Put Your Workflow on Autopilot with Creative Operations Management

Creative Operations Management is an incredibly important element of every organization. Your creative professionals, whether in-house or contracted — as well as the tools, platforms, and workflows within which they work — are essential to any company’s success. The Creative Operations solutions applied can make or break the integrity of the Creative Operations Management of any organization.

Facilitating Creative Operations Management can be challenging, however, when bringing in external partners and managing a wide range of different technologies. In this blog, we’ll explore the significance of Creative Operations Management, the benefits of doing it properly, and solutions for taking your Creative Operations to the next level.

Creative Operations vs. Project Management

When examining Creative Operations and project management, Creative Operations Management is the perfect combination of the artistic and pragmatic elements of each. Project management is a very tactical approach to the delivery of a product, facilitating how projects and tasks move through a workflow in the best way for the organization. It sees the full picture, including how many different projects and tasks are being executed at once, budget and resources, client relationships, and more.

Creative Operations Management includes the artistic elements of the overall processes, which evaluate the work styles of different creative professionals, the time needed for one design over another, and all the other factors that are directly impacted by and for the creative team. Creative Operations Management marries the essentials of each of these styles to look at the creative pieces, understand how they fit into a managerial workflow, and see a project through with the best operational methods for the organization.

Why Is Creative Operations Management Important?

Creative Operations Management can drastically impact the productivity of your creative team, the timelines to completion, the quality of the finished product, and even your employees’ happiness in their careers. Applying a well-developed Creative Operations solution to your management allows you to make the most of your creative team’s light bulb moments.

Greater Accountability

While you trust your creative team to complete tasks and work at optimal efficiency, the perpetual shift toward remote work, especially for creative professionals, has increased the need for workplace accountability for both creative employees and employers.

Creative Operations Management implements a structured set of solutions for tackling creative projects, ensuring a creative team can complete projects with few hindrances, and that director and client approvals don’t hold up the process. Within this structured set of solutions, deliverables and tasks are meticulously outlined so that all work, from concept to completion, can be organized and purposeful.

Boosted Efficiency

While rushing the creative process is never beneficial, you also can’t allow projects to drag on for too long. When your creative team is small, Creative Operations Management helps organize workflows based on each team member’s skills and work expediency to maximize your productivity even with small numbers.

Implementing a structured set of solutions is equally important for large creative teams, as well. It will assign and organize tasks and projects based on everyone’s workloads to ensure no one’s task list is significantly longer than another’s. Regardless of the size of your creative team, Creative Operations Management streamlines workflows across the board, enabling your team to execute a uniform approach to completing projects with fewer delays and distractions.

Improved Consistency

Whether you are performing creative work for external clients or for in-house initiatives, maintaining consistent quality and delivery is essential to a successful creative workflow. Management through Creative Operations solutions provides an automated schedule and process that keeps your team on track, so they can consistently deliver high-quality finished products on time. A set of systems in place also acts as a hub for all required materials, style guides, branding regulations, and more, resulting in greater consistency from project to project.

Higher Employee Retention

The creative team you have put together was not an accident. These creative professionals were likely brought on because of their unique proficiencies for specific kinds of creative work. But if their time is often wasted with long meetings and personal project management, or their work is thrown off track by the mismanagement of projects, they can become frustrated. A set of systems to manage Creative Operations cuts down the time spent on mundane, routine tasks and allows your creatives to get back to the work they love, increasing their happiness and purpose in their careers.

Get Started With Creative Operations Management

Creative Operations is an essential part of any organization, and there are in-house technology and solutions, as well as Creative Operations manager consultants that can optimize the creative efficiency of your team. If you’re looking for Creative Operations solutions, reach out to IO Integration today.