5 minutes with… Holly Davis
Holly is Head of Delivery at Torchbox, a employee owned agency focused on digital for good. She has over 13 years experience working in digital agencies and is the founder of Digital Delivery, a Slack channel with over 600 delivery managers. She has provided extensive mentorship and consultancy to other agencies and delivery managers to help improve the way they deliver. Holly lives in Witney, Oxfordshire.
This article was originally posted on LinkedIn in May 2023 and Holly has kindly given permission for the content to be added here.
Why did you choose a career in delivery or project management?
Like many delivery managers, I fell into it. After University, I started work as a Web Editor and Marketing Executive for a music startup. A large part of my role was liaising with our digital agency in communicating and prioritising features for website development, after leaving that role and taking some time out to work for a Not for Profit, I started looking for new jobs and realised I had a lot of transferable skills for a career in project management. A small local agency were advertising and I spent time swotting on all things digital, websites and project management and ended up landing the role. It was a steep learning curve but it was also a brilliant place to learn my craft, my boss was incredibly detail oriented - in a slightly scary way but they genuinely cared about delivering the best outcomes for our clients and that has really stuck with me. The rest you can say is history.
What advice would you give someone starting out in the industry?
Be curious, tap into the community - join meetups, share knowledge, make friends, network. It’s amazing how being vocal online has provided me with so many opportunities from being published in magazines, being invited onto podcasts, travelling to the US on multiple occasions and even organising our own conference. All of these opportunities have come from me building relationships with people and being generous with sharing my knowledge with others.
Have you ever worked on a particularly difficult project? Why was it rubbish/tough/hard?
There have been many difficult projects, projects which we shouldn’t have taken on in the first place but ignored the red flags and were terminated early. Projects where the client was rude and difficult to collaborate with, projects which were interesting but had lots of complexity with stakeholder management or issues delivering within budget. Bad projects are a bit like what I imagine happens after child birth though, after the painful delivery you move on and the pain doesn’t feel quite so bad until you have to go through it all again! It’s true though with every obstacle, there’s growth and learning and I’ve learnt to embrace those experiences because they’re teaching me something about myself and how to become better at my job.
What do you think are the most important skills for a delivery or project manager to have?
Collaboration, communication, organisation, empathy and integrity - doing what you say you’re going to do when you said you’re going to do it.
It’s important that the team can depend on you and that you provide the right culture, environment which enables people to be themselves and do their best work.
What do you think are the biggest challenges facing delivery and project managers today?
I think the thing I’ve been thinking about most recently is that there’s becoming more and more blurred lines between project, product, agile coaching etc and the expectations on the role are often blurry. I’d encourage anyone looking for a new role to really scrutinise the activities and expectations associated rather than just going off the job title or description to make sure it’s going to be well suited to your strengths and career aspirations.
What projects would you have loved to have been involved in?
I’m less interested in the what when it comes to delivery but the who I’m doing it with and the how. For that reason, I’d probably pick a collaboration with someone I really admire like John Cutler for example. I’ve also always toyed with the idea of working for Spotify, a product I love and use every day. I enjoy projects where you need to work at pace and organisations that have high trust and autonomy which allow for experimentation and continuous improvement.
This post is part of a services called ‘5 minutes with’ series of articles from people in the delivery management and project management space.