May 11, 2011

6 Easy Steps for Understanding Your Creative Project Management

Project Management Process

Six Basic Project Management Steps

Getting your feedback on project management helped me realize that a handy dandy graphic always makes large concepts easier to understand and break down. At it’s most basic, project management involves these six steps:

  1. Goal Setting
  2. Defining Scope
  3. Estimating
  4. Planning
  5. Executing
  6. Reviewing

I’ve mentioned that I’m tackling project management at step two, defining scope. There is already a lot of good content on setting goals out there. Having clear goals is an absolute prerequisite to project management, if you don’t know where you want to go, you can’t figure out what you need to do to get there. However the bulk of Project management focuses on the part that happens after you’ve set your goals.

Defining scope is when you look at all of the potential projects you want to tackle and make the hard call about which ones to pursue and which ones to abandon (or put on hold.) Your goals and objectives are the criteria against which you decide which ones make the cut.

Estimating helps you determine how long it’s going to carry out the projects you’ve set out to do. Once you’ve got your scope down, you estimate how long you think it will take. Once you do this, it makes sense to revisit your scope and see if you need to cut more or maybe you’ll find that you may have time to do more than you thought. We left off here, and I’ll continue with estimation next week.

Planning is when you map out your scope against time. When you look at your schedule and see how many hours are actually in the day. It’s when you can look at all the activities in your life (family, friends, exercise) etc. and see how to plot in your work. It also helps you really SEE what you don’t have time for and helps you become more conscious of you spend your precious time.

Executing is the doing. This is where we’ll talk about resistance, tracking the time it really takes you to do something, streamlining your work process, sitting down to focus and minimizing distractions.

Reviewing is ‘coming up for air’. Revisiting your goals, your scope, your plan. Checking progress, confirming that you’re on track (or not, and if so, why?) determining whether or not your goals and scope still make sense.

There is a lot of stuff under each of these buckets. I‘ll use the graphic to help illustrate ‘where we are’ in the overall topic.

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March 8, 2011

Creativity vs. Structure – A Phony Dilemma

'Creative Inspiration' Printable 2011 Calendar

From e.m.papers 'Creative Inspiration' Printable 2011 Calendar - click image for more info

Right brain versus left brain, analysis versus exploration, creativity versus structure and order. Many people think these ways of being are in opposition to each other. My experience has told me otherwise: rather than working against one another, these modes actually support each other.

A Tale of Two Bosses

This first became evident to me at the beginning of my career, when I worked for two book designers at the same time. The two designers shared a space, and each guy was growing his own book design agency. They decided to pool their efforts and hire a graphic design student from the local art school as an intern (yours truly.)

I started the job and loved it, the studio was fun, we were working for great clients and both men were talented, fun guys with impressive experience in the magazine and publishing industry.

Beyond the surface, however, the two were a study in contrasts.

One guy was a little more ‘fly by the seat of his pants’ and didn’t seem to have a clear process for planning and executing his work (he may have, but if he did, it was in his head.) And he while he created a lot of really beautiful designs, it seemed he always had a handful of the same clients and no real strategy for growing his business. I never knew what he expected of me, and wasn’t quite comfortable working for him. He also had a very messy desk.

The other designer, whose work area was always immaculate (can you see where this is going?), had a very systematic way of approaching his business. He had lists of what needed to be accomplished. He had a process for organizing, storing and backing up our files. Although it was informal, he seemed to have a very deliberate strategy for helping me grow and routinely increased my responsibilities, which freed him up to pursue lucrative side projects, like magazine consulting.

The second guy’s business literally grew before my eyes.

I started working for him exclusively. He promoted me to designer and together we were incredibly productive and creative. We routinely acquired new clients. Our books won design awards. We pitched to and won projects from publishers like Chronicle Books and Harper Collins.

I started earning a bonus based on our monthly revenue. As a result, I paid attention to how much the business was billing and noticed the amount steadily increased each month.

Flourishing Within Structure

Both designers produced amazing work. However one seemed to grow his business and his body of work through systematic planning and working in a structured, orderly way – with no discernible impact to creativity. I have seen this played out over and over in different scenarios throughout my career, despite the perception by some that in order to be creative you have to be chaotic, disorganized, or unhampered by structure or constraints.

How about you? How do you reconcile creativity, structure, and productivity?

Filed Under: Product Management Tagged With: , 15 Comments