About my Creative Operations Expertise
Typically you don’t see someone like a designer or CD highlight operations but I believe having this type of experience is what can determine the performance of good creative teams vs. outstanding creative teams. It’s why I’ve spent a good portion of my career focused on Operational roles and responsibilities.
To compare, let’s say you’re a great Art or Creative Director and you’ve been working on one project the past year. It turned out fine but it was over budget, took too long and had way too many rounds of revisions. Compare that to someone with a solid understanding of operations. You can anticipate things and have the budget and resources planned out. You’re embracing and leveraging a project mgmt tool and you’ve clearly set expectations with your stakeholder, thus minimizing the never ending back and forth. All this, plus you’re able to repeat it over and over again multiple times throughout the year.
It’s sort of like being a great cook and making a nice meal for your friends at home on occasion vs being a great chef and running a busy restaurant day after day.
Cheesy stock photo for visualization purposes. Sorry!
Project Management Tools
While working at Spruce, a Google Ventures fintech startup, our small Marketing team began using Asana as a way to track tasks and communicate during the building of our new website. We had such great success using it on that project that we adopted it for all of Marketing to use on all work. It did have its limitations, so we began searching for a more robust option. I got involved with the vetting process and eventually we went with a competitor, Wrike. Because I was involved with the vetting, I was a power user of the platform so it was a natural progression for me to become the Sys Admin for this tool (as our company didn’t have the headcount for a dedicated Sys Admin).
Fast forward a couple of years and I joined First Republic. Part of the reason why I was hired was my experience with project management software. One of my first tasks as the Production Manager was to onboard a new job management system. After months research and trial testing, we went with Workfront. Again, I found myself in the role of System Administrator.
Tackling Process Improvements
At First Republic, I quickly realized how large the volume of work was for the small Creative Services team. In conjunction with the implementation of a project management platform, I pitched the idea of creating a tier structure to determine the complexity of a new incoming work request. Once it was approved and the project managers were trained on it, we immediately saw improvements in resourcing designers as well as cost savings due to the greater transparency.
A tier structure is fairly common among agencies but it was new territory for our team so I was proud to be part of the design and execution of the new job tier system.
Restructuring the Entire Creative Department
During the COVID lockdown, we were all working from home. One of the drawbacks was the lost face time and in-person interactions we’d have not just amongst our team but with our stakeholders in Marketing. To help alleviate that, I pitched to the head of Creative a bold new restructuring of our team.
Prior to the restructuring, it was kind of a free for all as to which designer or project manager worked on a project with which stakeholder. This was a problem as it lacked consistency and relationships were hard to nurture, especially during lock down.
The idea I had was break up the larger creative team into three smaller “crews”, each with a dedicated Creative/Art Director, project manager, designers and copywriters. Each crew would be assigned a select number of stakeholders to work with. The net positive being improvements across: Quality, Collaboration, Consistency and Accountability.
After the concept was approved by our CMO, we got all of our stakeholders in Marketing on board. That was back in the summer of 2020. It was a huge hit. Communication and collaboration improved. The design work was more consistent. Turn times were reduced. It was a win all around. We even increased the team’s internal NPS score from 70 to 80! Today, First Republic is still using the Creative Crew structure.
I can honestly say my passion is split between making things look good and making things run good. Outside of visual design or producing videos, I’ve always had a strong interest for tinkering to make something as efficient or optimized as possible. I think that’s why I always find a way to involve myself in operational roles and improving processes, workflows and setting up my team for success.