How to Properly Balance Planning and Creativity in Your Redmine Project

Can you ask yourself - does planning prevent creativity? Does creativity have anything to do with planning? To be a good project manager, let creativity improve your problem-solving skills to help you overcome obstacles and develop interpersonal relationships. These will then help you achieve success with your project. But what happens when you have one without another?

Creativity without planning

Focusing solely on creativity without planning or not carrying out any form of control, your plan hinders poorly defined requirements and scope. This may only work if the tasks and milestones listed in your plan do not have any time estimates. By omitting a plan or not using it to monitor progress, it will eliminate any predictability on the project completion.

You lose the opportunity to assess the risk of delay over schedule, precisely because it is defined so indefinitely. The result will be a project that exceeds the budget and is not delivered in time. Stakeholders will be disappointed and the revenue forecasted will most likely be lost as well.

Planning and creativity are essential in project management.

Planning without creativity

Should you already have a project plan template, try applying it to your projects without any modifications. Redmine Easy Gantt gives you a nice overview of the relationship between tasks and the timeline. However, no customer is the same and, therefore, project plans cannot be used with any client. As your plan goes ahead, you will encounter various problems as it will not accurately reflect your customer's situation.

Because each customer is unique, your plan needs to be tailored in a unique way to meet the needs of individual clients. However, planning with no creativity does not allow you to come up with these unique solutions due to the inability to solve the problems you encounter when creating a plan. Without the proper use of your creative talent, you lose a key source of innovation without which you cannot create ideas and lose the ability to improve processes or strategies in a project environment.

One thing without the other does not bring a benefit.

Creativity and planning together in your Redmine project

The only way to avoid these pitfalls is to let creativity and planning work together. From the initial planning phase to gaining practical experience, these tools are used to create ideas and solve problems. Being creative means combining and using these ideas to solve demanding project issues, whether it is a conflicting task in a timetable or a delay on the customer's side.

Balancing creativity and planning helps to develop leadership and interpersonal skills while learning how to overcome obstacles. Leading the project team through demanding challenges will encourage you to perform better. There are many creative tools available to manage projects such as mind mapping, brainstorming or SWOT analysis. These tools stimulate useful and relevant ideas, no matter at what stage of the project lifecycle you are in.

For example, in the initial phase, you can use brainstorming techniques to help create a WBS (work breakdown structure) in your Redmine. Only a creative mind allows to resolve late deliverables and shift priorities without conflict. Using synergies created from creativity and planning will lead to project success. As a team leader, use creative techniques and encourage your team to use them to overcome obstacles.