How Creative Workflow Management Could Help Boost Your Team’s Efficiency
- Adilla
- Apr 25
- 7 min read
Updated: Jul 11
Are you struggling to find a way to ensure your creative projects are completed on schedule without exhausting your team? Especially for creative teams, where too much structure could affect their productivity. Creative workflow management is a creative project management method that could help you and your team.
What Is Creative Workflow Management?
A creative workflow is a process and method for streamlining tasks in a structured way so that a project or work is done efficiently. Implementing creative workflow management can help to organise and optimise tasks to achieve a successful creative project. Thus, it’s a suitable method for project management for creatives.
Table of Contents:
Why Creative Workflow Matters?
When there’s no clear structure implemented in a project or a team, the creative team might be stuck in a loop of not knowing what to do or even anxiousness from feeling lost in the middle of doing creative work. This could cause them to feel demotivated, hindering their work or worse, leading your team into burnout.
If you’re not convinced that creative work doesn’t go well with structure, here’s what happens if you do implement a creative workflow with your team:
Collaboration Comes Easier
When teams are clear about each other’s roles in the project, it eliminates confusion and barriers between teams from different departments. So, when collaboration is required across different teams, it becomes easier. Hence, fostering a team with better communication and collaboration skills directly improves their work performance.
Reduced Inefficiencies Bringing Faster Progress
Once a creative workflow is established, the progression of tasks is more efficient since your creatives will know what to do next once they complete their current set of tasks. Not needing to set up a meeting or have back-and-forth conversations that need clarification and confirmation. This will prevent delays, leading to tasks completing either on time or even earlier.
Consistent Quality
As collaboration and task completion become more efficient, the work quality of your team becomes more consistent. A well-structured workflow ensures that your team consistently meets expectations. Thus, reducing any errors, the project is maintained to a good standard and quality.
6 Steps to Build and Manage Your Creative Workflow
Here’s a 6-step method for building your creative workflow management to boost your team’s efficiency:
Step 1: Determine Project Scope, Objectives and Goals
First and foremost, every project starts with a clear plan, objectives, and goals. Besides giving a sense of direction and purpose, it ensures that resources are allocated accordingly and doesn’t overburden the team. Ensure to lay out the budget, timeline, deadlines, and roles for your project.
When breaking down the objectives into actionable tasks, make them as specific and detailed as possible. As you list these tasks, estimating how long each task will take will help you have a better prediction of how long the project will take to do.
Step 2: Build Creative Brief and Timeline with Milestones
By preparing a creative brief, the outline of the project’s summary, objectives, target audience, timeline and deliverables would be clear. If you have a prepared template, it will make the process faster and ensure that critical details are all there. Additionally, an in-depth creative brief can assist in keeping the team members on the same page, becoming a key part of creative workflow management.
Once you have determined everything, create a visual view of your timeline. Other than assisting you with a realistic view of what your team will do (either on a day-to-day or timely basis), this will help your team be accountable for what and when they should finish their tasks.
Step 3: Assign Key Roles and Responsibilities
Managing your team is a big part of creative workflow management. Even in a small team, assigning roles and responsibilities is important, as it creates accountability and keeps track of tasks. Clarifying everyone’s duty prevents the issue of any unassigned task mistakenly being done by someone else.
Other than that, you would have to know your team’s capacities when assigning tasks. Not only to prevent overworking your team, but also to prevent burnout from poorly distributed work. After assigning these roles and tasks, it would be good practice to check if they require resources or support.
Step 4: Centralised Communication and Collaboration with The Right Tools
There are numerous tools out there that can be used as a centralised communication tool to manage your workflow. By using project management tools, you can assign and track tasks, gain clear visibility of the progress of the project, and establish an effective creative workflow process.
Though typically, communication channels are separate from project management software. If your team needs to have everything in one application, then our TESSR might be the right fit for you.
Step 5: Regularly Review and Adjust
After establishing and implementing a creative workflow routine, it is crucial to evaluate its effectiveness. Regular check-ins with the team and monitoring the project's progress help identify any issues that may impact the timeline.
Frequent reviews can detect problems early, allowing for improvements to the workflow that can prevent delays. Additionally, gathering feedback from your team on the implemented creative workflow is vital for addressing any bottlenecks.
Step 6: Pay Attention to Workflow Metrics
When your project is finished, your work isn't quite done yet. You've put in the hard work to create a workflow that led to the project's completion, and now it's time to reflect on what worked and what didn’t. It's important to review the metrics to evaluate the efficiency of your workflow. Additionally, all the feedback received during the project can offer valuable insights for improving your creative workflow structure.
If you find this process overwhelming, TESSR offers a module called Woohoo. This module provides a visual overview of the weighted completion percentage of your project, measuring progress based on the importance of different priorities.
Tools and Platforms to Streamline Creative Workflows
Here is a list of tools and platforms that serve different features and modules according to what your creative projects are:
TESSR – TESSR project management tool not only manages and assigns tasks but also provides the space to collaborate and communicate at the same time, too. Not only will you be able to provide feedback on the tasks, but collaboration and communication can be done in one place without needing to switch channels or tabs.
Flow – This is a creative workflow design tool that combines your tasks, projects, timelines, and conversations into one software.
Krock.io – This software provides a space for creative collaboration and video review. It has features that help you visually organise ideas with mood boards and images.
Flipsnack – This application is best for collaborative designs, as it is an online design tool that creates interactive flipbooks like magazines, brochures and catalogues.
Robohead – This tool helps in providing insight into the project’s progress and priorities so teams can track their tasks and deadlines.
FigJam – A software that is essentially an online whiteboard that helps in brainstorming and planning with your team.
Bynder – This software is considered a digital asset management system that helps streamline content creation and organisation, to name a few.
Managing Workflow for Remote or Hybrid Creative Teams
When it comes to utilising creative workflow with remote or hybrid teams, miscommunication, unclear tasks, or lack of teamwork are the main issues. So, consider establishing these when managing your online teams:
Clear roles and responsibilities
Set clear expectations of response time (while keeping in mind their timezone)
Tools that have online collaboration
Schedule regular check-ins and seek feedback
Set up virtual team activities that foster collaboration
Be flexible and adaptable
With these points in mind, when establishing your creative workflow, your hybrid or remote teams will appreciate the inclusivity of the management method.
Conclusion
A structured creative workflow is essential in optimising your team’s efficiency when conducting projects. Not only does it ensure your team’s productivity, but it also provides a method to achieve a successful project.
As mentioned in this list, TESSR is not only a project management tool for creatives, but it can also provide the tools to implement an effective creative workflow management. Other than being able to collaborate and communicate in the same space, the TESSR Woohoo can give an overview of a project’s metrics.
One of the features in our project management software, TESSR Review, allows for assigning and giving feedback on tasks. Meanwhile, the TESSR Woohoo module can give an overview of a project’s metrics.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Why is creative workflow management important?
It is important because with this management method, projects are optimised, and tasks are carried out efficiently. Creative workflow management is flexible in addressing issues, improving work quality and resource allocation, and ensuring team members are neither overworked nor underworked.
Is the TESSR project management software beginner-friendly for implementing creative workflow management?
TESSR's visually pleasing software is not only easy on the eye, but it’s also easy to customise and implement with any type of project, especially for creatives.
If you need someone to hold your hand while trying out our app, book a demo with us.
Can creative workflow management only be implemented with creative projects?
Not at all. This method's main goal is to prioritise efficiency so that a project is done successfully without major issues.
Author Bio
With a background in Arts English, Adilla has been a casual writer for various hobbies, including parodies of animated shows and plots for board games like Dungeons & Dragons. She loves to read anything and everything from fantasy stories to articles on tips and tricks. Currently, Adilla resides in Malaysia and is a creative writer at TESSR. One day, she is eager to publish her book. To know more about her, check out her LinkedIn.