12 Ways to Improve Your Creative Workflow Management in 60 Days or Less

According to a recent survey from Lytho of how creative teams are responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, 43% of creative teams that don’t currently have a creative workflow management system in place plan to acquire one in 2020. That’s because seamless creative workflow management is key for creative teams who need to meet aggressive demand for volume and speed of creative work, without sacrificing quality.

However, many teams hesitate to invest in creative workflow or even take advantage of extended free trials. Why? They worry that it will take too long to see results from the new system. In fact, creative teams that implement a creative workflow management solution start seeing positive impacts to their workflows almost immediately.

Here are 12 ways that a creative workflow management platform can improve your workflow in 60 days or less.

Request Intake

51% of creatives report that their creative briefing process is neither comprehensive nor collaborative. A few simple steps to improve your request intake process will jump-start your entire workflow.

1. Getting all the Information in Advance

Start with identifying all the different types of work requests your team receives from stakeholders. THen, gather all the information you need to kick off a project. Then translate that into forms that requesters must fill out to submit a work request. This means you can get started on work faster, rather than chasing down requesters that submit incomplete briefs.

2. Increase Collaboration with Requesters

Creative teams are more than just a set of hands. They are strategic problems solvers that stakeholders should view as partners. Creative workflow management platforms, like Lytho Workflow, provide features like request dashboards, threaded comments, and request sharing so that it’s easy for creative teams to collaborate and increase transparency with stakeholders.

3. Let Request Details Guide the Project

Purpose-built creative workflow management solutions know how important the initial creative brief is to the success of the entire project. That is why they automatically connect requests to associated work. In this way, project participants can refer back to the initial request throughout the lifetime of the project.

Project Management

Management of projects is not the area of creative workflow management that causes the most trouble for creative teams. That being said, having the right project management tools that integrate seamlessly with the request intake and review and approval stages of the creative workflow can go a long way towards building a more efficient creative workflow.

4. Keep Track of Everything You Are Working On

For busy creative teams, there is always the danger that one project or proof slips through the cracks. A good creative project management solution helps team members keep track of their projects and due dates. How? By using personalized dashboards and work spaces, so they can focus less on juggling and more on designing brilliant creative.

5. Get a Clear View of the Team’s Projects

Oftentimes, the easiest way for a team to keep track of all their collective work is to leverage visualizations. Things like Gantt views, Kanban boards, or calendars offer project progress updates at a glance.

6. Allocate Resources Effectively

Accepting new projects can be tricky if you lack a strong understanding of how your team’s time is allocated. Start by logging their time in a resource management solution. Then, you can start making smarter decisions about project timelines and workload distribution.

Review & Approval

Sending proofs out for review is a defining aspect of creative work. Still, it can be quite challenging for teams that do not have the right tools.

7. Receive and Give Useful Feedback

The problem with sending a proof out for review? It is hard to get high quality feedback that your team can take action on. Additionally, you may often be forced to consolidate feedback from multiple reviewers. Such work can be duplicative, contradictory, and raise more questions than it answers. Our advice? Use an online proofing solution built with creative teams in mind. You can now benefit from better quality, actionable feedback on the first proof.

8. Receive Said Feedback Promptly

The only thing worse than getting confusing feedback on a proof is being stuck waiting on it. Creative workflow management platforms offer automated solutions to help you get your feedback on time. Features like automatic review reminders chase the reviewers for you, so you can focus on productive tasks instead.

9. Establish Immediate Accountability

Ever had creative work go live in a campaign, only to realize a crucial approver didn’t sign off? Avoid situations where your creative workflow management platform tracks review statuses. That leaves you with an audit trail to confirm sign off. This helps prevent unapproved work from going out the door.

Reporting

43% of creative teams don’t regularly track key operational metrics. Reporting may not seem like the most exciting or creative part of the job. It’s crucial to track key metrics so that you can continually improve your process. A few immediate benefits of implementing a creative workflow management platform with reporting include:

10. Get Access to Metrics

Missing out on a lot of data? You would not if you used an end-to-end creative workflow management platform. Having a platform that is actively recording key data, like submitted requests, cycle time on reviews, and total project duration, means that you can start acting on that data. Just getting access to the data is already a huge step forward.

11. Discover Completion Times for Each Project Type

The first step to meeting deadlines is to set reasonable ones. In order to do that, you need to know how long different types of work take to complete. You can start getting an understanding of project length after just a few projects go through your new creative workflow management system.

12. Identify Blockers

Going a step beyond simple total project time, you can also look at how much time was spent in each stage of a project, or how much time a proof spent in review, or which reviewers are taking the longest to complete reviews. Once you know where projects are getting hung up, you can take steps to clear the way and keep work on track to hit deadlines.

Do you want to give yourself and your creative team more room for creative stimulation by automating the boring stuff? Lytho helps you streamline your entire workflow and harmonize all brand collateral under a single, uniform platform. Feel free to reach out to us by scheduling a demo and learning how our creative solutions can boost the effectiveness of your creative projects. We look forward to speaking with you!