December 5, 2011
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 This thinking is outdated and doesn’t give the creative team the credit or respect that they deserve as professional designers.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.
November 21, 2011
[This content is protected for registered InSource members only. Please log in, or register as a member. Registration is free.] For information about how Cella can add value to your business through consulting, coaching, and training, please email cella@cellaconsulting.com. This article was written by Team Member Brendon Derr.
November 16, 2011
Our InSource Roundtable Event held in November 2011 was a success! 30 participants in New York had lively discussions on the topic of “The Design Career Path: Career Development for In-House Creatives and Managers”. The event was so successful that InSource is considering running the event in Chicago, Research Triangle Park (North Carolina), Los Angeles, and Union NJ.
November 11, 2011
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.
November 7, 2011
In today’s sluggish economy, support services are often the first areas within the firm tasked with trimming expenses. Yet if your in-house design operation is anything like mine, cutting heads is not a practical solution if the same amount of work is expected to flow through your department, with the same quick turnarounds.
October 24, 2011
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.
October 10, 2011
Rockport Publishers is pleased to offer InSource members an exclusive 35% discount on all design books on Qbookshop.com. Just enter promo code [This content is protected for registered InSource members only. Please log in, or register as a member. Registration is free.] in the Qbookshop shopping cart and you will receive 35% off all products in your [...]
October 10, 2011
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.
October 7, 2011
On November 4th of this year, InSource will host a roundtable discussion group in New York at the offices of Robert Half International. The topic for this year’s Regional Roundtable discussion groups is “The Design Career Path: Career development for in-house creatives and manager.”
October 7, 2011
Good project managers are hard enough to find, and great project managers are rarer still. Thanks to Andy Crowe (Alpha Project Managers), though, we now have a peek inside the top 2% of project managers, based on a study of 5,000 of them as rated by their peers/clients. Not surprisingly, great project management requires a lot more than the ability to move a milestone.
Here are the top ten traits of project managers who are really making ideas happen:
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