When businesses find themselves struggling to stay in control of the creative production process they often turn to project management tools. Project management tools are great – they can help an organization create detailed task workflows, share status info and notes, and track how much time team members spent on various projects.
But project management tools have a blind spot: the content review process.
If you’re like most marketing and creative departments, you’re creating content that needs to be routed for approval before it goes to market. The process comes with its own unique set of challenges that project management tools aren’t well-equipped to address.
Here are a few reasons why project management tools aren’t helping your review and approval process:
- Approvals still happen in a black boxIn most creative teams, content is produced and then emailed out to several stakeholders for review. You email, and you wait. Have they looked at it yet? How many have returned feedback? Will you need to create a new version? Your project management tool isn’t going to have these answers.
- Approval updates have to be done manuallyIf your project management tool does tell you what the approval status is on a project, it’s likely because somebody manually entered that information. The problem is, keeping every project up-to-date every time somebody returns feedback is time-consuming. And that’s time that’s not being spent on revenue-generating activities.
- You’re still relying on email to collect feedbackEmail is a lousy and inefficient way to collect feedback. Because reviewers have to describe what they want changed, there’s room for miscommunication. With multiple reviewers involved, email threads quickly become long and confusing. Start adding new versions and then you have to worry whether everyone’s on the same page. And good luck going back through old emails and piecing together feedback on a previous project!
If your organization uses a project management tool but still struggles with the review process, a better option may be a robust review and approval solution with built-in project management tools. Rather than an over-the-top project management tool with a little piece of review routing, you may find that an approval workflow solution with a bit of project management is a better fit for your needs.
Learn how inMotion does project management differently (download the PDF) and see an example how inMotion helps creative teams integrate project management into their entire workflow from initial request to final approval (watch the video).