Project Management in Creative Industries - Term Paper Example

Project Management in Creative Industries Creative industries represent a unique environment marked by entrepreneur’s spirit and unique vision of reality. Strategic vision and planning are important elements of any creative project which determine the project outcomes. Development of effective creative project management becomes important in maintenance of human relationships and ensuring the physical well-being of employees so that they give the maximum contri­bution to efficient working. Historically, project success has been defined as bringing a project to conclusion on time, within budget, and according to specifications (Frame, 2002). The organization selected for analysis and evaluation belongs to an advertising industry. The Creative Advertising Agency London is a leading organization in the industry located in UK. For successful performance, the Creative Advertising Agency London needs effective project management system which consists of control activities and effective resource allocation in order to achieve overall objectives of the company. The Creative Advertising Agency has a centralized structure. Centralization leads to greater rigidity and more formalized central control. Specialization of task by units results in fragmentation and creates problems in communication and coordination. The greater the degree of specialization, the greater the tendency to concentrate on individual functions while losing sight of overall corporate objectives. Thus, in large advertising agencies conflicts may arise among product group, functional, and territorial managers, even though all are preoccupied with marketing. Despite protesting cries that marketing specialists are "organization men," organizations require routines, programs and procedures, and conformity. Among the factors taken into consideration in answering it are the product line, customers, and processors. Traditionally the Creative Advertising Agency has been hierarchical, with functional groupings based on authority and responsibility. Recently these structural arrangements have changed. Marketing organizations now include more than sales. Moreover, technology, including computer usage, has led to organizations that have developed along horizontal lines (Burkun 32). Departmental structure helps advertising agencies to deal with complex environment and solve daily problems. Much advertising agencies thought dwell on such concepts as the centralization of business management (Surmanek 88). Customer orientation, in contrast, stresses consumer sovereignty, environmental forces, and coordinated marketing systems. Because self-managing members are working on permanent teams, the effort and expense involved in changing compensation structures is often justified (Burkun 43). The Creative Advertising Agency pays a special attention to account management. Auditing and controlling marketing effort, the fourth entrepreneurial function, is essential to assure the effective performance of marketing activities. in advertising agencies, work and focus groups are based on traditional structure organized around common technical or functional skills and areas of expertise (for example, accounting, finance, or production) (Drucker 19). The reorganization of work around processes and across boundaries has numerous benefits. For example, multiskilling (the learning of new skills in addition to functional expertise) can result in reduced staffing as fewer workers can perform the same range of tasks. It can create efficiencies through more flexible task assignment. Multiskilling also often leads to lower inventories because there is more effective work flow coordination. It also makes the team more flexible in meeting fluctuating market demand through operational flexibility. Finally, it can lead to a more differentiated response to the needs of particular customer segments and so contribute to strategic flexibility. Multi-skilling leads to greater awareness of the whole task and enables the team member to take part in problem solving, innovation, and strategic thinking. These same benefits do not accrue when tasks and organizations are structured under traditional assumptions of static, independent jobs (Surmanek 55). The functions of the account management department are to deal with customers and purchases. The actual implementation of the philosophy results in the development of the marketing concept -- a firm's conception of its marketing activities and strategies (The Creative Advertising Agency 2009). To implement this conception and create an effective marketing system, the systemic functions must be performed and a marketing mix determined. The main jobs in this department are Account Planner, Strategic Planning Director, Senior Account Planner, Account Coordinator, Account Executive, Account Group Director, Account Supervisor, Assistant Account Executive (Hameroff 98). In advertising agencies, the focus of most HR departments has been on the individual. Individual accountability and responsibility have been the foundation on which all of the business practices in the United States have been built. Furthermore, accountability in traditional work organizations was vested in those with formal positions—the managers and supervisors. Individual employees showed deference to people in these positions (The Creative Advertising Agency 2009). Reporting structures were vertical and a command-and-control philosophy reigned. Administrative jobs involve: Administrative Assistant,Administrative Assistant to the Chairman,Executive Administrative Assistant,Mailroom Clerk,Receptionist,Travel Supervisor. Skills such as planning, coordination, personnel functions, quality management, health and safety, and boundary management were the domain of managers. But increasingly, these duties are becoming the domain of teams (Sissors and Baron 72). The Creative Department develops images and ads themselves. It is responsible for copy-writing services and ads messages (verbal and visual). The impact of a message on consumer behavior, which is governed by intervening variables, determines its marketing effectiveness. Mass communication may essentially reinforce rather than change consumer attitudes and opinions. Such forces as group norms; interpersonal relations; the perception, retention, and selective exposure of individuals; and the impact of opinion leaders, are extremely influential. Creative jobs involve Art Director,Assistant Art Director,Creative Coordinator,Creative Director,Graphic Designer,Studio Manager.In this department, as nonmanagers become collectively responsible for managerial duties, basic assumptions about the legitimacy of authority are challenged. Team members may begin to question what gives peers the right to set rules for others. They may have difficulty dealing with authority that does not stem from position. Rather than depending on a job description and direction from the manager, people work jointly with coworkers to determine what they do. Because personal success depends on collective success, an individual's fate is tied to coworkers. Feelings of mutual trust and partnership must develop. The organization must help people learn to deal with greater ambiguity, uncertainty, continual change, and collaborative relationships. Both managers and employees in the team-based organization need to adjust to this shift in accountability and responsibility. Advertising copy-writers employed by agencies or advertisers are unmistakably advertising men (The Creative Advertising Agency 2009). The Media Planning department plans media campaigns and controls feedback. Agencies select media subject to the approval of the client. But publishers' representatives are also in a position to recommend agencies to manufacturers who are about to make their debut as advertisers or to regular advertisers who are thinking of changing agencies. Also agency space buyers sometimes change jobs. They may go to other agencies or become space salesmen themselves. And space salesmen frequently graduate into agency account executives. What with one thing and another the agency space buyer is likely to say yes and no--until all the data of his calculus is in hand. It is necessary to sketch this background of intrigue because it is unquestionably a factor in the traffic of advertising where the stakes are large and a decision one way or another can readily be justified on entirely ethical grounds. In addition to recognizing and adapting the assumptions on which they base their practices, HR professionals must also modify those practices to support teams (Sissors and Baron 74). The remarkable feature of advertising agencies is that teams are collectively responsible for an identifiable and substantial part of the work of the organization. To the extent possible, support services are included in the team so that it has the resources necessary to accomplish its goals. Members are multiskilled and dedicated to the team so that they do not have to split priorities. Finally, the team should report as a unit so that members do not have conflicting directions from different managers. The team is responsible for many aspects of its own functioning. For example, it should be able to determine how to apply the team's resources, strategies for completion of work, and quality monitoring. It should also be responsible for working with internal and external customers. Finally, part of the team's task should be performance evaluation (The Creative Advertising Agency 2009). Whenever appropriate skill levels and task conditions exist, team members should be involved. in reviewing their own performance and determining their own rewards. If within an identifiable set of activities coordination must occur across different functional areas, then teams should be cross-functional. In the cross-functional teams members can integrate work across disciplines and make trade-offs that require a multidisciplinary perspective. But if the process analysis indicates that an identifiable set of activities occurs within a functional area, then teams should be functional (Saaty 82). Creativity and productivity are important attributes of a person, a group of people, or an organization. The balance and focus of an organization on these two attributes determine what an organization can accomplish. Typically, at various stages in the life of an organization or person, there is a natural focus on one or the other. A creative organization is able to bring new, growing things into existence. The roots and current definition of productivity imply for an organization the ability to lead something through bringing it forth or forward. When applied to creativity, a productive organization leads the ideas through some steps; that is, it produces something. Creativity is the driving force of an organization. It causes growth to occur (The Creative Advertising Agency 2009). Without creativity, there can be no productivity. Productivity results from the exploitation of the creativity of an organization. The creativity of an organization does not have to totally exist within the organization, however. An organization's productivity can be built on others' creativity as a base or through injection for creativity at any point in the productivity process (Jones, 13). The organizational spans of control can be increased by empowering staff to perform more transactions by eliminating redundancies. Improved data quality reduces further the need for staff effort and supervisory intervention. Improvements in activity throughput reduce timing-related complaints to the benefit of productivity (The Creative Advertising Agency 2009). Most important, the new technologies and strategy achieve the goal of empowering departmental employees and promoting service while preserving and enhancing the central administrations' control of the institution's resources. Personal-selling expenditures have been estimated at approximately three times those of advertising, and are greater than the total of expenditures on all other forms of promotion. Developing an integrated promotional campaign that achieves the best sales-and-profit result is a task of considerable magnitude. The promotional mix helps shape preference and demand curves, implying that a company can affect its own market destiny; demand curves are not given items. Marketing managers are concerned with the elasticity of demand. They want the demand for their product to be less elastic or responsive to price; they also wish to shift the primary demand curve for a product category so that the products' total potential at various price points increases (Laudon and Laudon 87). Coordination of sales and advertising effort, however, is a weak area of marketing management. Often sales and advertising managers behave like rivals rather than members of the same marketing team. Lack of coordination affects sales and profits adversely, and both sales and costs can be pushed beyond optimal levels. However, the organizational changes reflected by the marketing-management concept and the brand-manager system are designed to provide more effective promotional campaigns that have greater market impact (Saaty 65). The development of global markets, global media, global advertising agencies, and global marketers has led to a push toward globalization in marketing: the treatment of the entire planet as one market. Unlike "multinational" advertising, where the marketer shapes individual campaigns for individual cultures, "global" advertising attempts to create one "universal" ad that would work in all cultures. Such efforts benefit the marketer in several ways. Advertisers can also strengthen the identity of a particular product brand by a global advertising blitz. One danger is the change in material habits that aggressive marketing may bring. Local peoples may switch from purchasing local foods and products to global products, perhaps altering for the worse their diets and the local economy. This is a danger with both multinational and global marketing. Global advertising strategies, though, create other problems for local cultures. A global strategy is designed to be universal, which often translates to image-oriented advertising rather than more heavily verbal-oriented ads (Owens and Wilson 101). The example of the Creative Advertising Agency shows that the outcomes of the creative project depend upon all elements of the project and effective implementation of all parts of the plan. Resource scheduling and resource location the main keys of effective project management based on control of a creative project and its security. All elements are interdependent and cannot be considered in isolation. For this reason, the project manager should take a special attention to all areas of the project and resources involved to achieve desirable and stipulated outcomes (The Creative Advertising Agency 2009). Market opportunities and marketing may be the two most important elements underpinning successful business creation, but scholarly attention to this interface has occurred only in recent years. Still, entrepreneurship is limited in resources (including financial resources) and has fewer possibilities to compete on the global scale (Laudon and Laudon 87). Marketing affects organization in yet another way. Because team functions are dynamic, not clearly sequenced, and dependent on environmental or other process factors, the operations and decisions involved in such processes are particularly suitable to combinations of descriptors like task definitions, work flows, and time charts. Because the popularity of team-based work structures has grown so rapidly, psychologists are still sorting out the issues involved in selecting for effective team membership, and measures of the ability to work in teams are still in the process of development. As goal-directed units, advertising agencies have multiple objectives, and the relative importance of their various goals changes. Sometimes goals conflict; but it is desirable for them to be compatible. Since marketing sectors vary, the relative importance of goals must be determined to achieve organization and establish criteria for effectiveness. Works Cited Burkun, S. The Art of Project Management. O'Reilly Media; 1 ed, 2005. Drucker, P. F. Management Challenges for the 21st Century. Collins, 2004. The Creative Advertising Agency. Home Page. 2009. http://creativeadvertisingagency.com/flash/ Hameroff, E. J. The Advertising Agency Business: The Complete Manual for Management & Operation. McGraw-Hill; 3 edition, 1998. Frame, J.D. The New Project Management: Tools for an Age of Rapid Change, Complexity, and Other Business Realities. Jossey-Bass, 2002 Jones, Ph. J. The Advertising Business: Operations, Creativity, Media Planning, Integrated Communications. Sage Publications, Inc; 1 edition, 1999. Laudon, K. C. & Laudon, J. P. Management Information Systems: Managing the Digital Firm, 9th Edition, 2005. Owens, I. Wilson, T. Information and Business Performance: A Study of Information Systems and Services in High Performing Companies. Bowker-Saur, 1996. Saaty, T. L. Decision Making for Leaders: The Analytical Hierarchy Process for Decisions in a Complex World. (3rd rev. ed.) San Francisco: RWS, 1999 Sissors, J.Z. Baron, R. Advertising Media Planning. McGraw-Hill; 6 edition, 2002. Read More