We frequently hear from creative departments who are looking for a solution to manage the approval process that they’ve been told their organization already has a solution in place – a project management solution, originally purchased to help the operations, product development, IT, or other department manage their workflow.
But is a project management solution a one-size fits all answer to every workflow challenge?
Project management solutions are as diverse as they are powerful. But they are often ill-suited to the needs of a creative department. Unlike a manufacturing group or an operations department, a creative team isn’t just completing tasks and reaching milestones, they are managing content in various stages of completion all of the time. That content is at the core of many tasks – route it for review, collect feedback on it, revise it, rinse and repeat until it’s approved. But Project Management tools separate the tasks from the content.
What does that mean for the creative team who is given a project management tool to control the approval process? It means that they continue to struggle with getting clear feedback, chasing approvals, version control, and tracking review status – and that using their project management tool just becomes admin work instead of an effective solution.
But it doesn’t have to be like this. Instead, creative teams can look for solutions tailored to their unique, dynamic workflows. Approval workflow solutions like inMotion are designed to manage the review and approval process and to make it easy to get feedback, keep everyone on the same version, track who’s reviewed content and identify bottlenecks. Most critically, it’s designed to automate much of the process so that creative teams stop spending their time making updates and can get back to what they do best – creating great content.