Marketing and creative teams that want to make their workflows faster, reduce errors, and build a better relationship with their stakeholders often turn to Agile. If you’re considering building an agile team, it’s time to get those gears in motion! Agile teams use a nimble approach to their workflow that helps them improve project efficiency, handle shifting objectives, and ultimately collaborate better as a team.

Even if your team hasn’t developed agile processes yet, you can still benefit greatly from agile-based features in your software stack. These features will not only make work easier and faster right now, they’ll also set you up for repeated successes in the future. With this in mind, we compiled this list of the top five software features that will help your team start feeling the impact of an agile workflow today:

1. Real-Time Collaboration
   A core foundation of agile, and one of many reasons it’s so successful, is strong collaboration. It seems like a no-brainer, but in reality teams without an infrastructure that enables collaboration will have a hard time keeping the lines of communication open and the ideas flowing. That’s why real-time collaboration features make a huge impact when your team is working within a workflow or project management software.Seek out features that encourage communication, offer immediate notifications, and reduce the barriers that occur naturally in collaborative environments. These include instant updates throughout your system, threaded comments for easier communication, @mentioning to loop in specific teammates, in-system file sharing, and customizable notifications to keep everyone on top of work.
2. Kanban
   If you haven’t heard of Kanban, be sure to learn more about how it helps teams collaborate and complete creative projects with its card-based work management view. It’s an extremely popular framework for agile workflows because it’s intuitive to use and helps team members manage their own workload without losing transparency into other progress.For Kanban to be effective, your cards need to update in real-time and display all of the key details at once, such as links to related projects, due dates, and which members of the team are involved. When you’re part of a marketing or creative team, it’s also critical that your Kanban board includes statuses that relate directly to your work like proofs that may be in review or returned.
3. Dynamic Custom Views
   Nothing says agile quite like customization and transparency. When you combine the two with a feature like custom views, you’ve really hit the jackpot! When you have the flexibility to customize them and view work in ways that work for you – that’s the sweet spot.When you’re evaluating features of dynamic and custom views, look for the capability to add and remove columns, including statuses, due dates, and assigned team members. You’ll also need the ability to filter your views and sort them by your preferred method. These small but powerful customizations make it easier to manage work your way. For example, create a view that shows your entire team’s “In Progress” work, or a view for your assigned work that has been tagged as “Urgent.”
4. Detailed Reporting
   Reporting and analytics features bring your team transparency and actionable insights. Reporting can be harnessed for measuring productivity, identifying areas for improvement, and collaborating more honestly in meetings and project briefs.Like custom views, you’ll need the ability to customize columns, filters, and sorting. On top of this, you’ll also want the ability to report on valuable custom fields that you’ve created throughout the system. If your software doesn’t offer custom fields, you’re missing out on key data points that are personalized to your team’s unique business needs. To help support the agile principles of transparency and collaboration, another key feature you can’t forget is report sharing so you can pass along your new insights and findings.
5. Automation
   Agile is known for driving increased productivity and efficiency. What better feature to suit agile workflows than automation? With administrative or menial tasks being automated by a software, more time can be freed to accomplish high-value work. Automation may take several forms in a workflow or project management software, but many tools miss out on the biggest impact for teams collaborating on creative work.For creative workflows, the #1 automation you’ll need is automated proof routing – it will streamline the approval process and help push content to market faster. By setting up route templates, you’ll be able to automate factors like having multiple approval tiers and essential vs non-essential reviewers. Additional automation features that will help streamline workflows and improve organization system-wide include auto-naming and auto-numbering, automatic date calculations, and automated email notifications.

To learn more about these core agile features and other methods of finding creative workflow magic, schedule your Custom demo of inMotion ignite – or go ahead and take advantage of our 90-day free trial!

As a digital marketer at inMotionNow, Joel Fogleman blends creativity with analytics to make marketing impactful. He has a fondness for crafting messages that resonate, whether via catchy ad copy, enlightening blog posts, or garden-variety poetry.