Paul Theron
SMARTlab / THERON & Associates

Of course, the artist's or researcher's initial idea is, beyond doubt, the foundation for any creative project. You are the artist. "They" are the funders who might finance your work. Between you and "them" runs a wild torrent of difficulties. Project management is that safety cord spreading between the two shores of the rapids onto which you can hang when you need to secure your connection to those who have the money. Look on the bright side: project management is not just paperwork. It's vital.

The story

Recently, one of my friends came to me with a brilliant idea: he had invented a character aimed at theweb. Seeing how little I was convinced, he added, "He can interact with the internaut's choices." "Great!" I said. My friend seemed defeated, if not totally desperate. and asked why I was so unenthusiastic. "Because your project is not yet mature and your idea still has to be explored, the concept to be refined," I explained. He went back to his study and came up with a brighter idea a few weeks later. His project had become clear and one could see that any operator or investor in fields such as interactive television or broadband technology might pay some attention to what was at first only the promise of a good idea.

Project management starts with putting sufficient effort into the definition and scope of the project.

What is your concept? What might it do for whoever it is aimed? Is it feasible to develop it to the point where it might show its true potential?

My friend asked me to review the presentation of his idea to expected investors. I always admire his creative mind but what he showed me was disastrous. Pictures, words, Flash compositions - all the tools that a creative person would be tempted to use to make her/his point were there. Only, there was no structure and his presentation could not possibly catch the attention of its viewers.

Project management is also about communications management. And communication is about making your world accessible to those who are not necessarily familiar with it.

After some corrections, he pitched successfully, and he got the finance he needed to build a prototype and run a pilot. Nice, he thought, and started rushing on with every idea he had in his mind. One of his students, one of these techno freaks who haunt computer rooms 24-hours a day, came up with a bluffing technology that would put the project on the cutting edge. My friend, creative as ever, added lots of features to his initial character and together they designed a man-machine interface that I still find fantastic.

The investors, a capital venture company specialising in the media industry, requested some kind of schedule and more precise details of the work to be carried out. Interestedvby what he had already prepared but not quite convinced, they let him proceed with his research but set a deadline for the delivery of the first outcome.

Months passed until the investors' management committee asked to see the results they had been promised by then. But my friend was in no position to do so. Things had got more complicated than he had expected. While he was supposed to work on the project, he had got some work from a major television company and the project had been left idle for a couple of months. The investors waited for another couple of months but then, as myfriend had made no significant move towards the completion of his tasks, they suddenly pulled out of the project, leaving him alone with his bright ideas and his eyes to cry.

Project management is that activity that helps to discipline a creative team or even just an individual when it comes to dealing with partners who expect to be delivered tangible results at some point.

Planning the job and controlling the progress of the tasks; giving a reasonably good idea of the sort of results you will produce and when; estimating the costs and making sure you do not run out of finance; coordinating resources; checking that all precautions are taken to avoid potential difficulties, failures and unpleasant surprises; making sure that what is produced is as good as one would expect; providing the logistics; securing your legal rights and those of your partners, etc. This is what project management is all about.

The question

How can one do all that without feeling like hitting one's head on the walls every evening because it is not in one's nature to handle an "administrative job"?

Because creative people and researchers are who they are, bright minds constantly coming up with ideas, project management must be organised in a way that suits them. Not in a manner that will repel them.

Easy to say, but how to do it?

Just by sticking to the basics. By doing what will make the difference between under-managed projects and over-managed projects.

The way forward

Project management in the creative and artistic arena can be articulated around five basic principles:

1. A project must be focused on a workable idea.
2. Any project can be regarded as a controlled process.
3. Creativity is not antinomic with engineering.
4. Hazards are part of life.
5. We should pride ourselves on the good rather than focus on the bad.

Whereas engineering projects are often (not always) focused on one well-defined idea from their very beginning, creative and research projects are often based upon intuition and a poetic vision of life. But this is no reason they shouldn't or couldn't be well-focused, especially when it comes to looking for funds to make them happen. It is obvious that the playwright has some idea of her/his work before s/he starts writing. So does a painter. Even the poet sets her/his mind and heart on what s/he fancies before getting any inspiration. Yes, their minds will certainly go into a circumnavigation that ordinary minds and the artist himself might not understand at first. But theyare somehow focused. Scientific research proceeds with the same approach and when the initial question may well be "Why doesa sand castle stand up although it is formed of loose grains of stone?", it is very much focused and the starting point to further work is clear, even while the outcomes are not.

It is vital to help those who may find interest in your work to understand your perspective. And not only that. It is important for you to set boundaries within which you'll concentrate your efforts if you want to achieve anything.

The second idea many researchers and creators often fight is that their projects can be organised in steps, deadlines and straight forward decisions.

Experience shows that this is very true, and one must not mix up the overall breakdown of the work with the thinking and creativity that take place at some of its stages (a mistake many engineers make as well).

Virtually any project can be sequenced like this:

1. Project definition:
At this stage, you precisely define your idea, the perimeter within which you want to work, and the sort of output you think you might come up with when all is finished. The better you focus your vision, the more likely you are to achieve something or to charm investors. Yes, it may take you years before you even reach that point. And creativity is needed to come up with the right idea. Project definition is the unique occasion you give yourself to take a complete tour of that idea, to check its strengths and weaknesses and to put it in perspective. At this point, you need to roughly estimate the cost and schedule of your project, because this is when you start talking money

2. Specification:
This is when you reconsider your initial idea and try to figure out how it will fit in the world you and everyone around you live in. Do you aim to get results at low costs and very quickly as a step towards some bigger work? Do you want to produce a design that will be safe for those it is destined to reach? Are you concerned with the price or the accessibility of your creation? Do you want to simply stun everyone? Do you want to explore a wide range of possibilities without any particular pre-conceived view? The question of the "qualities" you want to confer on your work will determine the design. And good project management can't ignore that it is a waste of time and money to deliver results that don't match their specifications. On the other hand, one might say that an unexpected outcome will be of such interest to society that obsession with usefulness is just for uncreative minds. The question is, how likely are you to produce a major breakthrough in arts or science? At this stage, you should be able to refine your estimate of the cost and schedule of your project.

3. Design:
This is when engineering and creativity mix together to produce the best - or the worst. What is a good design? One that overwhelms you with beauty and striking avant-garde features? One that changes the face of the world? One that delivers exactly what you intended? That last one might sound a bit boring. But think twice before saying so, as you have to deal with investors who expect some kind of useful output from your work. On the other hand, your project definition might state that you aim to be purely creative without any consideration for money and rationality. And you can also get paid for the pleasure of letting your mind run wild and produce the unexpected. The cost and schedule of your project should now be very accurate and the risks inherent to your work should be very well known.

4. Implementation and testing:
It's all very well to have a design, but the time comes when you have to turn it into a real thing that will materialise your concept. Some prototyping might be necessary before you actually produce your final piece of work, and you might have to revise your design in the light of the difficulties you encounter. Whatever you aim to produce, what matters is that it works well and that it does what it is supposed to do, that each and every one of its details looks great, that one can say you have really cared for what you have done, that you have put all your talents into your work. That's why the object you create has to be tested against itself as well as against the environment in which it might end up. The more effort goes into the design, the better the chances that your product or result will work well.

5. Transfer into the real world:
Once you have created it, your final product may be able to operatein the real world. What are we talking about? A piece of software, for instance, will be installed on computers, the set for a playwill be transported to a theatre interested in it, a website will be activated. Logistics and planning are then at the heart of your work. Interestingly enough, you should be aware of the fact that in many projects this phase may consume as much finance as all the work previously carried out! Consider that when you estimate your costs and also think of the time it takes to bring your creation to its public. It may take years. And keep in mind that the outerworld is not necessarily waiting for your brilliant piece of work. It may even be very unprepared for it

As you might have guessed, creativity and engineering are very complementary. You are creative when you elaborate your idea. You are creative when it comes to design. Your creativity may be more than useful when you project the product of your work into the real world of consumers and critics of all kinds.

Nevertheless, engineering is never faraway from creativity. For example, you are Raymond Quesneau and you want your readers to compose as many poems out of your own writing as they want. You end up writing a book of 100 pages witha 10-verse poem on each page and you ask the publisher to cut each page into as many strips as your poems have lines. You ask him to make the cover of the book such that it will be easy for the reader to combine a strip from the 50th page on line 4, with a strip from the 2nd page on line 3, and so on, so that in the end, the reader has composed a new poem at random out of up to ten verses from up to ten of your poems. The passage from your ideato the actual book is pure engineering. Whether you like the word or not, it is. You have designed the book to the writer's specifications. That's what engineering is all about.

As to hazards, they are part of life. Tomorrow, you'll be sick. You wanted to work on your PC today, but it was stolen last night. You have an important meeting, but there is a tube strike. You need to transport your theatre set to Manchester, but the sky pours tons of water on the road, soaks your piece of papier-mâché and transforms it into bread soup. Such risks exist. Good project management is about preventing them as much as possible and handling them, should they occur, in the least harmful manner. The questions are simple: what can go wrong and how do we deal with it? What if one changes the specifications while the project is already running into design, or worse, into implementation? What if the quality of delivery is not satisfactory?

The answer is that you must take the actions appropriate to any disruption, event or failure in a way that makes all stakeholders certain that as little as humanly possible has been forgotten or neglected.

It is in the attention paid to details that one can actually spot the difference between good and poor project management. What makes that difference is probably the ability of a project leader - whether an artist, a scientist, an engineer, or the organiser of a major or even minor event -to define and control as precisely as possible the work to be done and to ensure that its outcome will match the expectations placed in it.

It is not good enough to have ideas if you can't translate them into successful actions and results.

Beside your conceptual or artistic capabilities, project management is the second key to trust and success in creative projects. Your sense of humanity does the rest.

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