Coloring Outside The Lines: Integrating Project Management and Creativity

By Ananya Ridenour and Brett Ridenour

Although seemingly contradictory, project management and creativity can work together to enhance and guard against common pitfalls found in both endeavors. It is useful for project managers to be more creative and for creative professionals to have more structure. By exploring different aspects of both project management guidelines and creative

• Language: English
• Publisher: Invictus Press
• Release date: Oct 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9781946062024

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Introduction

The blogs in this book emerged out of a desire to understand myself and conflicting psyche. I started writing the first blog as a journal entry in order to facilitate and hone my thoughts in regard to my daily struggle between my structured self vs creative person that I am. While these two are definitely contradictory, I explored the facets of both characteristics. I did not want to just be one type of person and not the other.

On my journey, I started to acknowledge that I do have both traits of my personality. More importantly, I wanted to keep and foster both aspects of me. But how to do that? It started as thoughts and ideas and just continued. Each time I came across a new issue or concept as a project manager, I reviewed those items and tried to apply the same ideas to my creative endeavors. Similarly, as a writer, I wanted to see how I could incorporate items I learned into my project management world.

This is a journey for sure. I am keenly aware that there is no true end goal but the journey itself is the key to my personal growth and discovery. If there is an end goal, it is to embrace both sides of who I am and to foster an environment in which they can both grow and thrive. The structured nature of project management will help the creative side to stay on track, plan, develop, and accomplish set tasks. The creative part will enhance my ability to have more ideas and think outside the box, even within a more structured setting. Both my professional career as a project manager and as a blossoming writer will benefit from the continued discussions and thoughts around these topics.

The following pages are musings that I encountered during this journey. I hope you enjoy, learn something, and more importantly, start your own personal journey to combine both the structured and creative in your daily lives.

How to Project Manage Creativity

In my real job as a project manager, I make lists, plans, and schedules of the tasks that need to be done and how to achieve them. This is contradictory to my creative nature in which I write and let the words flow. Lately, I have been thinking, how do I project manage myself? How do I project manage my own creativity?

Although the project management process differs from the creative process, I do believe it is possible to marry them together. What is it that they say, Opposites Attract? This is no different.

A project is a specific set of tasks necessary to attain a specified goal. The project itself is temporary and has a defined beginning and end. Whether you are performing a cloud migration (what I do in my professional job), planning a spaghetti dinner, or writing a novel, project management is critically important for any venture you undertake. If you are getting anything done at all, you are probably using some project management principles—although you may not even know you are.

The usual tools for project management include lists, plans, and timelines. These tools can be applied to creative pursuits as well. For example, a painter has an idea, then procures the materials, then creates a sketch, then works the paint on the canvas until their vision is achieved. These steps and the associated sequence compose the overall project plan. It can be very detailed, or rather loose, but nearly anything you do could qualify as a project plan.

Although the rigid discipline of project management seems to clash with creativity, I have used the principles to assist my creative endeavors. I have created lists for each writing project and determined what needs to be done. My husband (who I write my novels with) and I develop outlines for our stories so that we can account for each character, scene, and action. This structure has helped me to gain traction in each writing project.

Creativity is the act of constructing something