Managing creativity?

I realize that this post has a somewhat ambitious heading…There is no such thing as a hard and fast answer to “managing creativity” and I don’t pretend to have one. It is what I do for a living, “managing creativity”, but if there is a Nirvana for this I have not arrived there yet.
But, since writing this is almost a therapeutic exercise I might as well start with the beginning: what is it I am I trying to do?

Ok, so I work for a company that develops and publishes video games (or computer games, or games.) The process of developing these is long (usually a couple of years for major titles) and involves a multitude of disciplines; programmers, graphical artists, audio artists, writers, managers, marketing people, publishing people, operations, localization, QA….pretty much everything to take something from being an abstract idea in somebody’s mind to becoming a product that you, the customer, can play on your PlayStation or XBox or Nintendo or PC…

In fact that last paragraph pretty much demonstrates exactly what makes it so difficult to “manage” this process; it is too complete. There are very few points during the development cycle where control naturally passes from one defined unit or discipline to another. It’s a continual evolution along a broad front which involves pretty much all disciplines from start to finish. Boundaries get fuzzy both in space and time and the project evolves into a lava flow; predictable only in as much as that it will reach the sea somewhere, some time…
Hand off’s and organisational boundaries that are one way gates can help tremendously in organising and structuring processes such as these. One great example of this is outsourcing but I think that might be a topic for another post.

Anyway, I work with some incredibly clever and creative people and it is easy to think that, if left to their own devices, they will just magically create wonderful things that will be instant market hits and provide great revenue from day 1.
Of course it is not so but not for lack of trying and not because these wonderfully creative people are somehow completely disorganized and incapable of coordination either. Btw, that last sentence is deliberately exaggerated because I know that many project managers, myself included, at least once in their careers have thought that the people they manage are exactly that; an unmanageable and sometimes reckless lot who dance away doing the things they like with no care for milestone dates and deliveries…

But this is of course what makes them what they are in the first place and this is what, ultimately, delivers hours of amazing escapes from reality for millions of consumers. So, we either learn to live with it or we find another job.

We still have to deliver on time, on budget and to specs of course and this is the cause of our sleepless nights and frustrations. How do you reach some level of predictability and order in all this creative chaos?

I read management books all the time and I follow various communities online (including our own internal ones) about Agile and Lean development approaches. Early on I thought that one of these would “show the way” and if we could just implement one of them then everything would fall into place by itself. I particularly liked (and still do) SCRUM for it’s simplicity and focus on customer value. However, none of these methods will, on their own, solve the problem of turning what is a highly organic and diverse evolutionary process into an ordered system of incremental deliveries over night.

What I find is that unless there really are “product owners” (in the case of SCRUM for example) who actually do care about the delivery of a product (as opposed to something against a date or some superficial criteria) and unless these people have the absolute authority and trust vested in them by their team(s) to act and behave like product owners, the whole wonderful house of cards crumbles to the ground.

Sounds easy then; identify your product owners and give them power and freedom to get what they ask for and set them loose with their individual self-organising teams…

Having worked with quite a few developers – both internally and externally – and having done a fair bit of trial and error I have to admit that I’ve come down to a very undramatic and pragmatic view of how this works;
If you have a disciplined team and if you have a team of leaders who can hold a vision and drive it through whilst at the same time are able to communicate with all the stakeholders to ensure that what is delivered is what somebody wants then, if you use SCRUM or waterfall or something else, you at least have a fighting chance of being able to predict and track progress towards your finished product.

I realize that what I am saying here is somewhat of a truism; Good Teams build Good Product.
But I believe this to be true.