Why traditional project management doesn’t always work for the creative and cultural sector (and what to do instead)
Most people who have managed a creative project will probably recognise the point at which the original plan doesn’t resemble what is actually happening.
For example, it can be common for a partner or funder’s circumstances to change, or participants to respond differently than anticipated to an idea. Sometimes the change is relatively small, but sometimes it means revisiting quite a lot of what you thought had already been decided.
None of this means that planning is pointless. Creative projects still need budgets, deadlines, clear responsibilities, risk management and some shared understanding of what they are trying to achieve. But approaches to project management that rely heavily on detailed upfront planning and assume a fairly predictable route can become difficult to apply when the project itself needs room to develop both creatively and logistically.
That can be why traditional project management approaches can often feel limiting to creative projects; because they were usually designed with the expectation for every project to behave in the same way.
The complexity of stakeholder engagement
Creative and cultural projects often involve artists, participants, funders, community partners, venues and colleagues, all with different priorities and ideas about what success looks like. An Arts Council England review of its Ambition for Excellence programme found that poor management of stakeholder relationships, especially between project partners, was a common feature of projects that experienced difficulties.
Those differences are not necessarily a problem, but they do need managing. A funder may focus on outputs and impact, whilst an artist, partner or participant may judge the project very differently. Clear communication and regular opportunities to revisit expectations can therefore be just as important as the original project plan.
Working with financial uncertainty
Creative projects also often operate within complicated funding arrangements, combining grants, earned income, partnership contributions or organisational subsidy. Costs can change, funding decisions can affect timelines and relatively small budget shifts can have a significant impact on delivery.
This makes good financial planning very important, and the key is to create enough structure to make informed decisions while allowing for change. Review points, visible risks and a clear understanding of what is fixed and what has flexibility can make a plan far more useful in practice.
Structure and flexibility are not opposites
Traditional approaches such as Waterfall can work very well when the outcome, deadline and sequence of activity are clear; an exhibition installation, publication or one-off event may need that kind of structure. However, problems can arise when the same approach is applied to work that is deliberately exploratory. Participatory programmes, pilots and creative collaborations may need to change as people become involved and new information emerges. In those cases, sticking rigidly to an outdated plan can be less useful than responding to what the project is teaching you.
Flexibility doesn’t have to mean abandoning accountability, but it can be helpful to build enough room into the process to test, learn and adapt while the work is still happening.
Success isn’t always straightforward either
Delivering on time and on budget matters, but it does not tell us everything about whether a creative project has succeeded. A project can meet its financial or numerical targets while giving participants a poor experience, or change direction and ultimately achieve something more valuable than originally expected.
This is where evaluation becomes part of good project management rather than something added at the end for a funder. Useful evaluation helps teams understand what happened, why it happened and what they can learn from it, including outcomes that are harder to measure such as changes in confidence, relationships or participation.
Creative projects rarely follow an identical formula, so evaluation should help to draw learning from the work rather than simply measure how closely reality matched the original plan.
So What Should You Do Instead?
There is no single project management methodology designed specifically for every exhibition, community programme, festival, learning project, artistic commission or organisational change project. Nor does there need to be.
Part of becoming a more confident project manager is understanding the approaches available and deciding which parts are useful for the work in front of you. Sometimes a traditional approach will be completely appropriate, but at other times, borrowing ideas from a more flexible methodology will make far more sense.
Here are four approaches commonly used in project management, all of which can have a place in creative and cultural work.
Waterfall
Waterfall works through a series of defined stages, with one leading into the next. It is particularly useful when the goal, deadline and required outputs are already clear.
An exhibition installation, printed publication or one-off event may contain a lot of work, but there are also likely to be fixed dependencies and deadlines. In those circumstances, being able to work backwards from a final delivery date and map what needs to happen can be extremely useful.
Problems arise when the project needs significant experimentation or when decisions made at the beginning are treated as irreversible long after circumstances have changed.
Agile
Agile approaches allow work to develop through shorter cycles of planning, activity, review and adaptation rather than attempting to define everything in detail at the outset.
That can make them useful for participatory or collaborative projects where the people involved will help to shape what happens. A team developing a new programme with community partners, for example, might test an idea on a small scale, gather feedback and use what it learns to inform the next stage.
This does require people to be comfortable with some uncertainty. It also needs good communication, because flexibility without shared decision-making can quickly lead to confusion.
Lean
Lean thinking asks teams to look closely at where time, money and effort are being used, with a particular focus on the value created by that work.
For organisations working with limited resources, this can be a useful way of questioning processes that have accumulated over time, spotting unnecessary stages or duplicated work, and considering whether more complicated processes are really worth the time they take.
It can be useful when piloting something new, reviewing an existing process or trying to make better use of limited capacity.
Hybrid
In practice, many people working in creative project management already use something closer to a hybrid approach, even if they would never describe it that way.
A project might need a firm Waterfall-style timetable around funding deadlines, contracting and venue logistics, while the creative development itself works more iteratively. There might be parts of the project where roles and deliverables need to be tightly defined and others where the team deliberately leaves room to test ideas.
Using a hybrid approach means treating project management methodologies as tools rather than rulebooks. The important thing is understanding why you are using a particular approach and whether it suits the work.
Sometimes the methodology isn’t the real problem
It is also worth saying that not every project difficulty can be solved by choosing between Waterfall and Agile.
Sometimes a project is difficult to manage because the team has never quite agreed what change it is trying to create. Sometimes the overall aim is clear but there is uncertainty about how particular activities are supposed to lead to that outcome. In other cases, the project itself is working reasonably well but a process within it is taking too much time or regularly causing problems.
This is where some of the other tools used alongside project management become useful.
A Theory of Change, for example, can help a team work backwards from the change it hopes to create and examine the assumptions that connect its activities with that change. This can be highly valuable early in a project, or when several partners need to reach a shared understanding of what they are collectively trying to achieve.
A Logic Model gives a more structured picture of the relationship between the resources going into a project, what the project does and the outputs and outcomes expected from that activity. It can provide a useful bridge between project planning and evaluation when a project is becoming complicated and people need to see the overall logic more clearly.
Kaizen approaches look at improvement from a different angle. Rather than waiting for a major review or redesign, Kaizen encourages people to notice opportunities for smaller improvements as work develops. That can be useful for recurring projects and organisational processes, where several modest changes may be more realistic and more useful than trying to replace the whole system in one go.
- Then there is Reflective Practice, which gives people space to look properly at experience and use it to inform what happens next. For project managers, that might mean examining a decision that did not have the intended result, understanding why something worked particularly well or noticing patterns that could otherwise be repeated from one project to another.
These are not competing approaches, and depending on the project you might use several of them at different points.
Finding an approach that fits the work
Good project management in the creative and cultural sectors does not mean throwing away structure because creativity is unpredictable, and nor does it mean forcing every project through a fixed process because that is what the project plan said at the beginning.
It means knowing what needs to be clear, what can remain flexible and when something needs to be revisited.
That might involve a Gantt chart or work breakdown structure to get a complicated delivery plan under control. It might mean using a RACI or DARCI matrix because nobody is quite sure who is responsible for a decision. On another project, the most useful thing you can do might be revisiting the Theory of Change, reviewing a process through Kaizen or just taking time to reflect on what the team has learned before moving into the next phase.
Artswork Professional Development’s project management learning is designed to reflect how creative projects are actually planned and delivered. Project Management for the Arts explores practical approaches to planning and delivering creative projects, including methodologies, stakeholder management, risk and the tools that can help bring structure to complicated work, and our shorter learning on Theory of Change, Logic Models and Kaizen allow people to explore these approaches in focus.
Explore our upcoming project management courses and build your confidence in planning, adapting and delivering creative projects effectively.