How To Manage In A Creative Agency Without Stifling Creativity

There is an enigma that still lays at the heart of creative-led agencies the world over; how can you manage resources effectively without stifling creativity?

Most agencies still struggle to find the most effective way to manage their projects, which has detrimental effects in terms of spiralling inefficiencies, reduced profitability, and client dissatisfaction. It goes without saying that Agencies have always been more focused upon their core product: the creative talents within the business, rather than the quick fixes to workflows and profitability a successful internal process can provide. I would argue that while creative minds should never be stunted, Agencies can easily deploy an agency management strategy to enhance project visibility, amplify efficiency and increase bottom line profitability.

The Traditional Agency

An agency that operates with ad-hoc processes and places no emphasis on managing the creative team will inevitably suffer from a servicing issue that impacts the bottom line. Without real-time visibility into project schedules there is no way to measure your studio’s capacity and efficiently manage job delivery to your customers. This combined with a lack of process for time management will provide no facility to track how many hours are being spent on each task. Therefore your team may often work many more hours on tasks and projects without the agency being able to charge for them. No matter how much talent your team possess it will not make up for a costs incurred and profit lost from a bad resource management process.

Moving Forward

However ambitious Agencies with a focus on delivering creativity, profitability and client satisfaction have moved on and are experiencing increased efficiency from user-friendly agency management tools and are empowering their creative teams to use them. By having an ingrained system to simplify and split projects into tasks and then assigning these tasks to team members has made project management simple and effective. It is now possible to keep tabs on capacity and your delivery schedules but still delight your customers with on time and on budget creative projects.

For more on this topic, please download ‘Putting a Price on the Intangible: How to Balance Creativity with Accountability’