Preliminary Results From Research On Managing Creative Projects

A list of questions for managing creative projects that Michal Domanski and Sean Murphy developed from interviews with team leads.

Preliminary Results From Research On Managing Creative Projects

If you manage a firm that provides creative, design, or professional services you have to balance making a profit with investing in your team. If you are  struggling to increase project profitability you may be interested in preliminary results from an ongoing research effort that has identified key questions that can help you manage and deliver creative projects at a profit.

The true measure for project profitability factors in not only your costs and revenue but also your need to

• improve current capabilities,
• develop new capabilities,
• establish new relationships,
• and acquire new domain knowledge.

I am collaborating with Michal Domanski on interviews with creative service firm managers to understand how they address these challenges. Our focus has been on the questions that they have found most useful to manage creative projects for improved customer value and increased profitability. We have summarized our findings to date in a document entitled “Value, Profit, and Creativity: Questions That Help You Manage And Deliver Profitable Projects,” which is appended below.

The document outlines a simple process to

• improve the accuracy of your estimates,
• deploy your team more effectively,
• eliminate sources of error and inefficiency,
• and identify opportunities that successful projects have now enabled.

If you manage a firm that delivers creative or design projects and would like to take part in a brief interview please contact me to take part in the ongoing research.

Value, Profit, and Creativity

Questions That Help You  Manage & Deliver Profitable Projects

1. A Brief Introduction To a Work In Progress

This book is written for managers and executives who run a creative services firm, in particular for the founders/partners in a firm with more people, tasks and projects than you can manage in e-mail or a project room whiteboard.

Our rule of thumb for this threshold of “more to manage than you can remember” is at least three projects proceeding simultaneously support by at least half a dozen people, where most of the team has expertise needed for more than one project. Obviously the challenges increase for larger firms.

To have a common understanding, in this book by “creative” we mean companies that face challenges of devising solutions to problems that don’t give you direct simple metrics to measure an outcome of your work. This will normally involve the need for diagnosis of the customer’s latent needs and true situation, and the an iterative approach to designing or improvising a set of outcomes that result in a measurable improvement in the customer’s business. And while improvement is measurable, the way to connect outcomes and actions is always different.

This book is the result of our continuing study of a simple question: how to measure and improve the productivity of a creative team as a whole.

Our research on managing creative projects is an ongoing effort: please contact us if you would like to take part.

2. Why Study Creative Projects?

The end focus for any business owner is enough profit to sustain the company, learning that enables similar projects to be delivered more effectively, and new knowledge and capabilities that enable higher value projects to be proposed and delivered.

What are the key challenges that a creative agency faces?
We interviewed a number of owners of creative agencies who are managing an average of three projects monthly. Teams were between 10 and 40 members.

They ranged from software development houses, engineering services firms, to law and accounting firms.

Some common characteristics of the creative agency were:

• Customer collaboration is essential to the work process
• Work process is typically iterative
• Outcome is the result of an interaction between deliverable and people
• Client pays for the outcome, not the deliverable
• Work is project oriented not transactional

The key questions

Creative project team managers need to ask four key questions:

1. Did the customer pay the agreed amount for the project, if not, why?
2. Did the project generate any non-financial gains, e.g. referrals, testimonials, new capabilities or new market knowledge?
3. How much had to spent on non-billable problems and errors?
4. How much went into “non-value added” work?

The first two questions address income and other compensation or consideration that flow from a project. While money is important, in many cases creative teams may agree to lower fees in exchange for the opportunity to work on an interesting project or the chance to explore a new markets

The latter two questions focus on operational expenses and investment. For creative companies the interpretation of whether a line item is an operational expense or an investment can be very fluid.

3. Improving Creative Work

As we explored the management of creative projects we found these questions helped creative teams discover useful metrics and improve productivity at a team level. In a way, you and your team have to become your own lab rats: experimenting with explicit changes to your methodology and processes and assessing their impact during and at the end of the project.

Project Fit

A few important questions here:

1. Did your team deliver on time?
2. Did your team have the skills and knowledge necessary to achieve the results your client expected?
3. Have you expanded your skill set or did you have to hire external help?

The first two questions are about whether you should try such project again. As a leader you want to plan so that your company advances but you also want to be sure that if something goes wrong you are able to contain the situation.

For example, if you run a creative agency specializing in improving user experience and user-to-customer conversions you may have problems with completing a project that is based 100% on working with social media.

The last question is the place to check if your team had an opportunity to grow as experts. If you had to hire external talent it may be sign that you either miscalculated your teams’ capability or that their focus was diverted somewhere else.

A worst case scenario is taking a project that was challenging enough for your team to grow but manageable–but then hiring outsiders because team focus was required somewhere else. It damages your team’s morale and hurts you financially.

Having answered those questions after each project and checking those records before a new one gives you the ability to predict what may happen with a new one.

Timeline and Outcomes: How Accurately Did You Estimate Them?

The design of the metrics you will use to interpret intermediate results, validate deliverables, and assess client outcomes is one of the first actions to perform. Including these in a creative brief or project scope document that you review with the client helps to ensure that both of you will at least start on the same page.

After a project milestone or final delivery you can always revise how the metrics matched the project. You can also use them later when taking on new project to improve your estimate of project fit.

A few things to consider here:

• What was the target outcome that the client wanted to achieve with the project and what was the actual outcome?
• What metrics provided best reference and what metrics did you initially plan to use?
• Did you meet your commitments?
• Did you deliver on time?

While the opinions of your client and your team are an important component of any project assessment, it’s important to include more objective measures as well. A common agreement on facts is critical to reaching a shared assessment within your team and with the client. Internal systems that help you keep track of notes, communications. action items, and results achieved are critical to an accurate review at the end of a long or difficult project

The first question is often the hardest, requiring that there was a meeting of the minds at the beginning of a project and that ongoing communication throughout the project enabled everyone involved to maintain a working consensus. Another factor to consider is the amount of time needed for a project activity or deliverable to create a result: if a project outcome needs at least time X to be measured then the project has to take at least time X.

For example, an on-line advertising campaign may take two to three months to not only generate a lead but allow the client’s sales process to convert the lead into a customer. If you only assess the project after a week or two your measurement of the impact may be either optimistic (“look at all of these leads”) or pessimistic (“look at how few inquiries these generated” run a project focused around those with the lifespan of a month, you measurements will be worthless.

What did you learn?

Beyond extending your skill set, what knowledge have you gained about your process and your team? Answering these “deliberate practice” questions is an essential element to serious improvement efforts:

• What did you learn as a team about your strengths and weaknesses?
• What do you now understand about the market and trends ?
• What do you now know about the customer?

This is focus on learning is something that companies we interviewed implemented supported using techniques such as:

• Creative brief or project scope documents that provided a benchmark for later evaluation.
• Onboarding documents (sometimes even books)
• Client dossier
• Project post mortem meeting with the team
• Project post mortem meeting with the client
• Lessons learned documents

4. Action Plan

Good Questions…But Your Team Needs to Find the Time to Answer

Section two outlined questions that can help your team improve. But conflicting demands from active projects or other billable work and can mean you never find the time.

There can be a temptation to postpone an after action conversation with a client because they have paid: allowing you to assume that they were completely delighted with the outcome instead of probing for areas of improvement. Clients may also negotiate for reduced payment after the project is underway or cancel a partially completed project without necessarily being dissatisfied with the quality of the work delivered. If after action questions are not intrinsic to a billable deliverable they can be postponed in favor of new billable work: one way to avoid this is to include after action conversations in the project scope document both parties agree to.

If you have several people working on several projects then some project contributors may only contribute to one or more milestone deliverables but not be on any one project from start to finish. Many team members may be working on more than one project at a time and feel pressure to assist other projects with billable deliverables. There are several approaches to consider to ensure problems are identified and addressed:

• Explicit onboarding de-brief efforts each time a team member joins or leaves the project.
• After action meetings at a team level with the delivery of each milestone, including customer team members in a separate meeting where possible.
• Executive participation in an after action meeting with everyone who participated on the team level at the end of the project.
• Executive participation in an after action meeting with key project team members and the customer team at the end of the project.

If your firm has several people with distinct skills or expertise working on several projects simultaneously you need to manage a number of dynamics:

• How to bid a project and define at a high level the outcomes to be achieved for the customer.
• How to learn from similar projects that the firm has done in the past and apply those lessons learned to the new project.
• How to hire, onboard and solicit communication between a team of specialists
• How to deliver results at a price that is acceptable to the customer and profitable for the company
• How to manage feedback around project from both the customer and the team

Process Improvement Questions

To pinpoint your processes and capability improvement efforts you can use this checklist. The first three questions are about new capabilities or resources that a new project similar to the current one would require for increased productivity (e.g. to cut costs or time needed). The last two address process or methodology changes.

• What were the tools you lacked? Should you buy or develop them?
• What outside people were critical and should be incorporated into the team?
• What new resources, beyond tools and people should be acquired?
• What “non-value added” work can automated, eliminated or outsourced
• What process changes are required:
  • what should you stop doing,
  • what should you start doing, and
  • what’s working well now that you should make sure that you don’t break with other changes.

Postscript – Thanks and How You Can Help Us Improve This Document

If you came this far, thank you. This is version 0.1: if you want to participate in an interview, tell us your opinion or share some insights with us, please contact me.

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