Anyone who took PSYCH 101 has seen Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Just in case you missed that day of class, here’s a quick recap.
Maslow was a psychologist who focused on what we now refer to as positive psychology. He studied high-functioning people to see how they got to where they were, and what emerged was his well-known hierarchy of needs.
In a nutshell, before a person can move on to the next level of needs, their most basic needs have to be met. That’s why the bottom of the pyramid starts with physiological needs like food, water and shelter. If a person didn’t have those, it was unlikely they’d be focused on self-actualization, which was at the top of the pyramid.
Now, Maslow’s theory is still widely discussed, but I’m not here to get into psychology. What does any of this have to do with creative operations, and managing work-in-progress?
Well, creative operations falls into a hierarchy as well, where as you move up through the stages, your work in progress process is getting closer to optimal efficiency. Each of the three stages addresses a specific set of needs, with the each stage building on the preceding stage.
The (current) hierarchy of creative operations stages are:
- Annotation
- Workflow
- Creative operations business intelligence (COBI)
Let’s take a look at each – and how progressing up the hierarchy will help creative production teams deliver more approved assets on time and increase production capacity.
1. Annotation
The first level of the hierarchy is the basics.
At this stage, teams are trying to collaborate on and review work using email or pen and paper. Change requests are unclear, no one can tell if someone has already made the same comment fifteen times, assets get lost and the process is, quite frankly, very inefficient. Teams are barely keeping their head above water given that they need to produce more and more assets, faster, using this broken process. With the timelines to deliver assets getting shorter every day, this is becoming a more and more pressing concern.
The needs that teams are looking to satisfy are simple (just like food and shelter.)
- - a way to share any type of creative work
- - a way to give clear feedback
- - a way to centralize feedback
And they try to satisfy those needs with an annotation tool.
Call it annotation, or online proofing, or digital collaboration on visual assets – it’s the ability to share visual assets of all kinds, draw circles on them, and tie your annotations to comments.
When teams are reviewing assets by email, this is a hugely effective strategy to add to their work-in-progress process. They now have a way to give clear feedback on creative work, annotate visual assets and a centralized feedback system. They’ve fulfilled the needs of this level of work-in-progress strategies.
Once the annotation tools are in place, everyone breathes a collective sigh of relief. What they don’t yet realize is that there’s a whole new level of efficiency that has opened up, thanks to the foundation of a more efficient review and approval process. Now, they can focus on the next level of work in progress strategies.
2. Workflow.
Now that annotation is in place, the team can start to see other inefficiencies they’d never had a reason to notice before. Who should see this video first, the marketing manager or the creative director? Should we send this to Legal before final executive sign off, or after? Who does have the authority to give final sign off, anyways? And how will those decisions impact the process?
At first, these can seem like minor issues that can be solved on an ad-hoc basis. It’s not until a few months down the road that teams realize that the way they handle email marketing projects is completely different between departments – and some departments are taking much longer to finish projects because of it.
That’s when teams realize they’ve arrived at the second level of work in progress needs. They need workflow process: a process that ensures that the right work is routed to the right person at the right time.
This process is a bit more involved than getting annotation tools in place, but once a process has been set up and implemented, teams breathe a sigh of relief. Everyone is using the same process, aiming for similar results. Especially in large organizations, getting everyone on the same page can result in big gains in work-in-progress productivity.
So we’ve solved the annotation and workflow problems.
But who cares?
If these tools aren’t driving real, measurable results for the business, in terms of increasing the number of approved assets you can deliver, they don’t matter.
That’s where creative operations business intelligence comes in.
3. Creative operations business intelligence (COBI)
At the quarterly meeting, when you’re standing there talking about how much more efficient the work in progress process is thanks to annotation and workflow strategies, your team might ask some of the following questions.
“Exactly how much more efficient are we today then we were six months ago?”
“So which of the 7 agencies we work with is most efficient at delivering assets for our digital campaigns?”
“How much has the average review time for a landing page been reduced?”
If you’ve only solved the first two needs in the work in progress hierarchy, there’s a good chance you can’t answer these questions with any degree of certainty. You’ll rely on estimates, and you’ll be left without any hard data to back up your investment in these tools.
That’s why teams at this stage turn to creative operations business intelligence (COBI) as a work in progress strategy.
Creative operations business intelligence is a focus on the KPIs and metrics that are most important to your work in progress process. Once teams realize they need to focus on COBI, they turn to data to analyze their current work-in-progress process. They’ll look at historical and current data to benchmark their current performance, and then use that data to find insights into what’s working – and what isn’t.
This is the third level of the hierarchy, because annotation and workflow strategies need to happen either before or at the same time as a focus on COBI. Why? Well, without better ways to communicate about creative work, and a repeated process, the data you get is either going to be fragmented or non-existent. Try measuring how long it takes to complete a review by email – and then do that for the hundreds of concurrent reviews. Soon, that’s a full time job in itself, which isn’t doing anything to make your team more efficient.
Instead, with COBI, you can gather data from historical projects and map out exactly what has happened in the past. For example, one company used COBI to identify why email marketing projects in one department were taking so much longer than others. Their process led them to see that the creative briefs in that department were far too vague, leading to additional rounds of revisions. This issue might not have been identified – or solved – without the COBI approach.
Being able to identify and solve roadblocks like those is more important than ever for today’s marketing and creative teams. Thanks to trends like Big Data, real time marketing and hyper-segmentation, you need to create more assets than ever to take advantage of the opportunities available, and you can’t do that without an efficient process. COBI, and the efficiency it can deliver, are the keys to increasing your production capacity and delivering more approved assets on time.
I’ll be speaking about this topic, and going more in depth about how leading marketing teams are using creative operations business intelligence, a few times in the upcoming months. If you’d like to find out more, I’ll be speaking about COBI at…
- Henry Stewart DAM NYC (register with code CONCEPT100 for a $100 discount)
- ADAM Sync! San Francisco, NYC and Chicago