MARKETING REPELS PROJECT MANAGEMENT
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 isn’t difficult, but it’s key; getting to know your clients, syncing creatives, and managing workloads keeps the project moving to schedule and budget.
It’s about 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 clients
Draw a line from clients to creatives
Draw a line from creatives to ideas
Draw a line from ideas to client presentation
Draw a line from ideas to development
Draw a line from developments to client updates
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.
Each project and client is unique, and a plan needs to account for this. Projects don’t move in a generic straight line, and you can’t just tick off a neat list of tasks. It’s more like a circle with a web of lines in between. And the end needs to go back to the beginning. The final outcome needs to be checked against the brief, to ensure that the original objectives have been achieved.
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.