Why Adopt Management Software For In-House Creative Teams

More and more each year, in-house creative teams are turning to workflow management software to help streamline their processes.

Although tracking time and tasking is often considered to be more value to outside agencies, a full understanding of work effort is not only valuable for billing and staff management, it is critical in proving the value of your creative team.

Any successful organization will expect a positive ROI on in-house work, so the easier it is for your team to work more efficiently and to then be able to prove it’s value the better.

It’s important for other departments in your company to understand the value that you bring to the table. Here are 3 ways that will help you show it to them.

1. Track Your Time

Tracking time is not about going “Big Brother” on your creative team. Instead, it’s about providing proof of how much time the work takes and how busy your team is. From the perspective of an in-house team, it’s important that the value of your work is quantifiable and understood. Although often viewed as more time consuming than anything, nothing will help more than being able to show your “client” the amount of time you spent working on their project. You can take it a step further even and provide a dollar value for your work (ensuring that your department isn’t seen as simply a cost centre).

2. Plan Your Work Well

Introducing proper planning to your team may seem like micro management at first, but the reality is that it will not only help decrease the work burden on key members, it will allow you to set realistic deadlines ahead of time by knowing who has the bandwidth to take on new tasks and who is over-allocated. Using something like FP’s Work Planning View will allow you to shift work around before your team even begins working on it and ensure that you make your “clients” happy by producing realistic deadlines. It will also make staffing decisions much more apparent as you will know when your team has reached capacity.

Planning your work also means that you can set up milestones for your projects to ensure that the stakeholders know when they’ll be expected to provide feedback or approve elements of the work.

3. Prove Your Value

It’s always important to prove your value as an in-house team. Management will always be looking for ways to reduce overhead costs and/or increase profitability (as every company should do).

Make sure you have the reporting capabilities on hand that will prove the value of your team. If you run your team like an outside agency and can readily produce reports that show the cost of each task, job or project, you will become a much more valuable component of your organization as a whole.

Be sure that you’re known as a competitive advantage for your company and not just a cost.