Working from home is one of the great perks of the modern office job. Not only can it be nice to spend the workday in the comfort of your own home, but it can also come in handy when making it to the office just isn’t an option. If your team is beginning to incorporate a remote working program, you’ll want to make sure you have a plan to keep your workflows running smoothly. inMotion ignite can help teams of all shapes, sizes, and locations collaborate seamlessly and streamline their workflows so that they never miss a beat, no matter where you’re working from.

Pillar 1: Request Intake
Whether you’re in the office or working remotely, requesters have a way of finding you. The request intake and briefing process tends to be difficult even when we’re all in the same room – working remotely can exacerbate these challenges. The first problem that tends to come up with request intake in a remote working situation is what I like to call the “email and bail” – which is when a requester sends you a quick email about needing something, often with an aggressive deadline, and not enough information for you to complete the job. When you try to email them back to fill in the gaps, they are nowhere to be found. inMotion ignite provides creative teams with custom, dynamic forms that require stakeholders to fill out all the information you need for their project before they can submit it. This means when that when you get that request, you have all the information you need to get started right away with no delays.

Pillar 2: Project Management
All teams benefit hugely from having a single system of record, but this is doubly true for remote teams. You can’t just pop up over the cubical to ask your teammate a question. You need to know at-a-glance the status of projects, what your current priorities are, and when work is due. inMotion ignite allows you to keep track of every campaign, project, proof, and task that your team is working on so that you are always working on the right thing at the right time and nothing slips through the cracks. Some of the project management features in inMotion ignite that are especially useful for remote teams include:

• Constant collaboration. No matter where you are in inMotion ignite, you can always get in touch with your teammates and stakeholders by @mentioning them in the comments section. Comments are available on every request, campaign, project, tasks, proof, and in the proofing environment, so you can have the most productive conversations right on the specific work item being discussed.
• Resource management. Your team has a lot going on and lot of moving pieces. You want to do as much for your stakeholders as possible, but in order to keep everything moving smoothly, you need to know your team’s capacity and how new projects will impact existing deadlines. Level of Effort (LOE) helps team members plan how much time they should be spending on work, while Time Tracking allows them to track the actual time they spend, so that your team can become better at measuring and managing capacity over time. Additionally, for teams that want a high level of precision in managing their time, Scheduling in inMotion ignite lets you plan out how much time and on which days work will be completed.
• Dynamic work views. Every team, and for that matter every person, has their own preferences about how they want to look at their work. When you’re working away from your team it’s important to make sure you’re up to date on everything, so inMotion ignite gives you a plethora of ways to look at your work.
  • Wondering where to get started for the day? Start with your personal dashboard.
  • Need to see the whole month at-a-glance? Check out calendar view.
  • Want to see the full timeline for a project and dependent relationships between work items? Gantt Views are for you.
  • Want to only see the work that is ready to be started right now? Toggle your work view to hide blocked tasks.
  • Want to switch between a few really specific sets of filters? Try saving some Custom Views.
• File sharing. Show of hands – who here has had to re-send a file when your teammate couldn’t find it in their email or Slack history? With inMotion ignite, you never have to go through that again because you can attach relevant files directly to the requests, campaigns, projects, tasks, and proofs. Now your teammates can get to all the files they need without asking you to send the file – again. When it comes to proofs, versioning keeps everyone on the same page (literally!). Don’t forget those requesters! When you finish a project attach the final files and mark them as deliverables to send them right back, attached to the original request. Best of all, everyone will know when you’ve sent those files because they will receive real-time notifications, whether they are in ignite or working in Adobe Creative Cloud.

Pillar 3: Review + Approval
For creative teams the biggest obstacle to working from home successfully is your proofing process. If you want to go home, you have to go digital. When the Coronavirus broke out, the New York Times Magazine switched to remote work, but they faced a significant challenge in their proofing process, which was still paper-based. By using an online proofing platform like the one included in inMotion ignite, you can get better feedback, faster, without chaperoning a physical proof around the office. Detailed markup tools like highlight, strikethrough, insert, free draw, and box allow your reviewers to leave specific, actionable feedback. Threaded comments and @mentioning allow dynamic collaboration on the proof.

Additionally, ignite automatically routes your proofs for you. Add all your reviewers, or apply a pre-built route template, and ignite makes sure every reviewer completes their review and automatically notifies you when all the feedback is in.

Pillar 4: Reporting
One of the hardest things about working from home is losing that daily chance to touch base with your teammates and for everyone to share what they are working on. This is even more true for agile teams, who often structure their workflow around regular meetings, like kicking their day off with a team standup. While ignite can’t magically teleport you to be in the same place as your team, remote teams, even agile ones, can still stay connected on what everyone is working on by building and sharing custom reports. These reports can show:

• What everyone is working on that day or week
• Top priorities for the team
• New requests that need to be distributed
• Blockers that are keeping projects from moving forward

While reporting in inMotion ignite is a powerful tool for any team become more data driven and track the key metrics that drive their process, it can be especially helpful for remote teams to share exactly the most important information they need to keep their workflow in motion.

No matter where you’re working, inMotion ignite provides your team with a single system of record where your entire team can gather to collaborate and produce high quality, impactful creative.

Learn more about how inMotion ignite can help your remote team by scheduling a demo.

Elise Hauser is a product and content marketer with a passion for telling brand stories. She has produced inMotionNow’s annual In-House Creative Management Report for 3 years, webinars, content sessions for major industry events reaching audiences of 1,000+, and of course, countless blog posts. When Elise isn’t writing about the marketing and creative industry at inMotionNow she is teaching economics and hanging out with her cat, Tucker, at her home in Raleigh, NC.