STRATEGIC CREATIVITY
Developing the right workflow begins with the people on the front line, those invested in getting the job done. These are the ones treading water, often gasping for air, about the time we come in.
Several things happen at once when we come to help. We figure out where everyone is (what’s really happening), and where you want to be (what your goals are). To get there, we employ proven techniques to ensure we tune in to your team.
We interview and “shadow” key stakeholders as they work.
The interviews help us understand what people think they do, and shadowing helps us see what they really do. We all behave in different ways, and utilize different processes, depending on our stress levels, the kind of work we’re doing, even the time of day.
Our custom “goals wall” methodology refines creative ideas.
Adapted by a colleague from models used by architects wrestling with space usage relationships among work teams, this methodology helps unleash creative thinking by allowing fast, free-flowing ideas. We’ve used this with large and small teams to arrive at innovative solutions in a goal-directed context.
We employ feedback loops, like blogs and persona narratives, to make sure we’re on the right track.
Nothing should happen in a black box. A transparent approach to process improvement ensures voices are heard and we achieve buy-in to changes from every level of the organization.
We distill the accumulated information in composite personas, which profile primary system users based on the principal of providing functionality that fulfills the needs of all system users, yet is “designed for one user” in its conceptual framework.
Understanding the goals and needs of users on a composite level puts decisions about process, system, and software design in perspective. It also ensures understanding of the production environment before changes are implemented.
STRATEGIC WORKFLOW
Your Situation:
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Too often, clunky tools and layered processes get in your way. Coupled with deadline pressures and ill-defined goals, your task can become thankless.
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Worse, problems with bad tools and cloudy vision will put your organization’s success at risk.
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An overwhelmed creative team will quickly leave an organization off-message and not nimble enough to respond to an ever-changing business environment
Our Answer:
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We have successfully helped editorial and design teams in multiple industries realize elegant, creative, effective workflow processes.
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By using ethnographic user data—interviews, workflow shadowing of live production, our custom goals card wall, composite personas and scenarios—we generate actionable information about your team’s root troubles.
A vision emerges as we work with your team.
We marry objective analysis with intuitive context, and we see top-level process issues come to light. For some, it’s a bottleneck problem with a single person who holds the key to the content you want to publish. For others, manual processes make tracking and maintaining content changes too burdensome. For still others, we find conflicting mandates collide on the production floor.
Once we can zero in on the big picture problems, we can redesign the processes, relationships and workflow tools you need to publish better than your competitors.
Our As-Is and Should-Be Workflow Maps give definition to our solution.
In order to build a workflow that allows a creative team to “jump the tracks,” we have to first have tracks to jump.
It is important to know how things really route through production, and how we want them to route through production, so we can address the bottlenecks and hazards that get in the wa
We write workflow scenarios to “script” out elegant solutions.
Scenarios play a key role during the design phase of development by providing context and detail about how an individual will use a tool and why. This allows us to create more user-friendly solutions.
Scenarios are written in a goal-directed manner and focus on actions to be taken and decisions to be made to achieve a defined goal
We create tools that support streamlined publication production without getting in the way of creativity.
Inspired by the Alan Cooper approach to interaction design, we craft workflow tools that minimize cognitive friction. This means usable, intuitive software that makes your job easier, less manual, and more fun.