Introduction to Creative Project Management: Beginner's Guide
- Adilla
- May 2
- 11 min read
Updated: Aug 22
Project management has significantly evolved, transitioning away from the rigid structures that were previously utilised. As creative projects become increasingly common, it is important to adopt a project management style that aligns with these demands. Project managers must embrace creative processes that allow for flexibility and adaptability to ongoing changes.
Creative teams thrive better in an environment where they can brainstorm and grow their ideas freely. Hence, they need a team leader who understands the controlled chaos of a creative team so they can focus their energy on creating and executing.
Table of Contents: What is Creative Project Management?
What is Creative Project Management?
Creative project management is the organised approach to planning, coordinating, and supervising tasks and resources to effectively execute creative work. Technically, like its traditional counterpart, but without the rigidity and fixed structure.
Project management for creatives has the open space to allow creative teams and artists to change the flow of the project without affecting the deadline or overall goal of the project. Naturally, this is also applied to artist project management as well.
Why is Creative Project Management Important?
Other than ensuring that a creative project runs smoothly, there are a few other reasons why it is important:
Lays Out the End Game
Like any project management, creative or artist project management helps provide the end goal for creative teams to achieve. Whether it is to create a website or design a product, creative project managers can help define these goals and break them down into actionable steps so team members can see how this shared goal can be achieved.
Balances Workload
Once the project is properly laid out with all the creative processes in mind, the workload throughout the team will be allocated according to everyone's creative abilities and strengths, considering their capacity as well. Thus, it minimises the chances of an imbalanced workload among the team members.
Encourages Collaboration and Improves Accountability
Once the team understand their tasks and roles, a well-planned project timeline will foster collaboration. This is important, as it will prevent misunderstandings and conflicts that could interrupt their creative workflow. With a clear outlook on everyone’s responsibilities, team members would be more encouraged to discuss and collaborate while improving their accountabilities.
Enhances Productivity
Now that the project timeline is clear and the assigned tasks are clear, work among the team members becomes efficient, and productivity will be enhanced. This is achievable because effective creative project management eliminates bottlenecks and minimises unnecessary tasks that do not positively impact the project goals.
Common Challenges Creative Project Managers Face
While project management for creatives is gaining popularity and recognition for its benefits, many project managers still face challenges. The challenges in creative project management are not few, so we will be highlighting the most common issues that creative teams face.
Finding The Harmony Between Creativity and Structure
We recognise that creativity doesn’t usually come with structure, one of the first challenges when it comes to project management. Finding the balance between creative freedom and the structured timeline of a project is a challenge that creative leaders typically face.
Handling Tight and Often Unrealistic Deadlines
Creative work can be unpredictable, often facing constant rejections and delayed deadlines. This presents a challenge for creative leaders when estimating timelines for tasks.
Resolving Creative Differences and Conflicts
Creativity manifests in various shapes and forms, which can lead to disagreements during the execution and evaluation of creative work. Achieving a consensus on an accepted creative project often requires a delicate balance of negotiation. It's essential to avoid dismissing creative ideas or making team members feel undervalued.
How Can We Implement Creative Project Management?
While not all project management software provides the tools to implement creative or artistic project management, it can help you handle the administrative work and organise tasks that make your work possible.
What makes project management software work for creatives is that it must have features that are not only asset-centric but also people-centric. The few tools that you can use to execute this management method are:
Asana
CGWire Kitsu
ClickUp
Ftrack
JIRA
Notion
Trello
TESSR
Wrike
These project management tools stand out because they have the necessary features to assist creative teams in planning their projects. These features include the visual view of the project timeline, creating reusable templates for other projects, and a collaborative feature to streamline communication and any necessary updates.
TESSR is creative project management software (with a Forever-Free plan), designed specifically for creatives, as its goal is to provide a tool that is people-centric to encourage team members to focus on what they do best.
2. Practise Management Skills for Creative Work
Project managers and creative project managers do come hand in hand, but they have their differences. What makes the latter stand out is their ability to handle the ‘chaos’ of a creative project, including flexible deadlines, creative processes that differ among creatives, and the unpredictability of an ever-changing industry.
So, what are these key skills that make these managers able to manage creative projects? We break it down further by separating their soft skills, hard skills and technical skills.
2.1 Soft Skills
These are personality traits or interpersonal skills that enable someone to interact effectively and harmoniously with other people as a creative project manager:
a. Leadership With Communication and Collaboration
When you’re managing creative projects, your team will refer to you as they progress with their project. However, being a leader doesn’t only mean leading and guiding your team but also being someone who has empathy and understanding.
Creative leaders must have communication skills that help bring the team together. Miscommunication is bound to happen, especially in a team full of creatives with different passions and perspectives. With empathy and understanding, you will be able to foster an open and honest discussion.
Not only that, but teamwork would also be efficient and productive with good leadership. Creatives need collaboration to be able to produce work that is more competitive and unique. Effective brainstorming and active listening are essential in making sure your team are heard, valued, and utilised in a creative project.
b. Organisation and Time Management with Adaptability
While organisation can be a daunting soft skill, it is made easier if you know how to use organisation tools. This skill comes hand in hand with time management, as being able to predict how long a task would take is something a creative project manager has to ponder.
Knowing how unpredictable creative projects are, these skills need to come with adaptability. The workflow of a creative project may even change in the middle of the project timeline. Thus, a creative project manager knows how to adapt to changes and keep to the project deadline.
c. Conflict Resolution and Problem Solving
As mentioned previously, creatives with different viewpoints and understanding may cause conflict. So, to be able to mediate a conflict while making sure everyone is heard and supported is an important soft skill to have as you manage creative projects.
However, that may not be the only conflict you will go through. If your project unexpectedly goes over budget or misses a deadline, as a creative project manager, you must be prepared to have either backup plans or solutions if an issue arises. Or even ways to improve the result of the project.
2.2 Hard Skills
These hard skills are abilities that would be required to do your role as a creative project manager. Here are the key hard skills to have:
a. Project Planning with Clear Objectives
It goes without saying that you would need to have exceptional project planning skills when it comes to creative projects. As mentioned previously, creative projects are bound to be chaotic because of their unpredictable nature.
With your soft skills equipped and planning a project with that in mind, your project brief should have a clear objective, budget, and schedule, to name a few. This is essential to ensure your team doesn’t feel lost or even lose confidence in your ability as a creative project manager.
b. Project Scoping and Road Mapping
While part of the project planning, this is where you would have to scope and break down the project into finer details without accidentally going away from the initial objectives. This would also be where you scale out the limitations of the projects according to your team’s skills and abilities.
As you scope through your creative projects with the predicted deadline, road mapping the timeline of your project helps you and your team stay on track. Having a visual view of the timeline and schedule of a project as it progresses keeps your team motivated and prevents them from losing track of time.
c. Task Management
This is where you must ensure the tasks that you set for your team fit their capacity and abilities. When breaking down a big task, starting from a big goal and then turning it into a smaller task is a good practice that won’t overwhelm or confuse your team on what to do next.
While task management can be hard to track down and delegate, using task management software that can help you do that will make your job easier and cut down time on you hunting down who is doing what.
For example, our TESSR creative project management software has a module called My Work that helps both you and your team keep track of the tasks that are assigned. Thus, keep visibility and transparency in terms of what your team is working on. This will prevent your team from suffering from burnout with properly distributed work when you understand their roles and tasks.
2.3 Technical Skills
These skills are practical abilities needed to perform certain tasks that require the use of software or tools in general. In this case, the knowledge is needed as a creative project manager when they utilise the tools they need to manage their team.
a. Visualising Data with Gantt Charts
A common way to visualise your project is with a horizontal bar chart. This may seem straightforward when looking at a project timeline at a glance. However, with your soft skills and hard skills put together, you would have to ‘calculate’ the project milestones’ start and end dates and your team’s dependencies as the project progresses.
b. Agile Management
This management method is suitable for product, engineering, and software development teams, but agile management is still suitable to be used for creative, like the animation industry. This method consists of a mixture of methods like lean portfolio management, Scrum, and Kanban put together.
Basically, agile management helps to coordinate their team while still being flexible, which suits the structured chaos of creative projects.
c. Workload Management
As mentioned previously, workload distribution is important in making sure you don’t burn out your teams. This method helps measure the capacity of your team and ensures they aren’t overworked or underworked.
According to the needs and changes that would happen in the middle of the project, tasks would either be reallocated or prioritised. So, creative project managers would need to continuously monitor their team’s workload.
d. Cost Management
For creative projects that are cost-sensitive or on a tight budget, this would be key knowledge to know what part of the project the budget needs to focus on. Being able to predict where the budget goes at the beginning of the budget will prevent any miscalculation of the funds for the project as it progresses.
To know if your cost planning did well, once the project ends, check the predicted cost against the actual cost that has been spent on the project. Not only will this be proof of your project planning skills, but it will also be a benchmark for future creative projects.
Set and Exercise 3 Key Principles of Creative Project Management
As a creative project manager, these are the key principles you should keep in mind as you lead and manage your team.
Clear Project Goals, Objectives, And Deadlines
Every creative project must have clear written goals and objectives to guide the team on where to focus their efforts. With direct expectation of the project, creatives are less likely to be at a loss for what to do. To better list out the project’s objectives, creative project managers can implement the SMART goal when planning out their project.
Progress and Performance Monitor
Make it a habit to seek out feedback and performance checks. While it is less about whether your team is doing their task, it is more about how the project management for creatives was applied. Plus, whether the project deliverables were possible to be delivered within the set timeline.
Risk Management
Part of a key principle that tends to be overlooked for creative project management is analysing the risks that could happen within a project. Creative projects tend to have unpredictable outcomes with their chaotic nature. Here is a list of what you can take note of:
Additional objectives were added in the middle of the project progress
Changing priorities
A team member on an extended leave
Budget constraints
How Does the Creative Project Management Process Look Like?
The process of creative project management can be broken down into a simple 5-step process. Although it is not a simple process, following a framework before starting a plan is a good approach.
Step 1: Brainstorm Session
Before any project begins, brainstorming is needed to lay down and build the foundation of the project. Discussions should be open-ended, and potential ideas should be explored thoroughly.
Step 2: Planning the Project
When the objectives are agreed upon, detailed planning starts. Drafts of creative briefs and timelines are written down while taking note of the resources and roles in the project.
Step 3: Execute The Plan
Once the project is undertaken, creative work is developed and improved. Ideas turned to results, and each result is either redirected or kept and refined.
Step 4: Feedback and Review
Improvements or changes can happen in the middle of a project because of the unpredictable nature of a creative project. So, feedback from the team is essential to know if the project objectives are reachable with the fixed resources and timeline.
Step 5: Closing the Project
When the project ends, post-project evaluations are required to know what worked and what didn't throughout the project. This is so that creative project leaders know whether they can continue the same method or change the way they conduct their projects.
Additional Resources and Recommendations to Better Manage Creative Projects:
Key Takeaways on Creative Project Management & Team Structure
Creative projects often operate in “controlled chaos,” which requires flexible yet focused management through creative project management.
A project manager who truly understands creative workflows can task project clarity without abandoning creativity.
Creative project management goes beyond traditional methods by allowing room for unpredictability.
Delays or shifts in direction during the process are expected and should be part of each creative project’s risk management plan.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Are creative operations the same as creative project management?
Although both roles support creative teams during projects, their focuses differ. Creative operations concentrate on the entire creative process, evaluating team members to identify areas for improvement. In contrast, creative project management is centred on individual projects, acting as a bridge between team members and the clients involved in those projects.
Would multiple creative project management software be needed when conducting creative projects?
Not necessarily, as it entirely depends on your creative project. When it comes to tools to conduct project management for creatives, consider what is essential in your project. Are customisable features a key? Would a more visualised timeline work better for your team?
Is it difficult to learn creative project management?
It can be challenging when you are new, but not entirely difficult. While it has the fundamental principles of a project manager, creative project managers must be prepared for the flexibility required to accommodate changes throughout the project timeline.
Author Bio
With a background in Arts English, Adilla has been a casual writer for various hobbies, including parodies of animated shows and plots for board games like Dungeons & Dragons. She loves to read anything and everything from fantasy stories to articles on tips and tricks. Currently, Adilla resides in Malaysia and is a creative writer at TESSR. One day, she is eager to publish her book. To know more about her, check out her LinkedIn.
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