It’s human nature to think bigger is always better. Even business leaders can succumb to the temptation to buy big, especially when they’re looking to purchase a technology solution.
We see this sometimes when we’re talking to customers about their experience looking for a solution to improve their workflow management challenges. Creative teams need tools to make their everyday life easier – tools that manage the common, routine tasks that are the “often.” These customers may occasionally have large, complex projects that, while important are also infrequent. These are the “ever-so-often”. Creative teams get hung up on worrying about how they’ll manage these complex projects and end up implementing solutions that are a better fit for the “ever-so-often” project than the “often” projects.
For example, a large book publisher contacted us about how we could help them get control of dozens of projects in various stages of completion. Most of the projects were routine, quick turnaround projects. The creative department would get an email asking them to put together an ad or a book tour flyer. These kinds of “often” projects made up the bulk of their workload. But occasionally, they would have an “ever-so-often” big release with a carefully choreographed promotional strategy planned months in advance, involving many people, with lots of moving parts and big budgets.
The looming presence of these big releases pushed the publisher into errantly trying to adopt a big project management application, one with multiple fields and inputs to complete, and Gantt charts to populate and manage. While this was helpful for the “ever-so-often” project, for the everyday, quick-turnaround projects that made up 90% of their workload this kind of application often required more time to set up a project than the project would take to complete!
Rolling the solution out took up a lot of resources, their team members were frustrated with how hard it was to use, and ultimately the “ever-so-often” solution failed to get widespread adoption for “often” projects.
At inMotionNow, we’re firm believers that technology shouldn’t get in the way and that technology should serve the “often” with ease and not the “ever-so-often.”
Keep this in mind when you are assessing what tools will deliver the highest ROI to your creative team – they’ll often tell you it’s the one that’s helping them with the “often”.
-Rob Munz
CEO, inMotionNow