At the core of any successful project is successful communication. A broken creative feedback workflow – whether with external clients, internal creatives, or the production team – will inevitably lead to mistakes, reworks, delayed deliverables, and budget overruns.
Such problems have a tendency to quickly snowball out of control, creating friction and stress for everyone involved.
A lack of accountability, finger-pointing, and the negative culture that comes with a broken creative workflow can ultimately affect team morale, productivity, and the quality of the work produced. It will also have an impact on client satisfaction and loyalty.
The consequences of broken feedback and creative workflows can dramatically impact your productivity and bottom line.
How do you know if you have a broken creative workflow? Here are a few symptoms that suggest you should review how you are approaching creative review and approval.
Lost Feedback
If your team is regularly missing feedback, you probably need to examine your workflows. Broken communication often happens when email threads get really long. Or the feedback meeting wasn’t recorded properly. Or you are using the wrong tools.
Communication Overload
Too many back and forths, meetings, and unclear pieces of feedback all result in communication overload and project fatigue. The results are even more emails and meetings to try to get clarity.
Unclear Responsibilities
What’s the task, and who should do it? It’s hard to know what to do with a game of broken telephone going – with no single source of truth.
Lack of Accountability
Who requested a change? Who was supposed to make the change? Without a traceable history of feedback, tasks, approvals, and versions, accountability is not really possible. There are also potential legal implications in certain cases.
Unnecessary Revisions
Miscommunication and poor executions lead to avoidable revisions. And those will inevitably result in further delays.
Missed deadlines
Deadlines have to be pushed back when there are missed assignments and mistakes. If you are wondering why a creative project is significantly delayed, one culprit could be your creative workflows.
Poor Creative Executions
All too often, creatives, project managers, or production teams will just give up out of frustration rather than push back. Weaker creative can be a symptom of a broken feedback process.
Slow Turnarounds
All of the above are momentum killers, inevitably resulting in avoidable delays. Every time a meeting is needed to clarify a comment or an email thread is started to locate a version, it adds to a timeline. A healthy creative workflow should enable any stakeholder to address their tasks or provide approvals without killing momentum.
Unhappy Teams
When teams are consistently struggling with creative workflows, it permeates into an organization’s culture, productivity, and employee loyalty.
Bad Client (and Decision Maker) Experience
With a broken creative workflow, clients and other decision-makers will face project delays, a lack of accountability, poor creative, and so on. None of this inspires confidence.
Where Online Proofing Can Help
Given these pitfalls, an online proofing software sets out to streamline the review and approval process, with the goal of limiting and eliminating the potential for communication errors and the associated negative impacts.
It’s designed to enable clearer feedback, facilitate coordination, and ensure accountability.
To find out more about the value of an online proofing solution, check out our whitepaper on Online Proofing 101: A Better Approach to Creative Feedback.
