Why buy when you can rent?

Why buy when you can rent?

The technology options available today for managing workflow and digital assets come in many shapes and sizes. One of the more intriguing options today is the ability to essentially “rent” an application…

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From How to Why

From How to Why

The further you move away from that entry-level role toward senior leadership roles, the higher the expectation of your contribution—and it’s not your tangible contribution.

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Got Charter?

Got Charter?

In-house creative departments often serve the conflicting masters of pleasing our in-house clients and staying true to the brand. It’s a vicious cycle, but maybe this doesn’t have to be the case.

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Managing Creative Assets

Managing Creative Assets

Organizing creative services materials is smart business; when the team knows what exists versus what needs to be created, they’re better prepared to deliver creative, strategic, timely and cost-effective projects.

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The Value of a Business Coach

The Value of a Business Coach

Name a highly successful athlete—he has a coach. What about that internationally recognized opera singer? She has a coach. Atul Gwande, a highly respected surgeon, just published an article in the New Yorker explaining his decision to hire a coach. Why do all these already successful professionals have coaches? Because you just can’t do it alone.

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Fun Along the Way

Fun Along the Way

Making work fun…sometimes this seems like an oxymoron, it’s called work for a reason, right? But we are all familiar with the proverb “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Regardless of industry, job title and role, we all need breaks within our day to allow our brains to recharge. For some this may mean water cooler breaks or coffee runs, but for others this means a few minutes on Facebook or making sure to take their lunch break away from their desk.

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Getting a Seat at the Marketing Table

Getting a Seat at the Marketing Table

The unfortunate fact is that in-house creative teams are often viewed as back-end production within organizations. Creative teams often find out about jobs at the last minute, without the proper time to do their best work. Many times, clients present a project that they have already ”thought out” strategically and mocked-up, and just want the creative team to “make it pretty.” This thinking is outdated and doesn’t give the creative team the credit or respect that they deserve as professional designers. It also doesn’t create the most compelling experience for your team. Company leaders often do not realize how graphically based their brand experience is. What the creative team contributes not only represents an organization to the public, but also attracts and resonates with current and potential clients. Further, it attracts and recruits future employees that will (hopefully) help both propel the organization in the direction and vision that the executives want and set the standard for the reputation of the organization.

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Applying Six Sigma to Creative – Good Idea?

Applying Six Sigma to Creative – Good Idea?

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 of making pharmaceuticals (and, in fact, the pharmaceutical industry has even surpassed this very low error rate), but the general reaction of creative people is, “Developing creative output isn’t like making pills.” This is very true. Ogilvy attempted to apply Six Sigma to its business a few years ago – with mixed results.

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Interactive Media Role Definitions—Aligning with a rapidly changing talent market

Interactive Media Role Definitions—Aligning with a rapidly changing talent market

If you provide a great career opportunity and pathway for your team members, you promote a more stable workforce, a higher performing department, lower personnel costs, and a happier culture. These all improve your ability to attract better talent and better work opportunities over time. Enough said…we’ll need another post to quantify all of that! With all these benefits in mind though, here are a few points you’ll want to review while (re)defining roles and the organizational structure for your interactive team.

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Offshoring Creative Production: 11 Best Practices

Offshoring Creative Production: 11 Best Practices

rule of thumb: “Offshoring projects will cost 4 times less but take twice as long to complete.” The notion of saving up to 70% of labor costs can be very enticing, especially in tight economic times. However, offshoring can be a daunting endeavor and one that can almost as easily waste money as save it.

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Tackling Your Process and Technology Projects

Tackling Your Process and Technology Projects

Many creative organizations recognize that they have room for improvement. This could mean better alignment within the organization, improving existing processes or implementing technology that can help manage the work. But often nothing gets done, because the next step requires time and effort… and those are in short supply. So, what options are available to creative leaders to address process and technology initiatives?

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Do you need a DAM (Digital Asset Management System)?

Do you need a DAM (Digital Asset Management System)?

I’m often surprised by the many well-established Creative Services organizations that do not utilize a DAM system for managing digital assets. And often, they explain that they don’t need a DAM system because they have a well-organized shared server where they keep all their assets, work-in-progress and archived files. But, this approach actually works better for outside agencies that it does for internal groups.

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Inspiring Creativity

Inspiring Creativity

As in-house creative leaders, we’re charged with inspiring our teams to be and stay creative.
This can be daunting when there are many revisions, only one client, only two fonts to choose
from (y’know: Book and Italic, or if you are lucky one serif and one sans serif) and the color
palette is limited to three choices. So with all of this potential monotony, how do we inspire
our teams to find and maintain creativity?

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Some Thoughts on Requirements for Software Solutions

Some Thoughts on Requirements for Software Solutions

There are many ways for an organization to implement a software solution, whether it is an automated workflow tool, a digital asset management system or some combination of functionality that uniquely fits the needs of the organization. Hopefully, process is used to identify the needs of the organization and the solution candidates, as well as to manage the eventual selection and rollout of the final solution.

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Effectively Managing Just-In-Time Creative Resources

Effectively Managing Just-In-Time Creative Resources

Just-in-time (JIT) labor is a customized staffing model that ensures you have the right resources with the right talent in the right place at the right time. In the past 20 years, the use of JIT labor by in-house creative groups has grown from less than 10% to nearly 30% and is predicted to increase over the next few years.

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The “New Normal” in Staffing Strategies: Contingent Workers

The “New Normal” in Staffing Strategies: Contingent Workers

It is a clear reality that contingent workers (defined as freelancers, contractors and temporary employees—basically all non-permanent employees at an organization) are playing an increasingly larger role in an organization’s success. With this in mind, leaders of in-house creative departments need to have a strategy on the impact that this may have on their department.

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Market Your Team as if Your Job Depends on It

Market Your Team as if Your Job Depends on It

The majority of in-house creative groups believe in a myth: that marketing is unnecessary because they have a built-in client base. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In-house groups must prove their worth every day. Proactive marketing is the key to surviving and, better yet, thriving as an in-house group.

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Automated Workflow Systems—Your Choices

Automated Workflow Systems—Your Choices

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, what are the choices available today?

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Implementing Creative-Friendly Time Tracking

Implementing Creative-Friendly Time Tracking

Time tracking in creative services is necessary in order to monitor utilization and productivity. We previously 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 your organization.

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A Non-Creative Viewpoint on Corporate Creative Culture

A Non-Creative Viewpoint on Corporate Creative Culture

It is the elephant in the room that nobody knows is there until it moves in the wrong direction. A healthy corporate culture can be one of the most, if not the most, valuable assets to a Creative Executive. The quantifiable outcomes of a healthy corporate culture can be tied to increased productivity, higher employee retention, accelerated learning, and more consistent innovation. If the culture is healthy and has been that way for a long period of time, you may never even realize how much you’re benefiting from it. However, when the cultural health of a creative organization goes south, you’ll quickly begin realizing its negative impact. Playing an active role in maintaining and building culture is an important aspect of being a leader.

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Start Fixing Your Processes

Start Fixing Your Processes

I’ve written in the past about selecting workflow systems and about specific aspects of automation, but what if you’re just starting to get your creative processes under control? Well, it’s an old axiom that if you automate your processes before fixing them, all you have is an automated bad process. (Or at least an un-optimized process.) So, where to start? In my experience, there are three main areas within your processes to address first. Once you address these areas, the rest will fall in place pretty easily.

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A Prescription for Difficult In-House Clients

A Prescription for Difficult In-House Clients

Leading an in-house agency often requires dealing with difficult clients. Unlike an outside agency, you cannot “fire” or walk away from your clients. You must learn to work with them and act as a buffer for your team members to maintain their morale and keep their focus on the work and delivering quality cost-effective products.
As the creative leader, your job is to make your client look like a superstar while delivering results that contribute to your company’s bottom lin

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Planning for 2011

Planning for 2011

Strategic planning can sound and be overwhelming and sometimes can feel like an exercise in futility as most strategic plans are never referred to again after presentation. Strategic plans can be created at varying levels of complexity, and unless you are required to create a full-blown strategic plan that includes an executive summary, situation summary and implementation plan, I suggest addressing your 2011 strategic plan in a more simplistic manner.

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Supporting the Career Growth of Designers

Supporting the Career Growth of Designers

Following discussions with more than 60 creative leaders this summer, the omnipresent challenge of Creative Services leaders kept bubbling to the surface: career paths for creative staff. This common challenge pulls at the heart strings of creative leaders, because they want to pay their people more money and want to provide them with more opportunities, but there isn’t always a business case to support those desires. Seemingly the larger the team, the more opportunities that exist for advancement. But typically the percentage of opportunities is similar, only the frequency of opportunities is higher.

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The ABC's of Team Evaluation

The ABC's of Team Evaluation

Whether you’ve recently inherited a team or you’ve been working with the same core group for several years, it’s likely your team is a mix of rock stars, steady performers, and underperformers—otherwise known as “A”, “B”, and “C” players. It’s important to have a healthy mix of “A” and “B” players on a team because you can’t keep the rock stars engaged if there are more rock stars than exciting opportunities, and “B” players are necessary to support your department’s bread and butter projects.

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Dynamic Collateral Creation for Marketing

Dynamic Collateral Creation for Marketing

Often when I work with marketing and creative services organizations, a piece of technology that is usually missing is Dynamic Authoring, or Content software. For some reason, there isn’t recognition of the value of this tool outside of generating things like direct mail or email campaigns. So, here’s another take on the value of these tools.

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Offshoring Creative to India

Offshoring Creative to India

As the economy struggled across the better part of the last decade and developing nations proved able to take on business services in addition to production tasks, outsourcing and offshoring conversations and activities increased. Business leaders looking to take advantage of the cost savings have asked their business unit heads to identify opportunities to offshore activities within their departments. These asks have not excluded creative departments and multimedia design and development and graphic design have been specifically targeted.

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Tracking Hours is Not Only for Chargeback Organizations

Tracking Hours is Not Only for Chargeback Organizations

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.

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Building a Chargeback Model

Building a Chargeback Model

Internal creative organizations often struggle with whether they should be charging clients and if so, at what rate. This doesn’t seem like a complex challenge, until you try to solve it! In this post I’ll touch on good reasons for implementing a chargeback model, costs that should be considered for inclusion, key considerations, and implementation tips.

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Who’s Talking to the Customer?

Who’s Talking to the Customer?

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 a pet project that just happens to be needed yesterday.

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Clear Roles are Key to Good Client Service

Clear Roles are Key to Good Client Service

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.

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Tips When Benchmarking Creative Departments

Tips When Benchmarking Creative Departments

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.

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InSide InSights: Ken Warshaw,  Saint-Gobain

InSide InSights: Ken Warshaw, Saint-Gobain

Recently, I had an opportunity to speak with the manager of the creative services group at Saint-Gobain, and I think his story from the past few years can provide some encouragement to other in-house creative leaders who are continuing to experience the pressures of a down economy.

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