The recent announcement of IBM’s acquisition of Unica prompted me to think about the current landscape of options for automated workflow systems and how it keeps changing.  For some companies, their history has included many acquisitions and changes in ownership, while others have been providing workflow solutions to the marketing communications market for decades.  So, [...]

Time tracking in creative services is necessary in order to monitor utilization and productivity. Last month we published a blog about the benefits of time tracking, but also pointed out it’s no one’s favorite activity. Let’s examine some of the ways time tracking can be implemented and how to make it an integral part of [...]

In-house creative services teams with an hourly chargeback model must track their time—often to the quarter-hour increment. The discipline of time tracking can be off-putting for many teams at first, but the advantages of time tracking can’t be ignored, and teams generally support the practice once they understand the potential outcomes. The advantages are so [...]

Many in-house creative services and communications groups grew organically as a result of an organizational unit deciding to hire a few people to do more cheaply (and perhaps more quickly) what the company was paying external agencies to do. The overwhelming majority of such groups start small with informal roles and processes. If there are only three or four people working in such a group, anyone can call up one of the designers and ask for work. This initial contact person becomes, by default, the requestor’s account manager and traffic manager. Such informality works well if it’s a small group of people who all sit together.

Speak to any executive, regardless of industry, and they’ll always be fascinated to hear how other companies run similar functions. When used correctly, benchmarking can be an extremely effective learning and validation tool for leaders who are trying to improve their corporate operation, but benchmarks can also cause leader’s to misstep when not reviewed in context.

In-house creative groups have plenty of challenges working with their customers, who range from marketing managers to technical experts to the CEO’s executive admin.  These customers often look at the creative group as a free support resource and picture them just sitting by the phone or computer waiting for their favorite customer to call with [...]

Over the past month, I’ve had the pleasure of speaking to many dozens of corporate creative leaders about the importance of being able to quantify an internal creative group’s value-add to the organization as a whole.  We recently organized and moderated a CreativeExecs Roundtable series that included face-to-face discussions between twenty-one participating corporations, to talk [...]

As a six sigma black belt, much of my training focused on manufacturing processes. When I work with transactional processes, such as those in creative services, I apply six sigma techniques whenever possible. But I’ve found that often a much more immediate return can be realized from applying LEAN techniques. Often people think of these [...]

Creative services is one of the last parts of corporate America that has been relatively untouched by Six Sigma.  Many manufacturing companies apply it rigorously to their production lines, with the mathematical target of Six Sigma being to get errors as low as 3.4 per million items produced.  This is an outstanding goal if one [...]

When I first started consulting with creative services organizations I brought a “manufacturing “ mindset which I was anxious to apply to the undisciplined creative world. I knew the organizations I worked with could be much more efficient and productive if only they would apply the many process learnings I had gleaned from the manufacturing [...]