How to Revamp Your Creative Project Management Process
Creative production from the perspective of a Project or Product manager requires its own degree of creativity as it tends to feel more like a juggling performance than a cohesive workflow.
Between feedback, approvals, deadlines, and results, juggling multiple balls in the air is generally worthy of a spotlight — until the balls start to fall down. Perhaps if we back off the juggling act (and the juggling metaphor), and look into the reasons why project management is broken, we can begin to find ways to mend this broken workflow.
A little creativity in your process can help you revamp your creative project management process and boost your team productivity!
Here’s a few thoughts on how to get the best out of your team.
Improve your method of communication
Successful collaboration starts with great communication. Ensuring that your clients requirements, and innermost desires of the project, are captured during scoping conversations and relayed properly to your team is the foundational block of a good delivery. This sentiment is even more important in the sensitive world of creative endeavors, as creating an atmosphere where clients can express themselves and discuss their goals with your team creates a connection that improves the outcome of your production and relationship as a whole.
Giving a voice to each team member and shareholder leads to a mesh of perspectives and allows for the vision of the product to be honed. Effective relationship management between your team and project stakeholders determines the success of your projects.
Identify team workflow and working hours
On most projects, you are probably working with remote teams, associates, and outsourced talent.
Here is a list of the most important things you need to identify:
· Time zones by teams, members, project consultants and other
· Gaps between time zones
· Team member availability
· Working hours
You will be creating your project execution plans based on the above factors, including mapping out your milestones and deadlines. Always keep in mind that someone might be sleeping on the other side of the world, while you are sipping your morning coffee and going through assignments.
It’s imperative that you respect your team member’s time, especially if you have set working hours. Just because people are working from home, doesn’t mean they are at your disposal 24/7. It is their goodwill if they sometimes do work on tasks over time, but don’t exploit that or let that become the expected norm. If you see a large work wave, or an all-nighter, coming on the horizon, communicate that in advance so your team can plan accordingly.
Visualize your process first (don’t make endless to-do’s)
The main reason why some projects are set to fail is the unclear instructions given to the project members to begin with.
Before making endless to-do lists and assigning them to each team member without any reasonable connectivity to the end result, try to visualize steps to reach your project goals using project milestones.
Why?
- This will give a sense of clarity and context to the entire team and create buy-in from all members.
- Being a project manager puts you in a leadership position and your planning will help you delegate tasks accordingly.
- It will make it easier for you to connect all other aspects of the project to the prime goal — successful completion.
“Clarity leads to satisfaction when each project member is associated with the end goal. They can visualize the entire process and feel more enthusiastic about the execution.”
You have to set project objectives straight in order to pass them to your team members. Creating a bulletproof process will ensure minimum modifications and sticking to the deadlines. The following are some basic steps that can help you to improve your creative team management process.
Define important project Milestones
We already wrote about the importance of project Milestones in one of our previous articles, but it bears repeating as it is an extremely important part in the creative agency management process. Milestones will keep your team focused on tracking the most important activities and drive a project’s trajectory in the desired direction while providing smaller, achievable markers that structure processes, responsibilities, and decisions.
Similar to goals, when creating project milestones make sure they are:
· Specific and clear
· Attainable and with realistic deadlines
· Progressive (leading towards the completion of the end goal)
The whole point of milestones is to make the final goal completion easier and more comprehensive. Think of it as dividing your project into stages. Without milestones, there are many more risks of delays, misunderstandings, and stops in the creative collaboration and flow of information.
Construct, or iterate an existing action plan
Next you’ll want to turn your goals into an action plan for achieving the milestones you’ve laid out for your team and client. When developing this plan, focus on the ways how specific goals should be accomplished. Break down every detail of the objectives. Basically, the plan of action should clearly state what each team member has to do, and how. Always include backup plans just in case something goes wrong — ideally it won’t be enacted, but it is always better to be safe than sorry.
Keep in mind your team members’ strengths and plan goals accordingly
Your team is made of people with different skills. Each member has a unique set of strengths and knowledge. The key to successful creative team management is to set appropriate goals for the appropriate people. More difficult tasks should be delegated to the members with the most experience and vice-versa. Hence, it is up to you to know your team’s abilities inside out and set the goals for each member accordingly.
You will have to set deadlines to give members of the team some incentive as to when certain tasks need to be done. If the results of creative collaboration require editing or verifying, include that into the deadline.
For example, if you need a completely finished blog post by Friday, set the deadline for the writer to Wednesday. That way, they have buffer time for editing and even rewrites, if necessary.
Stay on track
Communication is key for creative agency management projects to go smoothly and automated progress tracking such as the one Nifty provides, helps align team members and project stakeholders on the status and blockers of the project.
If you work with freelancers, asking them daily about their progress might have negative effect on their motivation so go ahead and automate your progress tracking!
At end end, it’s all about balancing workloads, which in addition to communication, is important for creative collaboration.
Make the most of team collaboration
As mentioned, your team consists of people with different skills and knowledge. While they are all creative thinkers, their expertise lays in different spheres. However, when you bring their beautiful minds together, great things can happen. A writer who has nothing to do with creating visuals will maybe see something that the designer didn’t review from its part of the view. On the other hand, a graphic designer can point out the gaps with the written content and so on.
Each member of your team can help another one. That’s why communication is crucial for successful creative team collaboration.
While it sounds exhausting, managing people is a big part of being in charge of the creative agency management. But when the ideas start flowing, it will be an unstoppable force that can really benefit productivity and project realization.
Final Thoughts
Now when you have the how’s, you can revamp your creative project management process and get the most out of your team.
As you can notice, a few and simple changes are more than enough to do that. While your job will be hard from time to time, following these tips and tricks will help you to deal with unexpected issues.
Feel free to share your thoughts on the best practices for improving your creative process!
