Fake it ’til’ you make it . . . as a traffic manager

Tamra Hughes from communications and technology company Vivid Group on how she links people and projects.

What exactly does a traffic manager do?

On my left I have people who ‘need stuff done’ and on my right I have people who ‘do stuff’. I sit in the middle and connect the two. In a nutshell, it’s about regulating the flow of work between the accounts team that work directly with clients and everyone else in the agency. It’s about reacting to the here and now while planning many months into the future. To do this effectively I need to start by extracting the key bits of information from the people who ‘need stuff done’ and marry that to the people who ‘do stuff’. I then translate the task for a range of audiences – technical, design, project managers. All this while meeting our clients’ expectation of timing.