About perfection and ideation

Rebranding JC has been a great exercise and as Borat would say 'I like to last for a very long time!'.
Well at some point the creative process and the pleasure that entails have to take a practical shape.
Perfection is the excuse of lazy and undecided people.
Personally I tend to adopt the iterative development - eternal beta approach. We rarely deal with mission critical projects in advertisement or management.

And at the end of the day the ideation / conception / initiation / inception phase exists in a very specific place in time as part of a project timeline.
So weather you like it or not, it has a clear end...

Now the issue is (and I get this question from every agency we're working with): how can a manager make sure the ideation phase of a project is delivered within budget, a timely manner and with the amazing concepts and ideas?
For many agencies the big challenge is how to keep the creatives happy and 'creative' and still not suffer too much in the subsequent project phases because of that.

The answer is quite simple.
- plan
- give special attention to dependencies.
:: is this task really dependent on the previous one? analyze the dependencies. you need the marketing objectives to be defined before you work on the creative how-to. but you don't need to wait for approved detailed storyboard in order to start designing the framework or programming your templates or css positioning. be proactively smart.
:: who should be involved when and why? always find the critical minimum number of persons assigned to a task
- manage the brainstorm meetings!! ok soft-manage them... this sounds dichotomatic (i like making up words) but with simple techniques and structures you can drastically improve the productivity of those meetings.
- money talks. at the end of the day the manager is in charge of the budget and every company should have clear procedures and policies that facilitate the decision making process.

There is such thing as good enough, but in order to benchmark on 'enough' the objectives have to be very clear. Too many projects are thrown in conception without clear marketing objectives and other considerations. And this is when you call us...