The importance of involvement and focus can’t be overstated when it comes to creative operations (not to mention the general morale and happiness of your team). Having clear, explicit guidelines and goals for every team member to follow is crucial to your success as a business.

The idea of “predictable creative operations” might at first glance seem like an oxymoron. After all, creativity is inherently unpredictable, requiring you to come up with fresh new ideas and approaches all the time.

Missed deadlines, lack of visibility, errors in output, and lost files are all signs that you’ve lost sight of who should be actioning each stage of your process. And without a clear chain of responsibility, quality suffers.

Transparency in terms of information is an essential trait when it comes to collaboration between different teams and departments within an organization. Conversely, the lack of visibility impairs real-time decision-making, causing project delays and higher costs.

By this point, every marketer understands that “Content is King.” Your ability to create quality content is the backbone of any marketing program, particularly if you have an inbound marketing strategy. The solutions used to host, share, deliver and track content are many with Hubspot, Marketo, and Pardot being the more recognizable names in this space. The point of this article however, is about improving efficiency in the Content Creation (Work In Progress) Process.

The idea of digital asset management (DAM) has come a long way since the early days of simple filesharing. We’ve moved on from the days of popping something onto a flash drive and passing it around the office. Now, in the age of metadata and semantic databases, we’ve got a much more efficient and effective way of managing digital assets. But the thing with evolution is that it continues, especially when you’re looking at the advances in technology. This is part two of one, read part one here!