues, or deliverables.
• Contribute to, review, and manage creation of client SOWs, ensuring accuracy and legal and financial compliance.
• Collaborate with the project team to drive the approach, deliverables, schedule, and tools to deliver the project within established constraints; ensure accurate financial management of projects.
• Coordinate activities of the project team and ensure project tasks, including scheduling and facilitating project-related team meetings (i.e., kickoffs, status, internal/client reviews), conveying action steps to the team, and delivering weekly status reports to project team, the client, and management.
• Work with Accounting to manage project billing schedules, including reviewing invoices and tracking fees and expenses.
• Develop, maintain, review, and/or disseminate project documentation, including status reports, invoices, change orders, project timelines, budgets, and sunset reviews.
• Ensure project documentation is produced in the standard format, follows internal documentation processes, and is reviewed and approved.
• Work with Resource Management to ensure projects are appropriately staffed, including both employee and contract resources.
• Partner with, manage communications, and execute project scope requirements with sister agencies within contract parameters.

Requirements

• 3–5 years of demonstrated ability coordinating brand, marketing, campaign and digital projects, preferably in a consulting or agency environment.
• Bachelor’s degree in business administration with a concentration in project management, advertising/marketing, or related field.
• Experience using project management methodology, including the ability to develop and track scopes of work, identify and resolve issues, mitigate risk, develop detailed task-based project plans and specifications, perform resource allocations, and lead team meetings.
• Experience with project life cycles, print and digital production processes, and the delivery of solutions with creative and engineering components, advertising projects, brand strategy, and research projects.
• Experience managing deliverables against a media plan is a plus.

Skills

• Strong organizational and time management skills.
• Strong team player; ability to assist with facilitating teams and clients.
• Ability to be highly organized, accurate, and timely; able to prioritize.
• Adaptability, flexibility, persistence, versatility, and ability to handle multiple projects and changing priorities.
• Ability to organize information, pay attention to detail, accurately follow procedures, maintain confidential information, and remember important pieces of information.
• Ability to maintain self-motivation and to work independently and in collaborative environments.
• Ability to develop and demonstrate an understanding of the client’s business, needs, expectations, and requirements.
• Strong knowledge of one or more of the following: creative project management, web development processes and the delivery of solutions with creative and technology components, advertising, digital marketing, print, strategy, and brand research.
• Strong digital literacy in Google Suite/MS Office (particularly Sheets/Excel), email, project, and team communication software (e.g., Workamajig, Smartsheet, Jira, Slack, DoneDone).
• Ability to interact at all levels of the company and with external parties in a professional manner, maintaining effective communication—both written and spoken.

Some evenings and weekend work may occasionally be required to meet deadlines.

Why VSA

You’ll join a high-performance Growth team building a scalable, data-driven system that connects marketing intelligence, outbound rigor, and brand storytelling into a unified engine for growth. This is a rare opportunity to help shape how a leading creative, strategy, and design firm drives measurable business impact.

Pay

Chicago: Estimated Salary Range $70,000 USD – $90,000 USD