The importance of streamlined creative project management

Did you wake up today hoping an unforeseen challenge would derail your entire week?

Probably not.

Managing an entire workflow can seem daunting, especially when it comes to creative projects.

Managing a creative team of designers, marketers, or writers (or all of the above) involves a lot of moving parts.

And a lot of opinions.

You have to overcome the challenges of creative project management to successfully complete a complicated creative project.

In this guide, we’ll take a look at:

• What a creative project manager’s role entails
• A guide to successfully managing a creative team using Optimizely CMP’s software
• The benefits of improving your creative project management process

An Introduction to Creative Project Management

Creative project management is the process of managing designer, writer, and creative teams throughout an entire campaign.

Let’s say a company wants to release a new brand logo.

This process could involve designers who will create the new logo along with writers who will create copy to coincide with the logo launch.

Filmmakers might create video materials to support the logo launch, and marketers might orchestrate the launch.

Not to mention, everyone from customer success to BDRs will want to have their say.

(Insert your classic metaphor for too many cooks in the kitchen).

This is where the creative project manager comes in.

Creative Project Manager

The creative project manager typically manages diverse creatives such as website designers, photographers, and copywriters.

For large creative projects, there are often multiple creative teams at work. The creative project manager is responsible for overseeing them all and organizing their workflows to make sure the project comes together effectively and within a given deadline.

A creative project manager’s responsibilities include:

• Organizing groups of people or the creative team
• Working with attention to detail
• Foreseeing creative issues
• Understanding creative goals
• Governing creative assets

A Guide to Managing a Creative Team

Good creative project management isn’t just about allowing creative latitude to people who just want you to get out of the way anyway.

It comes from detailed planning, steadfast organization, and efficient allocation of tasks.

All of this is best accomplished using some form of cloud-based software.

On average, most companies use around five different cloud platforms.

With Optimizely CMP’s marketing orchestration platform, you’ll only need one.

At Optimizely CMP, we offer marketing project management software that will cover all of your project management bases. With our all-in-one marketing platform, the project manager will be able to plan, organize, and monitor creative projects from start to finish.

We’ll take you through a guide on how project managers can use our software’s project management tools to transform the way each project is managed.

Create a Plan and Budget for the Project

Before launching into the designing, writing, and creating elements of the project, be sure to set aside time for project planning.

According to PMI, 37% of the time a project fails because it didn’t have clear goals.

Your plan should lay out all of the necessary elements of the project, including:

• Which teams are responsible for which task
• Resource management and budget goals for each item in the plan
• How long each part of the project will take
• When each element needs to be delivered

Optimizely CMP’s software makes the initial planning stages straightforward and hassle-free.

With shared calendars, you can lay out each task with relevant information and visualize the project plan as a whole.

Our budgeting dashboard is the perfect way to create a budget plan for each element of the project.

As the project goes on, you can use this dashboard to track your spending.

And using integrations, you can pay your invoices through the platform, too.

Build Marketing Workflows To Break Up Tasks

Once you’ve made a plan for the project timeline, begin to look at individual tasks.

For large projects, you may be working with several different creative teams, each of which has its own manager.

For smaller projects, you may be the only manager involved.

At this stage, work by yourself or with each creative team manager to split up tasks into more manageable, trackable workflows and methodologies.

As IBM notes, workflows can transform the way your teams work.

For instance, if you’re working with a team of copywriters, you may have several blog posts, a few landing pages, and some email copy as your creative work deliverables. Break down each of these tasks into smaller tasks to create a workflow.

This mini task workflow might look something like:

• Keyword research
• Outline
• Draft
• Edits
• Final copy

Optimizely CMP’s software has built-in workflow functionalities to help you and your team work together to create organized workflows.

You can add and edit these workflows as the project goes on, and Optimizely CMP will automatically update the queue of work to accommodate new requests from stakeholders.

The shared campaign workspace feature is where you can create strategic briefs, access campaign templates, and align as a team on the goals and deadlines of the project as a whole.

Use the Campaign Dashboard To Manage Teams

Once you’ve created a plan for the project’s trajectory, you can let all of the creative team members head off in their own direction to begin work on their tasks.

As the creative project manager, your job will be to oversee the entire project team as they work on their workflows. This part of the process can involve:

• Approving deliverables
• Ensuring tasks are accomplished by their deadlines
• Coordinating with team members about any issues or questions
• Reassigning tasks as needed to balance workloads

The Optimizely CMP campaign dashboard is the perfect software for keeping track of how the project is going.

From the dashboard, you can keep track of activities as they are completed, share files and documents with relevant team members, and reorganize the plan in real-time to coordinate with the team’s needs.

Use the Campaign Workspaces and Content Editors to Review and Edit Creative Project Deliverables

As the project manager, you may also be responsible for overseeing deliverables as they come in. This can mean editing copy, graphics, or other types of creative media.

Optimizely CMP has automated multi-format content editors along with review and approval workflows. This means that as the project manager, you will be alerted when a task is ready for review. If the file required changes, you can make them yourself in the content editor.

The content editor is also a useful tool for team members who wish to create graphics, PDFs, or other creative materials as part of the project.

Using Optimizely CMP’s software at this stage of the creative project management process will save you and your team time and headaches by cutting emails and email attachments out of the equation.

Monitor Workloads and Campaign Analytics

In order to keep the project running smoothly and efficiently, monitoring your team’s progress is a vital part of creative project management.

If you’re running a creative marketing campaign, it’s also important that you track analytics as you release your ads and content to customers. These figures can help you update your existing workflows throughout the campaign timeline.

Optimizely CMP’s software is well-equipped for this stage of the process.

To streamline your process, our operational analytics dashboard offers:

• Time tracking
• Productivity analysis
• SLA reporting
• Suggestions for workflow optimization

Our campaign analytics dashboard tracks leads and conversions throughout your marketing campaigns, giving you and your team insight into how to improve your future strategies.

Use Integrations To Distribute Content

For marketing campaigns, you’ll likely want to release elements of the campaign over the course of several weeks or months.

To kick off your public campaign, our platform can help you publish your finished materials on social media or to your website. Our distribution integrations mean you can link your CMS, CRM, or social media accounts to our platform and share your content directly.

Store Your Digital Assets

Once your creative project is finished, it’s vital that you come up with a good way to keep track of the digital assets you’ve created over the course of the project.

Assets such as branded images and videos can be useful for the creative team in later campaigns, so it’s good practice to keep them somewhere that is searchable and accessible.

Plus, this process will help keep your brand well-managed and consistent.

Our library feature makes this time-consuming task easy and automatic. We’ll store your files and workflows for future use, so that planning the next project is even easier and smoother.

Review Your Performance Analytics

For marketing campaigns, reviewing analytics can help you learn from mistakes and improve upon your current process.

Our ROI analytics functionality will show you statistics across the entire sales funnel to help you track your strong and weak points to improve upon next time.

The Benefits of Strengthening Your Creative Project Management

When it’s done well, creative project management can keep your projects running smoothly and on schedule. However, only 58% of organizations fully grasp the importance of project management.

Here are a few of the benefits that come from well organized management.

Improved Productivity and Lower Costs

By managing a creative team well, you can instantly boost productivity, simply because everyone will know what they’re meant to be working on and when.

According to CNBC, 67% of team meetings are thought to be failures.

Instead of wasting time on inefficient meetings and discussions, Optimizely CMP’s software empowers the creative project manager to assign tasks and communicate with staff in real-time.

We can help you and your team free up time to get on with the actual project and ultimately meet deadlines.

By keeping everything running smoothly and on time, you’ll save money on staffing, revisions, and overtime.

Balanced Workloads

Successful creative project management leads to balanced workloads across all teams.

As the International Journal of Scientific & Technology Research found, 39.9% of job dissatisfaction is caused by workload and stress.

Increased Levels of Customer Satisfaction

Delivering your work on time is always a good way to satisfy your customers. As is delivering quality work that needs few changes or edits. With Optimizely CMP’s software, you can manage a full creative team as they create work that is both on schedule and high-quality.

According to American Express, 69% of American consumers will spend more money on a business that has good customer service.

Fewer Problems

A lack of good management can easily lead to a chaotic process. Tasks can be overlooked, issues can be missed, and mistakes can be made.

Of course, errors always happen, and as project manager, it’s up to you to deal with them in a calm, mature way. However, with Optimizely CMP’s creative project management software, you can anticipate and eliminate a large portion of these potential problems.

Final Thoughts: Streamlined Creative Project Management and How We Help

Running a creative team through a project can be challenging and even overwhelming without the right software to support you.

Optimizely CMP offers marketing teams a platform where they can centralize all of their work and keep track of each task every step of the way.