On Tuesday, February 20th, inMotionNow presented a webinar panel discussion, “Optimizing Your Creative Workflow with Reporting and Analytics”. The panel was moderated by Alex Withers, CMO of inMotionNow, and included Jenni Watkins, Project Manager in Creative Services at a Fortune 500 company, Michael Arnott, Traffic Manager at Defenders, and Stacy Russell, Senior Marketing Project manager at WorldVentures. During the webinar, the panelists discussed how they each got their teams started with workflow reporting, how they currently use workflow reporting to help their teams streamline their creative workflow, and what they have found to be the biggest benefit of leveraging workflow reporting.
How to get started with workflow analytics?
For many teams, leveraging workflow analytics and reporting is a big change from how they are currently working. The panelists shared how they transitioned their teams to a more data-driven approach.
Arnott recommends starting small:
“Before we were working with inMotion we were tracking all our stuff through email and spreadsheets, which was rife with human error… We went from having really no workflow reporting, no analytics, to being able to go through inMotion to see how many projects we had, where we were in those projects, what the status of them was, what the priority level of the projects were, etc. It really helped us get a lot more organized…. inMotion really helped us get our arms around our jobs.”
Russell had a bigger change to manage, and one of her key tactics was to bring the stakeholders that would be affected by the changes into a room to get their feedback on exactly what they needed and wanted in a weekly report. By getting them engaged and invested in the process early on helped drive adoption.
“I wanted to try to get more visibility into the team and what they were doing on a daily and weekly basis… I met with the creative team and whiteboarded out what [information] specifically they needed…[then] I went into the reports and created tasks and milestones that were very specific to each team… and created a Hot Sheet. [This] was a big behavioral shift for the team, because they were used to going into a meeting every Monday for 2 hours with the traffic team about what we were doing that week… About 3 months in we saw that behavioral shift of now depending on that Hot Sheet.”
How do you use workflow reporting and analytics to optimize your creative workflow?
During the webinar, the panelists outlined three primary ways they use workflow reporting on their teams today:
1. Show tangible ROI by mapping business objective to creative production.
2. Help internal stakeholders prioritize requests by reporting on current team workloads and projects.
3. Ensure that the team is on track to hit deadlines by tracking project statuses against timelines. Watkins outlined how she uses reporting to both keep track of her team’s workload and progress, as well as helping their marketing stakeholders prioritize projects.
“As a project manager, every morning I go in [to the system] and run my daily reports to see what are the designers working on today, do they have too much time, do they have enough to do, do we need to switch things around, and also, what’s overdue, what’s coming up due, are there things that we won’t be able to accomplish, do we need to bring in contract workers, do we need to ask other teams to prioritize their projects… when you give the marketing team a whole list of everything we’re doing, they might decide that some of their projects are a little less important than others and give us some extra time to work on them.”
What is the biggest benefit your team has seen from using workflow reporting?
Ultimately, like any process change, whether it is worth implementing depends on the overall benefit to the team. Each of the panelists found important benefits from implementing workflow reporting.
– Custom reports
– Increased efficiency for the creative team
– Transparency for stakeholders
Arnott has seen benefits for his team with both increasing efficiency and creating transparency for his marketing stakeholders:
“…[the biggest benefit is increased] efficiency on how many hours we’re spending on things… We have weekly hour-reporting jobs that I create each week that track overall hours we’re spending on miscellaneous other things that we’re doing… [like] creating campaigns, working through compliance, and auditing our systems… We’re able to transparently show the marketing department how we’re spending our time.”
The entire webinar is available to view on-demand.
If you would like to learn how you can use workflow reporting to optimize your creative workflow, schedule a call with a workflow expert.