Four Pillars of Creative Workflow to Help Creative Teams Work from Home

Working from Home Is the Great Perk of Modern Office Jobs

It is such a freedom when you can spend the workday in the comfort of your own home. Working from home comes in handy especially when you are unable to go to the office. Let us assume that your organization has incorporated a culture of remote work. How do you ensure that your workflow keeps running smoothly? Lytho Workflow can help teams of all sizes and locations collaborate seamlessly. Learn how you can streamline your operations, no matter where you are working from.

Pillar 1: Request Intake

Whether you are in the office or working remotely, colleagues will always find you. The request intake and briefing process tends to be difficult even when we’re all in the same room. And working remotely can exacerbate these challenges. The first problem that comes up is what we call email and bail. It is when a requester sends you a quick email needing something. The deadline is often pressing, and the information you have been given insufficient. When you try to email them back to fill in the gaps, they are nowhere to be found.

Lytho Workflow provides creative teams with custom, dynamic forms that require stakeholders to fill out all the information you need in advance. This means that when you receive a request you can get started right away.

Pillar 2: Project Management

All teams benefit hugely from having a single system of record, but this is doubly true for remote teams. You can’t just pop up over the cubical to ask your teammate a question. You need to know at-a-glance the status of projects, what your current priorities are, and when work is due. Lytho Workflow allows you to keep track of every campaign, project, proof, and task that your team is working on so that you are always working on the right thing at the right time, and nothing slips through the cracks. Some of the project management features in Workflow that are especially useful for remote teams include

Constant Collaboration

No matter where you are in Workflow, you can always get in touch with your teammates and stakeholders by @mentioning them in the comments section. Comments are available on every request, campaign, project, tasks, proof, and in the proofing environment, so you can have the most productive conversations right on the specific work item being discussed

Resource Management

Your team has a lot going on and lot of moving pieces. You want to do as much for your stakeholders as possible, but in order to keep everything moving smoothly, you need to know your team’s capacity and how new projects will impact existing deadlines. Level of Effort (LOE) helps team members plan how much time they should be spending on work, while Time Tracking allows them to track the actual time they spend, so that your team can become better at measuring and managing capacity over time. Additionally, for teams that want a high level of precision in managing their time, Scheduling in Workflow lets you plan out how much time and on which days work will be completed.

Dynamic Work Views

Every team, and for that matter every person, has their own preferences about how they want to look at their work. When you’re working away from your team, it’s important to make sure you’re up to date on everything, so Workflow gives you a plethora of ways to look at your work. Wondering where to get started for the day? Start with your personal dashboard:

Need to see the whole month at-a-glance?

Check out calendar view

Want to see the full timeline for a project and dependent relationships between work items?

Gantt Views are for you

Want to only see the work that is ready to be started right now?

Toggle your work view to hide blocked tasks

Need to switch between a few really specific sets of filters?

Try saving some Custom Views

File Sharing

Show of hands – who here has had to re-send a file when your teammate couldn’t find it in their email or Slack history? With Workflow, you never have to go through that again because you can attach relevant files directly to the requests, campaigns, projects, tasks, and proofs. Now your teammates can get to all the files they need without asking you to send the file – again. When it comes to proofs, versioning keeps everyone on the same page. Don’t forget those requesters! When you finish a project, attach the final files and mark them as deliverables to send them right back, attached to the original request. Best of all, everyone will know when you’ve sent those files because they will receive real-time notifications, whether they are in Workflow or working in Adobe Creative Cloud.

Pillar 3: Review + Approval

For creative teams, the biggest obstacle to working from home successfully is your proofing process. If you want to go home, you have to go digital. When the Coronavirus broke out, the New York Times Magazine switched to remote work, but they faced a significant challenge in their proofing process, which was still paper-based. By using an online proofing platform like the one included in Workflow, you can get better feedback, faster, without chaperoning a physical proof around the office. Detailed markup tools like highlight, strike through, insert, free draw, and box allow your reviewers to leave specific, actionable feedback. Threaded comments and @mentioning allow dynamic collaboration on the proof.

Additionally, Workflow automatically routes your proofs for you. Add all your reviewers, or apply a pre-built route template, and Workflow makes sure every reviewer completes their review and automatically notifies you when all the feedback is in.

Pillar 4: Reporting

One of the hardest things about working from home is losing that daily chance to touch base with your teammates and for everyone to share what they are working on. This is even more true for agile teams, who often structure their workflow around regular meetings, like kicking their day off with a team stand-up. While ignite can’t magically teleport you to be in the same place as your team, remote teams, even agile ones, can still stay connected on what everyone is working on by building and sharing custom reports. These reports can show:

1. What everyone is working on that day or week

2. Top priorities for the team

3. New requests that need to be distributed

4. Blockers that are keeping projects from moving forward