Published: 10/07/2017

​

For all companies and particularly creative agencies the biggest challenge is to be profitable, irrespective of size. It’s not just being able to provide a good product or service but as a company you have to manage the client’s demands/expectations, costs, the communication, the staff, the workload, the planning etc. All these factors are interlinked and failure in one area will impact the others. As a creative agency you are facing an increasing amount of competition both locally and globally hammering you down on price.

Managing communication is just as important as the creative side of the business. The world is speeding up and communication no longer resides in the "I'll get back to that later" category, emails and social and chat platforms are creating the "instant response expected" culture. Clients and employers want great designs faster, so to maximise the income one has to work faster, often to several deadlines at once. This means time management has to be perfect so that one project won't affect the other project deadlines.

It is not uncommon in a creative studio to see an overload of post-it notes, chaotic whiteboard work flows and constant job re-assignments as studio managers struggle to keep track of time, deadlines, workloads and project progress. A wealth of software applications are available to help manage all these elements but they often only cater for a specific element and as is nearly always the case, you need multiple applications to cover the timekeeping, project management and quoting functions. There are only a handful of applications that have everything a creative studio needs in one application, much to the frustrations of design teams. What is needed is a simple application that brings all this automation together in a single place and in a way that doesn’t encroach on the creative freedoms and time needed to deliver high quality projects.

As we have seen with the installations we have done for design studios across the world, design teams are screaming out for a return to simplicity. Being able to do the necessary administrative aspects required to keep a business running and staying profitable whilst releasing the much needed precious few minutes and hours that teams need to just let the ideas and creative juices flow is the utopia everyone is after.

Feedback from our clients on how to best overcome some of the challenges creative agencies face are summarised as follows:

• Get the right tools – applications are great for helping you get the job done in the modern age. However, too many applications can lead to complications, time wastage and most certainly spiralling costs. Often our clients have been paying steep subscriptions for applications that they have only used once.

• Daily progress visibility – It really doesn’t matter how you do this, just do it. Most good applications will do this for you based on the jobs your team are working on and the progress they have made. However, even if you don’t have a fancy application, just have a brief chat with your team and make sure you are always aware of upcoming deadlines, workloads and team availability. Whiteboards do work well…..if you keep them simple.

• Avoid work shuffling at all costs, there is probably nothing more frustrating to your designers than having to spend painstaking hours on a complex design to only then have it shuffled to another designer to complete because you have not been able to plan for new work coming in.

​