Creative concepts – creative management

Interacitve projects are mostly multidisciplinary projects that suffer from being neither a technical nor a mere conceptual one. These projects require therfor a special kind of management that gives the producers the creative space they need and the project managers a clear line to track the process. So these projects and concepts demand for a special management process.

Usually some methods from software development are adopted – such as an iterative one. But they really do not fit the demands of interdisciplinary websites or applications because they just deal with the technical factors and neglect all other perspectives like information architecture or content creation.

One the other hand, a too strict process and workflow seems to be too limiting to create a creative idea.

Interactive projects need a flexible standard that fulfills both: it must create creative freedom and define a strict roadmap without useless iterations. The concept must be fix before the first assets (porgrammes, media elements, textual content) are produced.

A solution might be a strict division of defining the project goals, developing a creative idea and creating a conceptual design:

• Strategy: systematical problem definition
• Creation: find possible problem solutions
• Concept: adapt the solutions

Each stage can be seperated into several workflows. These workflows define the work that must be done. A typical workflow might be quality assurance in all three stages or developing the technical concept in the last one. Iterations are allowed, but only within workflows and within one stage.

This approach seems logical, but usually the borders of the steps blur and the different workflows are mixed up and one really knows how far the concept has advanced. The seperation has a main advantage: strictly defined steps allow the project managers and creative concept developers to keep track of the current process. This can result in a better and faster concept creation – but for sure it will provide a framework that gives more space for individual concepts while keeping an eye on resources and workflows.