3 Ways to Collaborate More Effectively at Your Advertising Agency

Today I’d like to share my experience helping small and mid-sized ad agencies improve collaboration amongst their team members. Whether you are a studio technician, a graphic designer or an account executive, you are always collaborating with your peers. The type of collaboration can be simply assisting your co-worker with a design task that is part of an overall project or reviewing artwork with your client.

The other day I had a very interesting call with one of our clients who was asking about the best way to collaborate with his team. He insisted that there must be a better way to improve productivity by collaborating with various stakeholders by having a well-structured process to facilitate both internal and external communications.

Collaboration is a very broad topic and can be defined in a variety of ways. I will stick to a simple definition: the act of working together to achieve a common goal. Although most of creative agencies collaborate on tasks, products, videos, proofs and files, you would be surprised how much time is wasted due to the lack of a defined collaboration process.

In order to take full advantage of your team’s complementary skills, here are some principles to guide you.

3 Keys to Better Team Collaboration

1. Adopt a System

Have a tool that will allow your team to share files, collaborate on proofs both internally with your team and externally with your clients. Your client needs to revise a proof, but you don’t have a tool to make the process simple and streamlined? Make sure to use some kind of application to maximize your team’s time.

2. Speed of Information Flow

Make sure the information flows fast throughout your project. It is crucial to develop a workflow process to ensure everyone has full visibility on tasks and milestones in a project. Quite often we have identified teams that don’t necessary have a tool in place to assist them with allocating tasks and internal communication. They end up being lost with no sense of direction.

3. Understand Everyone’s Unique Skills

At your agency, you may have three senior designers with similar abilities, but be careful, everyone has a unique set of skills. It is important to identify these little differences among your team members and leverage that to your team’s benefits.

Most of our customers combine our Client Portal tool with FP to communicate and interact with both internal and external clients. If you would like to learn more about how these tools can help your agency, let us show you how in a personalized demo.

Chris Wilson

Founder & CEO

Chris started Function Point over 20 years ago in his basement as a way to help professional service agencies run their businesses more efficiently. Since then he’s grown FP into an international success, working with over 600 agencies from around the world and continues to run the company from the head office in Vancouver, Canada.