Karen Axtell

At GA Creative, our role is to serve as an extension of your marketing team – helping you succeed in branding efforts, marketing and advertising campaigns, campaign management, and measurement. While we’re widely known for our outstanding creative solutions and strategies, creative project management is the secret weapon that ensures we deliver large volumes of work, on tight deadlines and on budget.

FIVE CREATIVE PROJECT MANAGEMENT SUCCESS FACTORS

Often people ask us how we do it. Here are the five success factors we’ve found are critical to any effective creative or marketing program and some insights we’ve learned along the way.

1. Project management controls: Clearly define the project scope, timeline, and budget in a creative brief.
2. Stakeholder management plan: Create a plan to identify and agree on roles and responsibilities of stakeholders and decision makers up front.
3. Methodology: Establish a project methodology and stick to it.
4. Technology: Make sure to identify the project management technology(ies) that the team will be using and ensure the team is familiar in how to use them.
5. Creative options: Allow the team to compare creative solutions against the creative brief.

CREATIVE PROJECT MANAGEMENT CONTROLS

As part of any project planning process, when it comes to defining the project scope, timeline, and budget, you need to get it all in writing. Develop a project brief that outlines:

Business goals and key performance metrics

Clarity on your overarching project goals and how you will connect the dots and measure the results of your efforts is essential. It’s powerful at every step along the way to remind the team of the goals and performance metrics to keep these top-of-mind throughout the process. Acknowledging what you’d ideally like to track and measure vs. what you are able to is key. Where possible, troubleshoot how you can improve your campaign data and metrics.

Functional specifications and creative preferences

You know the saying “measure twice, cut once.” You need to design to any functional specifications from the beginning to avoid having to re-do work—which can affect the scope of work, timeline, and budget. Equally important is to have any brand or style guidance. For some clients, this can be very stringent and detailed, whereas others can be quite light. While brand and style guidance can vary, getting preferences from the team is incredibly valuable. It can be tough to get people to articulate their likes and dislikes. We find that for branding and website projects, in particular, it’s helpful to have clients give us a list of some of their favorite brands or websites and why.

Timeline & budget

When developing a project schedule, you need to account for internal agency reviews and client-side reviews. Once a timeline is approved, we get the necessary reviews scheduled on the calendar – this helps us all be accountable while serving as a forcing function to keep things on track. For large-scale projects, this can sometimes be a daily “stand up”—a quick 15-minute check-in to weekly or twice weekly check-in calls.

When the due date and budget aren’t realistic given the scope of work or necessary review cycles on the client side, it requires creativity to determine what we can accomplish in the desired time period and budget. For websites, we often build out a site map and phase in select features, functionality or content. For campaigns, we focus on the lower production assets first which can be turned around more quickly than higher production assets such as video, phasing in the different media as appropriate to get things kicked off as soon as possible.

STAKEHOLDER MANAGEMENT PLAN

In creative project management, the biggest mistake is to only focus on the “three legs of the stool” —the project scope, timeline and budget. People—your stakeholders and decisionmakers—are the fourth leg of the stool when it comes to this project management analogy. It’s important to give them a voice in shaping the goals and criteria to evaluate the strategy and creative. Create a stakeholder management plan to ensure that everyone is in agreement on roles and responsibilities up front. Engage them at critical milestones along the way. Buy-in at every stage leads to better harmony and stronger solutions. While it’s common for new stakeholders or decision makers to step into the process mid-stream, take time to educate them on the process to date and try to bring them along; otherwise, you may find that you have to go back to square one.

Stakeholders and decision makers often have the most challenging schedules. One of the best practices in creative project management is to schedule key meetings on everyone’s calendars up front. We also make it clear that should a key stakeholder or decision maker push out a meeting, there is a domino effect on the rest of the timeline either because the meeting is rescheduled for a later date, or worse, the team decides to forge forward without buy-in and feedback from that individual before moving to the next step. These meetings help serve as a forcing function to keep the project on time.

CREATIVE PROJECT MANAGEMENT METHODOLOGY

There are a lot of project management methodologies out there, but two of the most common are Waterfall project management and Agile project management.

Waterfall is considered a traditional project management method that takes a sequential step-by-step approach – where progress cascades from top to bottom. With Waterfall, the goal is broken down into a series of easy, achievable steps built around each milestone, with each milestone decision requiring approval and consensus before moving on. Critical path project management is a variation of the Waterfall methodology and promotes on-time completion by adding time buffers. Both are easy, sequential processes that are simple to understand and manage. And, they are good for teams of stakeholders and decisionmakers who aren’t familiar with some of the more complex methodologies.

Agile project management is a rapid iterative process by which teams collaborate in the creative process, breaking the project down into smaller tasks, with the flexibility to reverse course to address any issues between phases.  Initially introduced as a method for software development, Agile project management rotates through product, design, coding, and testing phases through the project and goals and requirements can be changed or modified at any step along the way. Agile works well with creative exploration when the end goal is not clearly defined or where the requirements aren’t fluid.

Often we find that we need to employ a hybrid approach to creative project management. This can sometimes mean that in the beginning of the project, we use Agile methodologies to help define the end goal(s) and requirements. Then, when it comes to execution on a clearly defined goal with requirements, we can take a Waterfall approach to keep things moving.

Whatever methodology you use, it’s critical that the process is understood, respected, and adopted by all involved.

PROJECT MANAGEMENT TOOLS

Basecamp, Monday.com, Atlassian products including Trello and Jira, as well as Smartsheet are all great options for creative project management. As with project management methodologies, its critical that the project management tools are adopted by the entire workgroup, stakeholder, and decision-making team and used in the same way for greatest effectiveness.

CREATIVE PROJECT MANAGEMENT

A well-written creative brief is key to developing creative options that map back to the goals and strategy outlined. When it comes to evaluating creative, it’s important to review the brief and present the concepts in a way that addresses the goals (musts) and the preferences (wants) as well as the rationale behind the solutions. With large teams of reviewers, we like to create a ratings sheet that uses criteria from the brief so that each person can score the different concepts. We tally the results and then discuss the options that rose to the top. This helps us narrow the discussion if there is a clear winner.

PUTTING CREATIVE PROJECT MANAGEMENT PRINCIPLES INTO PRACTICE

Here are just a few examples where the team at GA Creative flexed our project management muscles, turning on a dime to deliver under pressures in terms of time and budget constraints or large stakeholder teams

• For Swedish Health Services, we launched a recruitment media campaign to respond to the need for critical talent due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our team rolled up our sleeves and dove right in. Having the right media partner and video and sound engineering talent at hand allowed us to accomplish this quickly. GA Creative works closely with Goodway Group to drive digital media campaigns based on sound strategies and research that deliver results.
• For a global B2B software firm, we had to get creative from a project management point of view in order to design, write, build, and launch a lead generation website in just 14 weeks. When the new Chief Revenue Officer at a B2B tech firm said he needed a lead gen website up yesterday, we jumped at the challenge. According to Jeff Welsh, Principal + Creative Services, “To meet the aggressive timeline, the design needed to be flexible enough to allow for just about any type of content. By creating individual content sections on long scrolling pages, we could add or remove sections without affecting the overall design.” Having a stellar developer, willing to take a waterfall approach to building this site was key. Thanks to Bright Spectrum, we were able to pull off this feat and launch the site on the CEO’s birthday with great fanfare.
• For Northwest Kidney Centers, they need a gallery and wall display to correspond with their 50^th anniversary and fundraising efforts in just 12 weeks. The Public Relations Director at Northwest Kidney Centers, said, “When we commissioned GA Creative to design museum exhibits, we imposed an unreasonably short deadline so that we could open for our 50th anniversary. They tackled the job with good cheer and came through for us as always.” The gallery and wall display serve to educate financial donors about the history of kidney disease treatment, progress, and the organization’s role in advancing kidney care.
• Designing a 60-page annual report, from zero to final file, in just two weeks. We’ve been helping PACCAR with their annual report for since 1999 and have a fine-tuned process in place. Having an approved design template prior to the availability of content, including financials, enables us to pull this piece together in such a short timeframe year after year.

Creative project management doesn’t have to weigh you down

As part of any process, it’s important to anticipate and prepare to mitigate risks including:

1. Scope creep due to large scale deviations in strategy, goals, requirements, or creative direction
2. Shifts in the timeline
3. Budget restrictions
4. Changes to the stakeholder or decision-making team
5. Failure to commit to the process – all it takes is one person to knock down the stool!

With the right project management controls, stakeholder management plan, as well as team adoption of project management methodology and technology, you have the basis for a successful creative project. And, giving teams the opportunity to weigh in on creative only furthers your chances for success. While often times decisionmakers and stakeholders don’t have creative backgrounds, they enjoy being part of the process and more importantly, celebrate in the success of the completed project.