In a previous post, we discussed three areas of your review and approval process that commonly experience bottlenecks. In the spirit of the upcoming New Year, let’s discuss ways to mitigate these bottlenecks so you can reduce friction in your workflow and get projects completed faster and with fewer headaches.
For Speedier Reviews
Tell your reviewers what kind of feedback you’re expecting from them. They’ll appreciate the guidance and you’ll get more relevant comments. For instance, in the early stages you may just want a proof of concept or you may want opinions on design options. Towards the end of your approval process, you may be looking for spelling and grammar proofing or simply for final signoff.
Make content simple for your reviewers to access and markup. With inMotion you can avoid headache-inducing FTP clients and snags with missing or incompatible software.
For Speedier Revisions
Avoid revision requests that are unclear or conflict with each other, dissuading your creative personnel to tackle changes. Let your reviewers know if there are specific parts of the content that you want them to give their attention to or if you’re looking for them to provide a certain perspective. For instance, if you’re including your customer support lead on an email newsletter review because you want to be sure that the contact info is accurate, let them know that’s what you need so they don’t provide feedback on other areas that may not be needed.
It’s also common for revision requests to come back with no deadline, and for creating new content to take precedence over making changes to completed pieces. Your content creators may have a deadline for creating content, but it’s not uncommon for revision requests to come back without any deadline and therefore get moved to the end of the queue. Providing deadlines for revisions can help your reviewers prioritize your project within the context of their other work.
Using inMotion also gives your content creators a good way to keep work that’s coming back for revisions organized. The solution also lets creators see feedback from all of their reviewers in one place and to easily compare past versions.
For Speedier Trafficking
An Approval Workflow Solution like inMotion can automate your routing so that assets move automatically from uploader to reviewers and back to uploaders. Plus, template workflows makes managing your rules-based routing even easier. Set up teams and rules once for repetitive projects and posting content for review takes just a couple of clicks. The days of babysitting an asset as it moves through the review and approval process are so last year.
What are your resolutions for improving your department’s review process?