Powerful creative project management ideas
| October 23, 2019
As creative campaigns increase in volume, companies need a way to structure newly-established creative departments. Enter creative project management, an efficient way to structure creative campaigns. Here are some of the basic features as well as dynamic approaches to this methodology.
What is creative project management?
Creative project management is the complete overseeing of creative teams and projects. These teams include things like writers, designers and other creative positions. Together they work on building creative projects. Creative project management ensures the creative process is optimized and the project is systematic and methodical.
Creative project management is also called creative workflow management, as it’s designed to boost workflows throughout entire creative projects for multiple departments. It allows for more freedom despite implementing structure.
A unique approach to creative project structures
The first step to understanding creative project management is compare it to traditional project management approaches. Whereas it’s important to move projects from start to finish through motivation, creative teams are different. Creativity requires balance between timelines and creative liberties. Another difference with creative project management is the end goal or desired result of a creative project is often different than traditional project management.
Creative project management provides valuable deadlines, structure and limits to creative teams. Though it may seem oxymoronic to put structure into creativity, it’s a necessity as creative output increases in marketing and business. Here’s an example of the power of structured creativity. If a painter was given a task to paint a 20×20 picture of a building and no timeline was set, he or she may not finish for ten years. A timeline seems to restrict creativity but it can boost it as well.
An uncommon way to boost success
Successful companies get creative with creative project management. It sounds funny but this type of approach consistently yields the most productivity out of teams. One approach that often goes overlooked is attacking a project by planning it around a team’s well-being. What does this entail? Ensuring things like individual perspective are prioritized over things such as deadlines.
It’s easy to get caught up in planning a creative project without remembering team members function best when treated with compassion. Instead of grilling team members with tasks and scaring them with deadlines, seek to understand them. Learn their issues with certain tasks and be sympathetic towards their perspectives. You’ll be surprised at the uptick of productivity that will result.
The right tools for creative project management
The right tool for a creative project requires connectivity that allows users to share and edit materials in real time. This is where digital asset management (DAM) comes into play, as it is at the forefront of management systems – especially for creative teams. DAM stores images, videos and other multimedia in a centralized location. This gives teams easy access to find and share creative thoughts and give feedback.
A DAM also cuts down on tasks that inhibit creative productivity, such as finding assets for other members and dealing with duplicate creative documents. A large part of creative projects is the busywork creatives are dealt throughout a campaign. The further a tool like DAM can cut down on it, the higher the quality of product produced.
Having the right structure around creative projects makes all the difference and nothing builds that structure better than a true understanding of creative teams. Develop your campaign methodologies on this principle to succeed.