Over the last twelve months we have seen many teams from major brands, marketing agencies and freelancers collaborate on their digital projects using Re4m. Each of them is slightly different and bring different perspectives – some are design focused, some product focused, some digital and some packaging focused.
Whatever the focus the premise is simple. Whether you are a product marketer, sales professional, web designer or any other role involved in creating and publishing digital content or indeed any content type it is essential that key individuals (maybe the CMO, VP Sales, CRO or CEO) have sight of and need to approve what is going to be shared before it is live.
Having talked to many of our users, we have identified four main themes that best-in-class teams have in their process:
- Clear Project Roles
At Re4m we see three main roles across creative production and digital collaboration projects. These are (i) Creative Project Managers, (ii) Approvers/Reviewers, (iii) Designers/Artworkers. In terms of (ii) Approvers, these can be internal to the organisation or in an agency or freelancer context they can be external. For clarity we describe these users as “Collaborators”. The Creative Project Manager is responsible for setting up the project and establishing roles for the rest of the team as well as communicating clearly with team members.
Designers/Artworkers are individuals who are responsible for the creation of the content. They are involved at the initial content creation stage (the initial version) and are involved in making any amends necessary from feedback provided by Approvers/Reviewers.
Approvers/Reviewers are the people you want to provide access to designs, make comments and execute the creative workflow required. This is normally an approval (or rejection) of the content or simply providing timely feedback.
As mentioned previously, the Collaborator role allows the Creative Project Manager to involve extended team members to participate in the process without signing up. This creates a seamless, frictionless approach to eliciting feedback and approvals.
- Agile vs Managed (Waterfall) Process
Once roles are established, the next critical step is to establish your workflow for reviewing content. When approval is required, we typically see teams divide into two groups: agile vs managed.
An Agile flow deals with a design that requires approval where the Creative Project Manager is happy for all approvers involved in the review to make comments and assign tasks allowing the team to work collaboratively.
The agile nature of this flow is considered and managed by Re4m. For example:
Creative Project Manager initiates an Agile review for Design A for three team members (Person A, Person B and Person C). The design has Designer X as a team member
9.00am – Person A logs into Re4m and is the first person to see Design A.
9.01am – Person A sees that there is a spelling mistake on the title line in Design A
9.02am – Person A annotates Design A, assigns the comment as a task for Designer X and ‘Rejects’ the design
Re4m notifies all team members that Person A has rejected the design
9.30am – Designer X sees they have a task for Design A and looks at the comment. He sees that there is a spelling mistake he needs to correct in the title
9.31am – Designer X makes the change in Adobe and creates a new PDF that has spelling mistakes corrected
9.32am – Designer X uploads a new version of the design to Re4m
Re4m re-calibrates the review in progress – by this we mean the deep links from tasks need to go to the right version (if the user navigates to the previous version this is ok – the user just needs to know this is not the current version as it has been superseded and there are no actions available). Re4m notifies all team members that the new design has been uploaded
9.45am – Person B logs into Re4m and can clearly see that they need to review and approve Version 2 of Design A (not Version 1 as their colleague Person A has already provided feedback, has rejected and a new version has been uploaded)
Once the design process and the versions are complete – i.e. a version has been approved by all users, the Creative Project Manager can change the status of the design to “Approved and Complete”.
A Managed flow deals with a design that requires approval where the Creative Project Manager reviews user comments and can turn these comments into tasks and assign them for completion.
The Creative Project Manager of the Project will, once all the approvers have approved or rejected the design:
- Review the comments from all the reviewers
- Convert tasks from the comments and assign them the designer or other users in the project team
Once a new design has been uploaded, the Creative Project Manager will consciously initiate another review and the review cycle will continue
- Centralise Task Management
Collaboration platforms like Re4m keep all creative production and creative feedback tasks in one centralized place. Re4m allows you to review all comments and convert comments into tasks and have them serve as proof of completion. That said, it is important that any solution plays well with any existing project management, CRM or collaboration software like SFDC, Trello and numerous others. Wherever you collaborate, be sure to identify where the final sign-off will ultimately take place.
- Centralise Creative Collaboration
Over the last 12 months we have received numerous messages from users saying, “why didn’t I do this sooner” or “I don’t know how we got stuff out the door before Re4m”. The consistent theme we’re hearing from them: you must centralise creative collaboration and you will never look back.
Change is always difficult but it is essential to bring digital transformation to what are old and outdated processes and systems. It is a priority to establish new and better ways of collaborating with your team and external stakeholders. Centralise creative collaboration as soon as possible. Be consistent in your approach. As one of our clients said to us recently, “With Re4m, we can manage the end-to-end review process across all types of media (video, pdf, web etc.) in one solution. That means no long emails chains, no PowerPoint presentations with screenshots, no misunderstandings and most importantly our customers love it.”