What to look for when hiring a PDS manager

Great PDS managers have a very particular set of skills which aren’t a common combination in my experience. They need to be both superb project managers and highly skilled writers. Let’s break these down.

What does a great project manager look like? Well first of all, they get the job done. On time, and with all the details sorted. PDSs are public documents, and are lodged with ASIC, so they just HAVE to be mistake free. Plus they are usually tied to either legislative changes or product changes, and have to be delivered on time. Late but perfect is simply not an option.

So they need to be cat herding ninja, able to get a large group of people to review, sign off and provide evidence in the time frame available. They will need every trick in the book, and to know which trick for which person. Some people need constant reminders, others get annoyed if you do this. Some people need handling with kid gloves, others appreciate a straight-forward approach. Of course, if your PDS manager doesn’t do a good job of this, you can expect complaints and ‘just cc’ing you’ on grumpy emails. Fun times…

And then, to add an additional level of entertainment*, your PDS manager will at times need to negotiate between departments to solve a particular piece of wording. Ops want it one way, legal want something else, and you can’t write it twice! What’s a PDS manager to do? Well, they need to know when it’s time to pull the right people into a room and work with them until the issue is solved. Not only is that tricky at the best of times, but ‘the right people’ may well be much more senior than your PDS manager, so it takes a special sort of person to be able to get this done without any blood on their hands (or yours).

Which leads me to the actual writing component. It’s always made me laugh over the years, that being a ‘comms person’ is about 5% actual writing and the rest is project management. But when your PDS manager puts pen to paper, you want it to be great. Not just good, but great. Their writing will have to stand up to scrutiny from lawyers, subject matter experts and as we all know, when it comes to the written word, everyone has an opinion. At the same time, your PDS manager needs to be flexible, not wedded to their own words, and able to see when a compromise is the best way forward. It’s a fine line, and they have to be able to walk it with a smile.

The other part of being a PDS manager, is having a solid grasp on a whole range of topics, from product management to investments to the various regs&legs** that govern financial products.

If your PDS manager is a fast learner, and you and your colleagues are prepared to take a few extra minutes to explain various concepts, then they will get up to speed in no time. In fact, I would go so far as to say that while this part of the job builds over time and certainly delivers loads of value, it’s something that can easily be learnt on the job and not something that I’d include as a ‘must have’ when hiring.

This combination of writing skills, project management and industry knowledge is somewhat unusual. In my experience, project managers tend to be a bit on the verbose side (sorry!!!) and great writers are often not that great at boring things like, er, deadlines. But both are generally fine at learning/retaining the industry ‘stuff’.

Which leads me to, where can you find such an unusual beast? My advice is to look further afield than you might imagine.

Given that the number of PDS rolls has increased by 42% since 2017, the demand for PDS managers has also grown. Which means that finding a great PDS manager, with loads of experience, who’s just sitting around waiting for your call, isn’t going to happen.

Instead, I’d look for people with solid project management and comms skills, and not worry too much about whether or not they’ve rolled a PDS before. They’ll learn fast. Just ask my colleague Cameron, who went from building an intranet for a government department to rolling PDSs at a major fund manager. It was a baptism of fire for sure, but certainly not impossible!

What do you think? Are there other skills that I’ve missed? Add your comments below.

*By entertainment I don’t mean entertainment…

** ‘legs & regs’ means ‘legislation and regulation’ to those of us on the inside. Yes, we really are THAT hilarious.