DESIGN PROJECT MANAGEMENT TEMPLATE HOW TO

Give them a survey or workflow questionnaire to see where their skillset works best. Find out your team’s strengths, understand how they work best, and weave that into your plan. Your art director might do their best work in the dead of night, while some of your illustrators are more creative in the morning. The combination of different creative minds makes it hard to take a linear approach to project management for design professionals.

Understand how your design team best works In fact, within Teamwork, leads can set dependencies to designers that aren't available to complete until the necessary resources are provided first. Task dependencies prevent team members from working ahead without the proper assets or information. It's simple to assign task dependencies to ensure everyone understands what's needed to get the project across the finish line. That's why design agencies love Teamwork. Whether it's brainstorming or creating the sharing the final design file, agencies need a flexible space for designers to work with clients or project owners without creating additional work. Avoid wasting valuable time (and killing the creativity buzz) by using a centralized hub for every stage and stakeholder to communicate. You may get lucky, but most times, the client will ask for amendments or worse, ask you to start over because it’s not what they pictured. Otherwise, your graphic designers are left to shoot in the dark and hope their designs align with the client’s vision. It's important for project managers to get everything from the client upfront. They need direction, goals, parameters, and the right assets to effectively optimize their workflows. Businesses rely on their innate talents and acquired digital skills to create graphics that represent their brand.īut it’s not as easy as simply telling (or demanding) a graphic designer to create a new logo and hope for the best. Graphic designers, like other creatives, are specially qualified to bring your ideas to life. But there are simple steps design leads or agency owners can take to ensure designers feel empowered and autonomous in their craft. Listen – you could write a novel on the different ways to manage designers.

DESIGN PROJECT MANAGEMENT TEMPLATE HOW TO

How to best manage designers and set client expectations But the best design project managers walk this very fine line to manage clients and keep everyone happy. And without harmonious collaborative efforts from both sides, there's a very real danger of hitting a bottleneck with too many cooks in the kitchen.įinding a compromise between structure and creative freedom is hard. Designers are then forced into the unwanted role of mind readers.ĭesign requests demand effective project collaboration. Project collaboration is key to effective design teamsĭesigning the perfect asset requires the creator to match (or oftentimes exceed) the expectations of the requestor's mental image. What makes this even harder is that design can be such a subjective discipline. This is a common problem for design teams because their requests tend to require more changes and revisions than other marketing teams. Why project management for design teams is differentĭesign projects aren’t like other projects.ĭon't believe us? Just ask a designer how many tasks arrive on their plate with little-to-no project information, direction, or appropriate content. There are many different components of a design project, but managing one doesn't have to be a high-anxiety task. If you picture someone spinning plates while juggling flaming bowling pins, you’re not too far off the mark. This means you have to encourage creativity while adhering to client briefs or team guidelines. multiple reiterations of a creative concept), you as the project manager or lead will need to oversee all the moving parts. If there’s an element of design involved (a.k.a. The task could be anything from a webpage design, branding materials, creating a logo, or something that requires multiple assets like a digital marketing campaign. This process relies heavily on connecting two or more parties – typically the designer and requestor – to work together on delivering assets for one or more projects. Try our design project template What is design project management?ĭesign project management is the process of managing incoming design requests, allocating tasks to specific team members, and following through the project lifecycle to completion.

Design project management template