One of the biggest trends we saw with creative and marketing teams while talking with attendees of Adobe MAX this year didn’t have anything to do with actually producing content. It had to do with administrative workflows. While many of you are great at producing quality content, there seems to be a theme of misaligned project management tools paired with few or nonexistent project request and review processes. Of course, many of you that are implementing tools said it was better than what you had before – nothing. And it certainly is, but there are still challenges.
Many of you said that you didn’t have any tools in place to ensure all information for a project was captured right during the initial request. Instead, it seems that many of you filter multiple channels of input and only collect some of the information you need to carry out your projects. How big is the banner ad supposed to be? How long should the video run? From email and telephone to instant message and sticky notes, the challenge seemed to be that there were too many channels for project intake and not enough formality to capture the right information up front.
This problem seemed to be prominent through the review and approval process, too. Many of you get informal change requests that often lead to too many revisions and efficiency leaks. Almost everyone said they are confronted with conflicting change requests when multiple reviewers are involved. This forces you to step away from your design workflow and spend time trying to get outside parties to agree on a direction. And sometimes the reviews are even on printed proofs, making it difficult to actually track changes as you make edits.
Don’t worry. You’re not alone. We actually hear these same challenges from pretty much every creative team in the country. So, to help you overcome those challenges, we’ve created some really great resources to help you get your content to market faster and even produced a webinar on the subject.