Part 1 of a 4-part series on Project Management by contributor Annika Vaughan, MBA, PMP
By Annika Vaughan, MBA, PMP
A few years ago, I was working at one of the UN agencies based in Rome, in what can be described as a typical in-house creative agency. The team consisted of a creative director, chief copywriter (who was also my mentor), senior designer, contract designer, social media/distribution specialists and a bunch of others including a writer, editor, production coordinator, video/photo shooter and strategist.
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Soon after I started working, I was assigned a recurring, multi-lingual publication project, managed by the chief copywriter. He seemed to have nailed down a functioning production management system. After explaining how it worked, he confessed that he could use some new ideas because “we always miss the print date and designers mess up the files.” So, I quickly drafted a Gantt-chart style schedule using Excel and set up a file sharing system in Drop-box for external designers and translators to access the production files.
When I showed him how the schedule and file sharing system worked, he looked at me with amazement and said “Wow, I never thought of using Excel to draw up a schedule. Where did you learn this?”
To answer his question, I should have said, “That’s the problem! We, in the creative industry, are never taught how to properly manage projects, so we waste too much energy and time working in chaos.”
Frankly, when I went to business school almost 10 years ago, project management was not a mandatory subject. So, I acquired these skills learning from experienced colleagues on the job.
Why managing a triangle of constraints matter
As creative leaders, all of you have experienced pains caused by disorganization of projects. We are hired to be creative and think outside the box, so getting organized is probably not high on our priority list. However, our world is also bound by business rules, such as time, cost, and client-satisfaction rates. Whether you are in an agency environment or in-house, as long as you are making money from selling your services, you will be subject to the triangle of constraint; time, cost, and scope. Does missed deadlines, cost overruns, dissatisfied clients, excessive number of revisions, and late nights and weekends sound familiar?
If so, let’s think about this—these issues are not only destructive to your team’s work-life balance, but also critical to your business’s value proposition. If you are in a charge-back environment, the triangle is the key to your team’s survival as it is what your performance will be measured against. Even if you are subsidized or centrally funded, if you are not managing your resources, tracking your time, or delivering what clients ask for, you will probably not receive executive support the next time you need to increase your headcount. In short, project management is the science of balancing scope, time and cost. It is not an optional methodology—it is a must in today’s world.
What project management can offer
Here’s a question to ask yourself: Did you hire your designer to worry about missing client deadlines or to dig up multiple emails to confirm what the specs were? Now, imagine if you had a dedicated team of project managers whose sole responsibility was to gather requirements, draw up preliminary schedules, remind designers of upcoming deadlines, label production files in an organized fashion, and follow up with clients? With project management, projects will run seamlessly and your designers can actually focus on what they are good at.
Risk management is another reason why project management is relevant to the creative industry. According to industry studies, by IAG consulting in 2009 and by US Government Accountability Office in 2008, around 50 – 70% of IT projects surveyed did not succeed for various reasons such as poor project planning and management. And these IT projects are generally carried out by qualified project managers and technical specialists—the number crunchers. If the chance of failure is that high in the IT industry, what’s the chance of project failure in the creative industry when projects are managed by artists? I doubt many of your creative talent care to be experts in estimating time and costs and love quantitatively tracking project progress. Well, there we are.
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So, if your team is tired of living in the creative chaos, and wants to please the clients and save money and time, project management is the way to go!
Coming up next on March 3rd: Part 2 – Tips and tricks: Five easy steps to implementing project management.
About the author: Annika Vaughan, MBA, PMP
Annika works as Media Officer at the International Monetary Fund, in a project management team of an in-house agency with 40 + staff providing design, photography and video production services. Her previously held positions include TV reporter, PR manager and UN Communications Officer.
Disclaimer: The views expressed herein are those of the author and should not be attributed to the IMF, its Executive Board, or its management