by Herman Manson (@marklives) The Jupiter Drawing Room Cape Town has collapsed their separate ‘leadership’ and ‘management teams’ into a single unit.
Helen Qually (Head of Strategy), Jonathan Beggs (Creative Director) and Peter Biven (Head of Account Management) now form part of the new single layer management team alongside Kevan Aspoas (CEO and Chairman), Ross Chowles (ECD), Joanne Thomas (Creative Director, 
Design), Claire Cobbledick (MD), Kevin Duke (Financial Director) and Anne Van Rensburg (Media Director).
According to Jupiter Cape Town MD Claire Cobbledick the move simplifies the corporate management structure at the agency which is also experimenting with restructuring its internal cross functional teams (each serves a portfolio of clients).
The team structure was supposed to build the account management /creative partnership and has been successful but teams grew too large (some had as many as 45 people on board), says Cobbledick. This meant team leaders didn’t get to fully utilise skill sets, some of which were locked in by rival teams, and their size took away from the nimbleness Jupiter was betting on achieving with the original structure.
The new internal structure will see five teams, each headed jointly by an accounts manager and a senior creative, with their own portfolio of clients, work with a central studio from where they can pick required skill sets. The studio will sit at the centre of the agency and teams will be able to draw skills from a central pool. Each member of the reconstituted creative department will have access to a mentor in the person of one of the creative team leaders.
The agency also took an inside-out approach to digital – digital specialists sit in the creative department and in a nod to the rise of social media so does PR.
Cobbledick says Jupiter Cape Town will continue to experiment with reinventing agency processes noting that traditionally these seem to have centred on “slowing stuff down and creating bottlenecks in traffic while covering your own ass.” The agency hopes to apply common sense, adaptability and an openness to experimenting with roles and structures to how it operates and what processes it adopts going forward.
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