Isaac Leung
Even the most tightly run ship accumulates inefficiencies and minor irritations. In such a competitive environment, improving your workflow is just one way to increase your advertising production efficiency. It’s a good idea to pull back from the daily grind and get a big picture look at just how people are getting things done, as falling behind isn’t an option.
Here are the 5 things to keep in mind:
#1: Communication
In many cases, the front-line staff in the studio will be aware of their daily frustrations, and what can be done to improve the situation. By talking and taking on feedback, whilst combining it with your big-picture insight, you can make highly effective changes – many of which will yield almost immediate results:
The result: Things get done faster; there are fewer mistakes and less repetition.
#2: Morale boost
Workflow improvements provide more than just productivity benefits, and workflow reviews should be seen less as a chore, and more so a two-way process of communication. Allowing you to engage with the staff, and show them that you are listening and acting on their concerns, making changes to enable them to work smarter, not harder.
The result: With this process of engagement, staff can take ownership of their roles, and get a greater sense of fulfilment by achieving more at work.
#3: Technology improvements
The benefits from any improvements are not just short-term gains: they build up over time and can also cascade down the workflow to result in bigger time-savings. Five minutes saved on a single job by each Mac Operator can quickly add up to many extra hours throughout the working year.
And if your advertising workflow improvements result in better quality being produced, with less checks needed, and less risk of rejection by the publisher, that can mean hours of extra time freed up in a week across the whole agency.
The result: A studio which can get more done, on the same headcount, budget all without subjecting staff to overtime.
#4: Get prepared
Workflow reviews are not about totally replacing your way of working, or being at the bleeding edge of technology. In fact, because many studios’ workflows have quirks that are unique to their situation, many one-size-fits-all type solutions will not fit your needs at the current time.
To be truly effective they need to be paired with some research. This research, regardless of the results of the review, will give you and your team a big-picture view and better insight into what is going on in the market. Here are some questions to keep in mind:
- What is the competition is doing?
- Are there new solutions coming out in the market that might be useful a few months down the track?
- Are there new ways of working sweeping across the industry? And how do they compare with current work methods?
- How is the market changing, and what do you need to do in the next year or so to deal with these changes?
- And are solution providers introducing new features and functionalities, which indicate trends in what the wider market is asking for? (For example, some indications show some agencies are increasingly unifying their print and online workflows. Traditionally print-focused production platforms are responding by adding on online capabilities to their solutions.)
#5: Write it down
Your studio’s workflow is hard earned knowledge, built up from experience and experimentation. It’s important to keep a record of how things are done, and why they are done that way. So while documentation may not be the most exciting part of your day, it has the potential to save a lot of time later on.
Since workflow reviews involve actually finding out how things are being done in the studio, you can take the opportunity and kill two birds with one stone, by documenting or updating documented work processes at the same time. These records provide a central point of reference so you can track how working methods have changed with new solutions, or as new trends affect the agency.
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