Agile project management, originally designed for software development, can be effectively adapted to the animation industry to enhance creativity, collaboration, and flexibility. PIXAR is the frontrunner of this concept—they’re currently the only widely known animation studio that has adapted the Agile project management style.
Here’s a structured exploration of how Agile principles can be applied to animation projects:
Introduction to Agile Project Management
In its purest definition, Agile project management focuses on integrating feedback in sustained releases of a software project. There are two widespread frameworks of Agile—Scrum and Kanban.
Scrum involves setting a handful of principles and goals, that give enough leeway for flexibility, without sacrificing quality or collective vision. More importantly, these goals are to be completed within short timeframes, called sprints—a name rather befitting of Agile project management.
Kanban typically values transparency above all. This includes efficient and effective communication, with tasks often depicted on a board, allowing members of a team to be up to date constantly.
And this sounds all good and well—but how is it relevant to project management? As with many other methods and techniques, Agile project management is transferrable to industries outside of software development. Its concept aligns with the dynamic and iterative nature of animation projects. Constant feedback and improvement, flexibility in art and creative collaboration are all crucial to successful, structured approaches to larger animation projects.
Key Agile Principles for Animation
1. Iterative Development
Break down the animation project into smaller, manageable iterations—or sprints. This ensures that your team of animators aren’t overworked and burnt out, while maintaining a production quality that is up to date and standard. While the latter is self-explanatory in its importance, the former is just as critical. With artists that are in an art block or a slump, the quality of production can fall—and it’s simply humane to care for your team.
2. Continuous Feedback
Incorporate regular feedback to refine and improve the animation throughout the project. In an industry as volatile and subjective as art is, it’s only natural for the art of an animation project to be iterated, based on the feedback of higher-ups. But this isn’t simply limited to the visuals of the animation but can include music and scripts.
3. Flexibility and Adaptability
Allow for changes in project scope and direction based on feedback and evolving requirements. We’ve well-established the importance of the improvement of a creative project, but it’s just as important to address a key principle that makes it work. If you allow buffer space for change in your animation, you’re also allowing room for growth and improvement.
4. Collaboration
Foster a collaborative environment where team members—including animators, storyboard artists, and directors—work in unity. This might be obvious, but it can be difficult to achieve, especially in animation. Individuals may have differing opinions or tastes, but it must be learnt to make compromises for the best interests of a team and project. To help with this, regular meetings should be held. It matters how this is done as well—avoid dismissing ideas rashly or disallowing others to speak.
Implementing Agile Methodologies in Animation Projects
Scrum Framework
1. Roles: For the sake of organisation, the Scrum framework will delegate the following roles: Product Owner, Scrum Master and Development Team. Contextually, this means an animation’s Creative Director who would lead a team towards their subjective definitions of success; a Production Manager and a Creative Supervisor/Lead who would handle planning, collecting details and supporting a team; and the Animators—the main artists of the bunch.
2. Sprints: Organise work into sprints, with each sprint focusing on delivering a specific component of the animation. For example, the first sprint of a brand-new animation project may be scriptwriting, followed by storyboarding.
3. Daily Stand-Ups: Conduct brief, yet comprehensive meetings daily to discuss progress, identify obstacles, and plan the next steps. This is greatly beneficial, especially in identifying blockages/challenges before they impact the performance of the whole project.
4. Sprint Reviews: Hold reviews to assess completed work and retrospectives to discuss improvements for future sprints. These should be held at the end of a sprint goal’s agreed date, where members of a team take turns to go over the work they have completed and what they have learnt throughout the sprint.
Kanban Method
1. Visual Workflow: Use Kanban boards to visualise the workflow of an animation project. For better organisation, it may be best to allocate columns that represent the different stages of production, like “Concept”, “Design”,” Animation”,” Review”, and “Finalisation”.
2. Work-in-Progress Limits: Agree on and set limits on the number of tasks in each stage, for laser-focus and to prevent bottlenecks. When you can put your energy into a smaller set of tasks, rather than spreading yourself thin across many, the result is likely to be polished—and with a smaller workload, teams can redirect focus onto ad hocs or removing blockages.
3. Continuous Delivery: Prioritise the continuous delivery of completed animation segments, which builds a structure of cyclic reviews and adjustments. This rhythm guides teams towards consistency and facilitates constant improvement.
Benefits and Challenges of Agile for Animation Projects
Benefits
Enhanced Flexibility
Agile project management allows for amendments and improvements in animation projects, based on feedback and creative changes. With the competitive nature of modern markets and the sheer nature of the arts, the animation industry is a dynamic one. Studios must stay on their toes to ensure that their projects stay relevant and with Agile, projects are likely to have more space to accommodate this.
Improved Collaboration
Regular interactions and feedback sessions foster better communication and teamwork among animators and other stakeholders. Besides avoiding conflict, the environment created can rouse new ideas and innovations. Agile project management encourages teams to freely voice out opinions and bounce ideas off of each other.
Faster Delivery
Iterative sprints lead to progress made in increments, allowing for quicker delivery of animation segments and early feedback. To elaborate further, if mistakes are caught early for example, there’s much less to go through to correct—especially so if it was a mistake that affects what comes after it.
Higher Quality
Continuous feedback and refinement contribute to higher quality and a more polished final output. This can be credited to the incremental structure of Agile project management—with tasks and reviews done in smaller volumes, attention to detail becomes second nature.
Challenges and Solutions
1. Creative Constraints
Challenge: While key features of Agile include flexibility, it still embodies a structured approach. Balancing that, with the freedom required for creation might be difficult. Animation is an art, so it’s inherent that skeleton plans or scripts will evolve throughout a project, even without rhyme or reason.
Solution: Allow flexibility within sprints, for creative exploration and innovation. Remember to tweak Agile to suit your industry’s and team’s needs. It’s a process that aims to help you, at the end of the day.
2. Team Dynamics
Challenge: Ensuring effective collaboration and communication among members who have varying roles and responsibilities is a road bump that all teams face—which may pose a challenge, especially with the introduction of a new project management principal, like Agile.
Solution: Establish clear roles and responsibilities of each role, to avoid clashes or the pointing of fingers. Simultaneously, it’s encouraged to cultivate a workplace culture of open communication and collaboration.
3. Managing Iterations and Deadlines
Challenge: Ensuring that iterative cycles align with production deadlines and milestones can be difficult. Dates can get delayed or moved forward, milestones might not be linear simply due to the subjective quality of art—which may fall out of line with previously set sprints.
Solution: Define realistic sprint goals and timelines, while regularly reviewing progress to adjust plans according to deadlines. Your plans can be flexible, where it needs to be.
4. Resistance to Change
Challenge: Team members accustomed to traditional approaches may resist adopting Agile practices. It’s a common issue, yet a leading variable in the failure of implementing change. If teams aren’t in sync, Agile project management will struggle to work.
Solution: Fearing change may be due to insecurity in personal skill, or reluctance in the effectiveness of said change—so instil confidence in your team members by leading by example, and demonstrating the benefits of Agile and training.
5. Maintaining Quality Control
Challenge: Iterative development can sometimes lead to inconsistent quality, if not managed properly. Underprepared teams who don’t have a good grasp on Agile’s concept, or who are careless due to the frequency of sprints can exacerbate this issue.
Solution: Hold regular review sessions for quality checks within sprint meetings, to ensure that each batch of tasks meets desired standards—remember that iterations value quality over quantity.
So, is Agile Possible for Animation Studios?
PIXAR has proved that Agile is possible with Animation, yet it still is a foreign practice in the industry. Thus far, it is primarily studios that utilise CG Animation that are the most encouraged about using Agile in their processes, some going as far as to claim that CG needs to be more Agile.
Agile implementation has never been easy, as it was designed for a completely different, specialised industry—software development. Multiple others have been trying to introduce Agile into their workplace—especially startups—after noticing a rise in companies who have succeeded by using it, such as Spotify, LEGO, Barclays and Fitbit.
Conclusively, it completely depends on how well Agile methodology fits into your company's values, culture and characters to be able to pull through with this method.
Author Bio
From Malaysia, Leia Emeera is a writer at TESSR and a published author. She has been putting pen to paper ever since she learned how to, and has an anthology to her name, titled 'Ten'. Leia loves music, games and her beloved labrador retriever, George. She aims to further her studies in English Literature and Creative Writing the moment her gap year ends. 'Till then, you will find her sitting behind a desk, writing with TESSR.
Connect with her on LinkedIn: Leia Emeera
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