How artists can improve their work priorities
How artists can improve their work priorities
Use the MoSCoW method to manage an artist team's workload.
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Let’s dive into today’s topic:
How artists can improve their work priorities
Business people love their acronyms. The MoSCoW method is a simple approach to help artists and their teams decide on what actions to focus on.
Why it matters
Artists have a lot to manage when it comes to promoting their music. They need to create additional content, build brands, tell stories, manage social media profiles, keep up with marketing gurus who tell them to invest in web3 and AI, and more. Additionally, marketing music costs time and money and requires a broad skill set. It's impossible to execute everything simultaneously. Not everything is important, and what's important is different for every artist. Furthermore, most artists never really learned how work works. To learn how to manage an artist team's workflow, it's valuable for music artists to learn how businesses prioritise work.
How it works
The MoSCoW method was developed by project managers using agile approaches, such as SCRUM, to develop applications faster. The method prioritises actions in a project into four categories:
Must have: Non-negotiable deliverables that are mandatory for the artist team.
Should have: Deliverables that are not vital but add significant value.
Could have: Deliverables that are nice to have, but leaving them out has little impact.
Won’t have: Deliverables without priority for now. Also known as the wishlist.
Actions can be prioritised alone as a more elaborate to-do list, but aligning the entire team is better. Decisions on what actions should be prioritised over others are based on available resources such as:
Time: All must-have tasks should be delivered within the deadline.
Budget: All must-have tasks should fit the budget.
Skills: Does the artist team have the skills available in-house, or should they recruit an external worker?
Yes, but..
Prioritising work is arbitrary, and opposing interests in an artist team can lead to wrong prioritisation. The artist or their manager should have the final call in prioritising actions, but even they can be biased. The solution is to stick with the strategy and base prioritisations on desired long-term effects.
Take action now
Start by writing down a list of actions and prioritise them into the four categories using the MoSCoW method.
Further reading
MoSCoW Prioritisation Method – How To Use It As A Musician (BlackbirdPunk)