Are you an artist? You’re a project manager!
Photo by Anna Kolosyuk on Unsplash
I work with A LOT of very creative and artistic people. Designers, artists, actors, and many others who consider themselves creative in some way. One of the most frequent self-critiques I hear from these folks is, “I’m not organized,” and I’m here to tell you: that doesn’t matter- whether you consider yourself organized or not, you, yes YOU, are a project manager, my friend.
Project managers have a reputation for being highly organized, detail-oriented people. And as a certified Project Management Professional, I’d have to say that I would use those words to describe myself, but that doesn’t mean that only organized people with a strict focus and attention to detail can do project management.
Why? Well, project management is a lot more than being organized. One of the main practices of successful project management is doing things in a logical order that limits re-work. Guess what? Most artists I know do this naturally. You start with a sketch, you fill in some basic colors, you refine and refine, and eventually, your painting is complete. You might even be on a deadline for a local art show or fair, so you’ve got to get all those steps done in a very short timeframe. What is going on here is that on a very micro-level, each piece of art you create - whether it’s a painting or a piece of jewelry, is a project that you are managing.
Moreover, project management is all about creativity and experiments. Especially projects that are more Agile in their nature- those are projects where we don’t necessarily know what the product or result is going to be. For instance, we may know that we want to create a new app, but maybe we don’t know every feature. So, we build a little, test a little, see how it goes, and continually iterate until we find what works best. Any sculptor can tell you, the final product is liberated from the medium (right, Michelangelo?). So, you may start sculpting, and you may have a vision of what is going to be created, but the final product may vary significantly from what you thought it was going to be at first. Maybe you run into some initial engineering problems, so you have to re-tool completely mid-stream. Guess what? That is project management.
As I introduced last week, I think the way we talk about and frame project management is very limited in today’s business world. It’s all deadlines and dashboards and KPIs, but that only paints a small picture of everything that is involved in the discipline itself. If we spent more time talking about the creativity required to lead a project, or the innovation needed to bring new endeavors to life, I think we could tap into a whole new set of ideas and ways of approaching work that could benefit project management as a discipline. And, the more people start to see themselves in project management, the greater ability we’ll have to spread the familiar best practices, methods, and yes, organization, needed to get us all working in more efficient and fulfilling ways. Imagine the impact we could have by supporting our artists in their systems and processes, and enabling them to create more and more art in our world!
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
Are you an artist or a creative-at-large? Do you consider yourself a project manager? How would thinking about yourself as a successful project manager contribute to your process of creating and selling your art? Leave me a comment or a DM with your thoughts! I’d love to hear from you!