In a production agency, it's not enough to have the best talent in the world to guarantee customer satisfaction. Good project management is also very important. This requires meticulous organization.

In this tutorial, we're going to share with you some effective methods for optimizing teamwork as a creative agency.

Use project management tools

To keep track of each of your projects, there are tools like Monday, Notion or Trello, to name but a few. In our opinion, they've become indispensable for any project involving more than one person. They facilitate collaboration, task allocation, progress tracking and centralization of information.

In this tutorial, we'll illustrate our point with an example. We'll use Notion for this example.

Planning every project

You can't expect good organization and teamwork without planning ahead. Here's how you can plan your projects from within Notion.

Create a Gantt chart

Once you've signed a contract with a new customer, the first thing to do is plan the various stages that will make up the project.

This gives you an idea of the resources you'll need to call on and the time it will take. It's also a way of reassuring the customer as to the progress of his project.

You can start by creating a Gantt chart to show the different stages of the project. Remember to list everything from the initial design phase to the testing phase, specifying deadlines for each stage.

For our example, let's imagine that we need to create a series of Instagram reels for our customer. Here's what the Gantt chart might look like:.

As you can see, there's a step for reviewing the work. In our opinion, this step is essential to guarantee customer satisfaction.

Include a checklist to ensure that all instructions have been followed during production.

Allocate the right tasks

From this diagram, you can assign the various tasks to your team members.

Remember to detail the task and what needs to be considered when carrying it out (customer requirements, project objective, etc.).

This operation allows you to optimize the skills and time of each member of your teams. It's also an excellent way of determining individual workloads and ensuring the right balance between quality and productivity.

Avoid overloading your teams if you don't want to tire them and thus reduce the quality of the result.

Give all teams access to resources

For everyone to gain autonomy, the whole team needs to have access to the resources they need to move the project forward (meeting reports, project objectives, multimedia files, etc.).

So open a database in which each document is carefully stored. Each team member can then consult and retrieve the documents they need to work efficiently on the project.

Ensure structured customer feedback

For a well-run project, it's essential to have regular customer feedback to make sure you're moving in the right direction.

In this case, you can count on feedback in the form of comments from the customer, who will also have access to project follow-up information.

However, this is no substitute for face-to-face discussions between your teams and the customer. If necessary, schedule these meetings at key moments in the project's progress.

If the customer agrees, you can also leave their contact details on the project tracking sheet. This way, your teams can ask questions directly.

Project management also means maximum autonomy.

Automate as much as possible

Automation can be applied to organizational follow-up, as well as to creation and production operations.

When it comes to organizational tasks, Notion offers a number of simple automations that can make all the difference. For example, you could imagine sending a notification to all members involved in a project as soon as a step has been completed.

This keeps team members informed of project progress. In this way, you avoid stand-by on the project.

On other platforms, you can use Make or Zapier to perform these small automations.

Speaking of automation, don't forget that you can also automate visual production with Abyssale.

Optimize the use of technology

Technologies enable you to produce more qualitative results while saving precious time.

To make the most of your graphic designers' creativity, Photoshop probably remains one of the best tools. But when it comes to industrializing production and creating a multitude of variants for the same image, this quickly becomes problematic and laborious.

In this case, exporting Photoshop PSD lets you retrieve the work of your creative teams on Photoshop. You can then send all the layers back to Abyssale, enabling you to produce variations of the visual in just a few clicks.

From then on, there's no need for your creative teams to intervene. Thanks to Image Form, marketing teams can take over and imagine a multitude of visuals in just a few clicks. You can even leave this task in the hands of your customers if they wish to become more autonomous.

Abyssale's video builder makes it easy to auto-generate videos. First, let your creative teams create a consistent video template with text and visual elements.

Once the template has been validated, the creative teams don't need to intervene. Let your marketing teams do the rest, modifying the text and image elements according to the message they need to convey.

Drawing conclusions from each project

Every new project brings its own problems and lessons. No matter how hard you try to deploy a fluid internal organization in your agency, you'll always have shortcomings.

But that's okay. The important thing is to learn from them and prevent them from happening again.

To do this, create a centralized file accessible to all your teams, in which they can find a guide to procedures and feedback from previous projects. This will enable you to better identify areas of friction and think of solutions to avoid them.

At the end of a project, don't hesitate to bring all the teams together to celebrate its success. Take the opportunity to discuss the challenges faced by each team member, and to think about ways of improving future projects.

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Finally, optimizing internal teamwork is not just a question of good will. You need to know how to use the right tools and processes.

You'll never be guaranteed to see a project through to completion without a hitch. However, the important thing is to draw conclusions from each project to improve internal organization.

Especially as technologies, projects and customer expectations evolve. You'll need to adapt constantly.

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