Aug 27, 2010
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Linchpin Project Management: A Defense of Project Managers in Creative Work
Part Three of Four
Art departments, marketing firms and creative agencies have a unique challenge when it comes to project management. How do you distinguish between operations and projects when you do projects for a living?
Making this distinction helps you empower your project managers to be true agents of change. This distinction gives them room to be linchpin project managers.
Picture an art department, marketing company or creative service firm. They keep the lights on by doing unique things. Their job is to come up with new designs, new campaigns, new slogans, new websites, new whatever. True to the definition of a project, they are unique undertakings, there are fixed deadlines and there are risks involved. But this is something they do every day. It is the day to day operations of the company.
This blurs the line between operations and projects.
In these situations, most creative firms turn to the talent to deliver the results. And, without question, the talent is key. But project management has a large role to play and a project manager can be a big contributor to the whole process. The project manager can help you deliver remarkable results for your clients.
Unfortunately, what often happens though is that the project manager gets relegated to a secondary role. They become minders of the talent or administrators of the work. They get stripped of the value they can provide.
The challenge here is to give a project manager the space and authority to manage the project. A project manager can actively contribute to the work product and, over the long term, to the work process, to make it great. They can be instrumental in making sure creative juices are flowing towards making the customer happy and the team efficient.
Here are some results a linchpin project manager can deliver. A project manager can improve turnaround time on projects or increase speed to market and help create better campaigns. They can give you information on how to keep the company profitable or how to avoid doing a ton of work for free when you’re pitching a client. Bottom line, a project manager can give you ideas on how to create better stuff than you currently are.
One great example of how they can do this is insisting on a creative brief for every project. Instinctively most designers know that this would improve the whole process. A project manager can make sure that the first question asked when starting a new project is “Why are we doing this?” so you can spend your time wisely, as opposed to “ok…what’s the first task?” and hope that you deliver what the client wants.
Give it a try on one project. Let the project manager actually manage the project and the people. Let them contribute and shine. You might be surprised at the tremendous results they can achieve for you.
