Solve 3 Pain Points Faced By In-House Creative Agency Teams

After working with many in-house teams, I’ve found that they all have their own unique creative workflow processes. This can make it difficult to pinpoint the key elements you must have in a task management software, but we’re here to shed light on some key areas that you may not have considered before.

Managing Job Requests

In-house teams can get work from departments, cost centres, clients, employees, and many variations of this. You can get hundreds of job requests in a single month. As your team works to finish all these requests, maybe you realize that the client didn’t provide you with enough info, or they’re calling in wanting updates about every other minute. Whatever it may be, they’re all interruptions to your workday!

If this sounds familiar, it’s time to automate the way you receive job requests.  You want to set up a client portal that allows clients to submit a job request form, and allows your team to alert the appropriate team member(s). The client portal should also allow the client to view, in real-time, the status of the job and when it will be completed. This eliminates the background noise and gives your team more time to design.

Tracking Your Time

Tracking time is usually a rare occurrence for in-house teams. It’s a hassle and it’s not part of your job description, right? The thing is, tracking time helps solve a lot of issues including high maintenance clients, overworked team, and workforce inefficiency. How you may ask? The reports you gain by tracking time will give everyone a deeper understanding of what it takes to complete their requests and set more accurate expectations and delivery dates – a small investment for a much larger gain.

Billing For Jobs

In-house creative teams are often viewed as a cost to the company.  It can be difficult for management to understand the value that an in-house creative team provides to the company.  As a solution to this, mature teams will “bill” for their work as if they were a traditional agency.  By billing this “Monopoly money,” you can help management visually see the quantitative value of all the jobs that you do. It helps them imagine what it would be like if they had to pay all that money – or more – to an outsourced agency. Perhaps you’ll even get approval for a higher budget!

While these are not necessarily top-tier items for an in-house team, it is important to choose a task management software that can grow with your team.  If you are going to change your task management software, do it right and do it once!