On Project Management

No matter how great a creative team you've got, or how receptive your clients are to brilliant ideas, there's one very important piece to running a good creative department. That, dear readers, is organization.

Without it, you cannot meet client expectations. Delivering work late, unfinished or half baked due to rushing, being overloaded or understaffed doesn't result in good results or good feelings.

There are a few elements key to achieve great organization.

Strategy

A solid creative brief can help set the stage for understanding the overall scope of work. What kind of project does the budget allow for it to be? How long does the project of this kind take to execute? These questions begin to frame staffing needs and help with overall project needs.

But the brief should also be abel to answer questions such as, Who are you talking to? What are their challenges? What is the key message? What are the key benefits? Getting answers to these questions that will frame the creative process help the creative come faster and be more on pointe from the start. You end up with less need for iteration because you'll be closer to an answer that's on pointe.

Project Managers

I've often said that a good project manager (or traffic manager) is worth their weight in gold and then some. Someone who can wrap their head around deadlines and the intricacies of different disciplines helps keep the team on track.

Project Management Systems

No matter how amazing the project manager, having a great project management system is also critical. Tracking projects, organizing information, deadlines, and much more in one place so that everyone is held accountable for their deliverables.

To-do lists & Status Meetings

Getting the team together for a status meeting weekly (or more frequently, depending on the project) helps everyone align on needs, dependencies, and work loads. It also helps to keep ownership and roles and responsibilities clear for everyone involved. Each team member should be well aware of their own to-do lists--whether that comes from the project management system, their project manager, or out of their own head.

Having certain elements organized, allows for unorganized thinking. It frees up time to put toward finding the most creative solutions to a problem posed by a brief. It Reduces the amount of stress and helps create an environment of trust and professionalism.