Creative Project Manager: What And How

creative project manager

A creative project manager’s main duty is to help the production team manage the daily operations of the creative team. Because different studios have different perspectives on the role, it can be challenging to define the role of the creative project manager. What about creative project management? How to be a creative project manager? Continue reading, you will find the answer.

What is Creative Agency Project Management?

A creative project manager at a creative agency oversees the creative team as they collaborate with a wide range of clients.

There are a few key differences between working at an agency and working in-house within a company:

  • One focus vs. many. The sole company that all in-house creatives and creative project managers work for is the focus of all of their work. The team and project manager have more variety in the subjects of their creative projects in an agency setting because they are working with many different clients.
  • Depth vs. breadth. Since they only work for one company, in-house creatives can gradually gain a thorough understanding of the brand, its target market, and its goals. However, because they serve a wider variety of clients, creative agencies receive both less depth and more breadth in terms of these factors.

What Does a Creative Project Manager Do?

A creative project manager is someone who works primarily with creative individuals on projects ranging from website design to video production (people like graphic designers, copywriters, UX designers, and photographers). Creative project managers must promote inspiration, respect the creative process, and value the project team.

For instance, at Monday.com, creative project managers supervise the work of creative specialists who are engaged in activities like video production, offline ad creation, marketing design, and more.

This position might be right for you if you like collaborating with people from different functional areas, have an eye for detail, and can manage business goals while maintaining creativity (much like a traditional project manager).

Why is Creative Project Management Important?

A useful framework is provided by creative project management to guarantee that work is completed on schedule, within budget, and to a consistently high standard. Here are just a few reasons why creative project management is important:

  • Ensures creative projects are briefed clearly and work is evenly distributed to appropriate team members
  • By acting as the key coordinator between the creative team and those briefing projects, expectations can be managed and met appropriately regarding budgets, deadlines, and the creative direction of a project
  • Prevents creative bottlenecks by monitoring the progress and objectives of projects to ensure everyone is on track
  • Coordinates feedback and approval processes to ensure everyone is satisfied prior to the sign-off of a project

What is Creative Agency Project Management?

A project manager at a creative agency oversees the team’s efforts to deliver creative work to a client, which can include everything from marketing campaigns to website designs and creative productions.

Project management at a creative agency involves:

Managing creatives. Creative project managers are in charge of a variety of people. You might be overseeing web designers, UX designers, copywriters, branding experts, web/mobile app developers, and more, depending on the project’s specific needs. You’re in charge of a group of people with various levels of expertise and skill who are all working toward the same objective.

creative project manager

Managing time, cost, and scope. There are numerous moving parts in the management of creative projects. A project manager’s responsibility includes making sure the team delivers the promised creative assets within predetermined constraints, as well as staying within budget and meeting deadlines.

Additionally, you can discover creative talent on influencer networks like Trend.io, which acts as a network for top creators.

What Are the Key Terms Used in Creative Project Management?

To get you familiar with the terminology used in this field, let’s now take a look at a few of the terms that are frequently used in creative project management.

Creative Assets

Creative assets sometimes referred to as digital assets, are visual files that help your brand tell a story. Your creative materials (for social media, email, blog content, and the accompanying visuals) might be used in a marketing campaign. An e-book, course, or catalog are examples of products that could be made entirely out of creative assets.

The visual footage, musical score, animation, digital logo, and other elements are examples of creative assets for a video production company. If you’re working on a marketing campaign, creative assets include your logo, company photos (in various sizes for various platforms), written copy, videos, and infographics.

Creative Workflow

A creative workflow is a set process to help your team complete a series of tasks. A workflow enables you and your team to progress through your project with confidence rather than having to start from scratch for each project. All projects have steps that must be taken in order to be completed, whether they are developing a commercial or building a website.

It might look something like this:

  1. Receive client request
  2. Establish the scope of work
  3. Brainstorm and delegate
  4. Create project timeline
  5. Check-in with team members
  6. Send for review
  7. Make revisions
  8. Send final project

You can avoid misunderstandings and increase team productivity by establishing a clear creative workflow.

Creative Resource Management

Your job as a creative project manager is to plan and navigate effective resource management. There are two major creative resources to manage:

  • Team. It’s crucial to understand and utilize your creatives’ strengths where they are most applicable because creative marketing teams frequently have a variety of skill sets and strengths.
  • Time. Time management is crucial because creatives function best when given clear guidelines, deadlines, and expectations for project turnaround.

Knowing what your team is capable of and then keeping them focused are the keys to managing creative resources.

How to Become a Creative Project Manager?

A bachelor’s degree in communication, marketing, journalism, or creative writing is typically the first step toward the qualifications needed for a career as a creative project manager. Additionally, you must demonstrate managerial experience and the capacity to strike a balance between encouraging creativity and staying on task. It may also be beneficial if you have experience developing creative projects. Despite the fact that it’s not always the case, creative project managers frequently rise through the ranks of a creative department. You develop a deeper understanding of the creative process as a result of the knowledge and experience you gain along the way. For this position, you’ll need to be a strong leader, have excellent written and verbal communication skills, and have the ability to supervise creative staff.

creative project manager

How to Manage Creatives?

Give Recognition

All people—creatives included—succeed when they are acknowledged and praised, according to management fundamentals. Because everyone can see which tasks have been finished (and by whom), using a project management tool like Monday.com is extremely effective.)

By jointly celebrating those accomplishments at the end of the week, you can encourage your creative team to feel confident and capable.

Create Transparent Processes.

Processes are necessary for creative teams to plan, delegate, create, check progress on projects, review them, and put them into action. Be open and honest with your team about everything, including KPIs, workload, operations, and the reasons behind each step along the way.

Ask your team for feedback whenever you can to promote transparency. You can foster a culture of trust and collaboration by being transparent about the ideas behind your workflows and soliciting suggestions.

Set Clear Goals

When a project has so many components, it is simple to get bogged down in the particulars. Naturally, since you want the project completed correctly, you want to direct your team. Micromanaging, however, will impede creativity in addition to decreasing team productivity. Instead of managing tasks, try managing the week, and establish clear objectives beforehand.

As a creative project manager, it’s your job to balance structure and team creativity. The balance between those two things can be maintained by having clear objectives.

Software

Planning is difficult enough. Without an established project management system, it’s simple to get bogged down in the small print or lose sight of the big picture. monday.com can help you plan and produce more creative content while helping your team stay on track.

What Are the Four Main Processes in a Project Lifecycle?

Initiation
A creative asset’s requirement is identified during the initiation phase by the marketing team or a stakeholder. The project manager for the creative project sets goals and objectives and determines and agrees on the project’s scope. A project plan is created as a result of the documentation of deadlines and procedures for feedback and updates.

Even though the creative project manager typically oversees the initiation stage, it probably necessitates input from other team members. Each member of the team and each stakeholder in the project should understand exactly what needs to be delivered, when, and why. If you are in charge of external stakeholders, such as clients—like with creative agency project management—agree on how updates will be communicated, and when. The first point of contact should be designated for important updates, and if necessary, you can give different team members who are experts in different project areas the responsibility of communicating directly with each other.

Planning
Here, inventive project managers construct a thorough project plan based on the business case. On the basis of benchmarks and deliverables, break down the tasks and create a timeline of activities, workflows, and responsibilities.

Now is the time to put together your creative project team, if you haven’t already. The scope of your project may also make you realize that you require additional staff. You can set a budget and coordinate procurement once the project’s technical and human resource requirements have been determined.

Every project carries some risk, so take the time to think about potential obstacles and develop backup plans. Throughout this process, keep having meetings with your team to make sure you’ve covered everything.

Execution
The actual work now begins. Today’s creative teams frequently use collaboration tools to automate a large portion of the administrative tasks involved in executing creative projects, but it’s important to review your workflows to ensure that the work is aligned to meet objectives and to check in with project stakeholders to ensure any potential issues are resolved.

Throughout the execution phase, communication is absolutely essential. Ensure that quality is being monitored at all times and that every team member has received a thorough briefing.

Sign-off
You should gather and compile any last-minute criticism during the sign-off phase before conducting a final review and delivering the completed deliverables. Additionally, this is the time to consider the project’s successes and failures, suggest changes for the future, and acknowledge the positive aspects.

Conclusion

Project budgets, timelines, work scope, and other factors are planned and organized by creative project managers. They act as the go-between for the creative team and the client to set expectations and keep everyone on track. Do you want to be a creative project manager?