Delivering successful projects is difficult. Doing so in sectors for which business process is not a given is even harder. As creatives, we often assume that good ideas alone are enough to get us through. Or that just because we know what we want, we’ll achieve success. As long as everyone means well and does their creative best, then all will be well. This approach is almost always doomed to failure. I know from bitter experience.
Creative and educational projects require as much if not more rigour. Because more is at stake. We’re creating cultural or learning opportunities that are often intended to be a lifeline for otherwise hard to reach young people or communities facing incredible challenges. It’s just not enough to want to design something well, it needs to be planned, delivered and evaluated in ways that can sustain lasting change.
Projects have three main constituents: people, processes and product. None of which can work alone. All of which depend upon each other to succeed. And all of which must be given equal measure for the project to succeed. If you try to jump to making a product, then that’s just what you get. But nothing is learned on the way. Equally if you don’t spend the time you need to explore ideas and then plan your strategy and go straight to ‘doing things’, you won’t know why you end up where you do.
In non-jargon language, the stages of a project are planning, doing and reviewing. In industry terms, the last stage is the equivalent of quality assurance – a critical success factor. Like useful and successful evaluation (a much misunderstood term) in the arts and education, it is a reflective process that starts at the beginning of your project and charts the distance you travel and extent to which you achieve your ambitions (e=a/d2) What it tells you in the end is where you need to start in your next creative endeavour. It’s the way most artists work intuitively – but in project management these elements need to be explicit. Seen not felt.
Bear in mind too, that all projects have the what and how – what are called drivers and enablers in professional jargon. They are both the abstract and the practical things that make it happen – if you like, they are the concept and currency of a successful project.
As creatives working in the third sector, arts or education, we have much more responsibility to apply rigour and process. Particularly in a time of recession, funders may question the value of what we do. If we can’t foreground the process and show how it works, everyone is just guessing. And we are failing those we want to benefit from our project management skills.