Project Management Is Flexibility
Marketing brings creativity, and Project Management brings control. Combining the two is challenging, and delivering a tidy marketing campaign is only possible with a balanced mix of skills and experience.
Creativity doesn’t tend to like boundaries, but in order for a project to be delivered on time and within budget, creativity needs discipline. Communication is key; getting to know your client, enlisting the right people, building the right teams and reliably negotiating between the client and creatives keeps everyone in sync, and keeps the project moving to schedule and budget.
It’s about managing time. And time is not messy. It doesn’t jump, backtrack, pause or slow down. Focused, consistent and methodical planning ensures that a project is developed and implemented with ease, right? Lets see.
Draw a line from brief to plan
Draw a line from communication to contacts
Draw a line from contacts to teams
Draw a line from teams to ideas
Draw a line from ideas to development
Draw a line from development to implementation
If you join all of the lines above, you’ll have a smooth continuous line, or project, right? Wrong. If you take all of those lines and curve, misdirect, double-back and link to another point, you take a linear sequence and turn it into a web. Project management is not a series of unconnected words or plans. It cannot be just about discipline, planning, overseeing or management. Great project management is about flexibility.
Project management is about being prepared for unexpected changes, and having the experience to detour from the plan but keep the project progressing forwards.Billy Synergy Project Manager
Each project and client is unique, and a plan needs to account for this. Project management is not drawing a straight line of objectives and ticking each one off as it is achieved. It’s more like a circle with a web of lines in between. The end needs to go back to the beginning; final implementation needs to go back to the brief, to ensure it fulfils it. It can’t be a simple straight line.
Project management is about knowing that the straight lines will be crossed out, curved, rubbed out, moved and shortened; being prepared for unexpected changes, and having the experience to detour from the plan but keep the project progressing forwards. Messy projects will fail, and projects without flexibility will also fail.
The difference between a messy and flexible approach comes with experience, communication, knowledge and organisation. It’s devising a logical strategy, and implementing it creatively.