This post is part of a series of the Four Pillars of Creative Workflow Management. You can read the related posts here:
How to Manage Creative Projects

Request intake, project kickoff, Creative brief, job ticket. Whatever you call it, the process of stakeholders requesting work from the creative team is a pivotal point in the creative workflow that can ultimately determine the success or failure of a project. It’s also one of the most difficult parts of the creative workflow. In the 2020 In-House Creative Management Report, 51% of creative teams reported that their creative briefing process is neither comprehensive nor collaborative.

In many ways, this first step in the creative workflow should be the most collaborative step. Unfortunately, many stakeholders view the creative briefing process as a hassle and a formality that they often race through. However, In order for creative teams to produce creative assets that are going to be the most effective and impactful, they need to be fully briefed on the larger campaign, the desired outcomes, and what problems the initiative is trying to solve.

When creative teams are handed incomplete briefs and not given the opportunity to have an open dialogue with requesters, the entire creative workflow is put in jeopardy. Many of the problems that appear later in the creative workflow can be directly tied back to an inadequate project kickoff. For example, a difficult proof review with lots of negative feedback, or an excessive number of versions, is almost always an indicator of a gap between what the requester was expecting and what they actually asked for in the brief. When creative briefs are unclear or missing important information, creative teams either can’t get started as quickly on a project because they’re chasing down those details, or it results in massive amounts of rework later in the process because the work produced by the creative team does not meet the expectations of the stakeholders. Kicking off projects faster, finishing them on time, and increasing efficiencies across the entire creative workflow process depends entirely on successful project kickoff.

The lack of collaboration during project kickoff is a direct indicator of creative teams being viewed as order takers, rather than collaborative partners. Let’s take a look at what the ideal creative briefing and request intake process should look like.

The Ideal Request Intake Process
The ideal request intake process begins with the brief. The term “creative brief” describes a document that lists out all of the requirements for the project. This should include everything from technical specifications all the way through concept and design notes. It should include timeline information such as a due date, as well as any relevant reference materials. It’s important to remember that creative briefs are not “job tickets” or “order forms”. These terms imply a one-way communication rather than collaboration. These are documents that kick off the process of requesting work by documenting the needs of the project so that they can be easily distributed and reviewed throughout the lifecycle of the project.

What happens next is the real differentiator between creative teams that have effective request intake and those that do not. First, the form submission should not automatically generate work. Many generic project management solutions tout automatically generating work from submitted requests. This is the difference between generic PM and creative workflow management. Creative teams need an opportunity to traffic submitted requests. Incoming requests need to be reviewed and approved before they are accepted. Is the due date realistic? Did the requester provide all the information the creative team needs to get started on the project? Does the creative team understand the context surrounding the project, and what metrics will measure the success of the project?

Sometimes forms will have all this information in the initial submission and can be quickly accepted. Other times, if a project is more complex or the requester has been less fastidious with their submission, the creative team may need to conduct some level of collaboration with the requester before work can begin. It is also important that the creative team can decline requests if they are incomplete or have unrealistic timelines. This gets the request off the creative team’s plate and sends it back to the requester, making it clear that something needs to change before work can begin.

This collaboration during request intake should be happening in a hybrid of in-person meetings (or via telecommunication, as the case may be), and in a creative workflow management solution. The best collaboration often happens when a group of people can all get into the same room together. However, that collaboration needs to be supported by documentation in a centralized dashboard available to both requesters and creatives. This dashboard should house the initial request details, threaded chat with @mentioning, reference and final deliverable files, and the ability to share the request with additional necessary collaborators.

In fact, request sharing is one of the more important parts of a collaborative request intake. Being able so share access to submitted requests with other team members or stakeholders increases transparency and invites cross-departmental collaboration.

Finally, having a good request intake process based in a single dashboard is important for the entire life of the project and beyond. Not only can requesters return to this dashboard to check on the status of their work and collaborate with the creative team in a dedicated space, but they can also go here to retrieve final deliverables. By sharing that request dashboard, other involved stakeholders can also access a project’s final deliverables. Even when the project is completed and archived, the requester will still be able to view it. This means when similar work comes up next quarter or next year, both the requester and the creative team can refer back to the previous request and associated work to increase efficiencies.

What to Look For
If your creative team wants to find opportunities to improve the request intake process by implementing a creative workflow management solution, ask these three questions of any software you evaluate:

1. Does the system treat creatives like order takers or collaborators?
2. Does the system give the creative team control over the process, while still providing opportunities to increase transparency with stakeholders?
3. Does the entire request process sync with the rest of the platform, or does it feel like an afterthought?

If you want to improve your request intake process to be comprehensive and collaborative, schedule a custom demo of inMotion ignite today!

This post is part of a series of the Four Pillars of Creative Workflow Management. You can read the related posts here:
How to Manage Creative Projects

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