Build A Simple Creative Workflow Using These 10 Steps

Did you know that companies could be dismissing up to 70% of potential creative ideas in the way that they frame problems to be solved?

Building a simple and efficient creative workflow (often using workflow management software) is vital for preserving creativity, ensuring the smooth completion of creative projects, and enhancing your team’s productivity. Without a structured workflow, ideas can get overlooked, deadlines will get missed, miscommunications will happen, and quality and team morale will suffer.

By following the steps outlined in this article, you’ll discover how to streamline your creative process, avoid common pitfalls, and foster a more productive working environment. Read on to learn about the importance of creative workflows, the typical phases involved, and 10 essential steps to build a workflow that will transform your team's creative output.

What Is A Creative Workflow?

A creative workflow is a series of steps and processes that teams like marketers or designers follow from the initial concept to the final deliverable. This structured approach not only develops and enhances the creative team’s output but also organizes and coordinates tasks, milestones, resources, and time to ensure high-quality deliverables that meet the desired objectives.

A well-defined creative workflow does the following:

• Organizes key areas of project: By breaking down the project into manageable parts, a creative workflow ensures that each component is addressed systematically. This includes defining the scope, setting objectives, and outlining the necessary steps to achieve the end goal.
• Assigns responsibilities: A creative workflow clearly shows team leaders who is in charge of what. This helps in creative resource management, delegating tasks and making sure team members are aware of their specific roles and responsibilities.
• Tracks project status: The status of each project component is monitored throughout the workflow. This transparency allows team members and leaders to see progress in real-time, identify bottlenecks, and make necessary adjustments to keep the project on track.
• Manages changes: Creative projects often require adjustments. A good creative workflow includes mechanisms for managing changes smoothly, ensuring that revisions are documented, and the team is updated.
• Monitors approval history: Keeping a detailed approval history is vital for tracking the evolution of the project. It provides a record of all decisions made, who approved them, and when. This historical data helps in understanding the project's trajectory and is useful for future reference.

By incorporating these elements, the creative workflow process can enhance your creative team’s output while organizing and coordinating tasks, milestones, resources, and time to ensure high-quality deliverables that meet the desired objectives.

Why Is A Creative Workflow Important?

A well-defined and structured creative workflow is crucial for several reasons, including these:

• Provides a clear roadmap: Regardless of your industry or final deliverables, structured, easy-to-follow creative workflows allow teams to easily navigate potentially complex creative processes. 
• Provides a work breakdown: Creative projects can be broken down into manageable bite-size tasks to ensure team members stay on track to meet due dates.
• Ensures quality and consistency: A structured workflow helps you maintain consistency, quality, and workflow efficiency, resulting in better creative project management outcomes and higher client satisfaction.
• Reduces decision fatigue: Focusing on ideas rather than the creative process preserves creativity and encourages more ideas to flow freely, reducing duplication of effort and decision fatigue.
• Increases transparency: With so many moving parts, teams can easily see where they are in the creative process at any given moment—keeping everyone on the same page.
• Improved performance and higher project success rates: Structured successful creative workflows help creative teams achieve higher levels of creative performance and successful deliverables. 

Author's Tip

High-growth creative brands are more likely to have the mindset and processes to allow creativity to flourish.

How To Build A Creative Workflow

Whether you are working with a creative agency, managing a team of subcontractors, using freelancers and copywriters, or working with in-house designers, having well-defined creative workflows is vital for ensuring your projects are completed as promised. Here are 10 steps to create a workflow, reach your goal, and deliver results in a creative operation.

1. Determine Project Scope, Objectives, And Goals

The first step is to establish clear goals and objectives for your project. This will provide a sense of direction and purpose, allowing you to stay focused and prioritize your tasks accordingly. Start by gathering requirements to determine the scope of the work. 

Consider what you want to achieve with your project and how it aligns with your client's needs. By clearly defining your goals, you can make informed decisions throughout the project workflow and ensure that your creative work is always moving in the right direction.

Requirements gathering also helps keep everyone focused on essential work and ensures that your clients receive the highest-quality deliverables on time.

2. Use A Creative Brief Template

A creative brief template helps ensure that all essential information is captured before starting a project. This document outlines the project’s background, objectives, target audience, key messages, and deliverables.

Using a template standardizes this process, making sure no critical details are missed and everyone involved has a clear understanding of the project requirements from the start.

3. Map Out The Workflow

Understanding the future state of your creative workflow means first mapping out the old workflows. Start by creating workflow diagrams to help you visualize your current process and find bottlenecks.

Brainstorming with other stakeholders helps to capture all possibilities. Once you’ve identified where problems exist, determine what and where things need to change and map out the desired state. 

Over the years, I have worked in process reengineering and found that accurately isolating existing workflows can uncover process gaps or unnecessary steps. Identifying these means asking the individuals in your organization who do the work to tell you how they do each step in a process.

💡Tip:

Take the time to sit with people and observe them doing the work to ensure nothing is missed. Often, processes are so intuitive to individuals that they forget small details when explaining them.

4. Create A Timeline Or Schedule

Creating a timeline or schedule is crucial for staying organized and meeting deadlines. Break down your project into smaller tasks and allocate specific time slots for each stage of your workflow. Consider the dependencies between tasks and plan accordingly to ensure a smooth workflow. 

Having a visual representation of your timeline or schedule will help you manage your time effectively and prioritize tasks based on their importance and urgency.

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5. Gather Necessary Resources And Tools

Gathering all the necessary project management resources and collaboration tools for your project is vital to working efficiently. This may include creative project management software, reference materials, or even outsourcing specific tasks to industry experts. 

Take the time to research and identify the tools and resources that will best support your creative process. Investing in the right project and task management tools upfront can save you time and frustration later on.

💡Tip:

It’s beneficial to use workflow diagram software designed for workflow mapping—it will save you a lot of time and frustration.

6. Assign Roles And Responsibilities

Building your creative workflows needs to go smoothly. That means each team member and stakeholder involved in the workflow should know what they need to do and when. 

Make sure to get suggestions from business leaders and subject matter experts before arbitrarily assigning roles. It’s essential to know who has the skills, capabilities, and knowledge in each area and if they have the time available to do the work. 

Then, use a roles and responsibilities template or docs like this one to identify everyone, communicate the results, and get feedback (this template is only available through DPM membership).

7. Test The Workflow And Get Approval

Developing a new workflow does not guarantee its success. You’ll need to test it to confirm that it is working as intended and is an improvement over what’s currently being done. 

If your digital workflows are automated, make sure to test each approval process using the workflow software to follow it through from start to finish. Sometimes, what seems to work well at the process level can produce different results once it’s automated. Make sure to factor in and test workflow integrations with other systems.

8. Document The Creative Workflow

Once it is thoroughly tested under different scenarios and determined to work well, make sure to document the workflow thoroughly. Update everyone on the final changes and results before they are used in a live environment.

Thorough documentation of your creative workflow is important for consistency and transparency. This documentation should include detailed steps, assigned roles, timelines, and any tools or resources required.

Well-documented workflows serve as a reference for your team, ensuring that everyone follows the same process and understands their responsibilities. This also aids in onboarding new team members and maintaining process continuity.

9. Monitor And Iterate

Don’t just stop once the creative workflow changes are complete. The revision process refines workflows to ensure the required standards are met.

Follow every step over a few full cycles and document any issues through every stage of the project's progress. Then, make any necessary adjustments. Testing and making revisions as needed ensures everything works well once implemented.

For example, if you work in a marketing department, customers will expect your creative workflows to incorporate approvals and notifications throughout each stage. Ensure you’ve tested this requirement in each relevant workflow to avoid releasing a deliverable the customer didn’t review or approve. (PS: find more workflow examples here.)

10. Implement And Automate

Once all steps in each creative workflow are working well and as intended, they’re ready to be implemented and automated using workflow automation software. 

Although your creative workflows were tested before implementation, it’s a good idea to monitor and test them in real time to make sure they are still working properly. I’ve seen newly implemented workflows change outcomes once they are live, and companies work with different datasets, changing timelines, and different participants. 

Typical Phases In A Creative Workflow

While creative workflows may vary depending on the industry or specific projects, they generally consist of these commonly used phases.

1. Planning and research: In this phase, gathering requirements, defining the project's goals and objectives, conducting research, and gathering relevant information are necessary. This is foundational work that sets the stage for how steps in creative workflows will be determined and why.
2. Concept development: In this phase, ideas and concepts are brainstormed and justified, and initial designs or drafts are outlined in a creative brief. It’s all about exploring the various options and ideation to find the most suitable direction for workflows to achieve the best outcomes and deliverables.
3. Execution and creative production: Once the concepts are finalized, this phase focuses on bringing the best ideas to life and moving everything into a live state. It involves encouraging the development of the best creative deliverables, whether it's writing, designing, coding, or any other form of creative output.
4. Review and feedback: After completing the initial execution, gathering feedback and reviewing the work is essential. This phase allows for revisions and improvements to streamline workflows based on the input received from your target audience, your entire team, or other stakeholders.
5. Refinement and finalization: Once the feedback has been incorporated, the workflows should be refined and polished. This includes fine-tuning workflow details to ensure the final deliverables meet the highest standards and customer expectations.
6. Delivery and distribution: The final phase involves handing off the completed creative deliverables to the client. This may include submitting files, launching websites, publishing content, or any other type of creative.
7. Evaluation and analysis: After the final products are delivered, evaluating their success and analyzing the results using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) or metrics is important. This phase helps identify areas for improvement and learn from the experience for future workflow enhancement projects.

Example of a Creative Workflow 

With those phases in mind, let’s take a look at a real-life example of a creative workflow for a marketing campaign:

1. Planning and Research

Objective: Gather requirements, define project goals and objectives, conduct research, and gather relevant information.

Participants: Marketing Manager, Creative Director, Content Strategist

Steps:

• Marketing Manager drafts the campaign brief outlining goals, target audience, key messages, and deliverables.
• Conduct market research to understand audience needs and competitor strategies.
• Compile research findings and share with the team to inform the concept development phase.

2. Concept Development

Objective: Brainstorm ideas and concepts, justify them, and outline initial designs or drafts in a creative brief.

Participants: Marketing Team, Designers, Copywriters

Steps:

• Conduct brainstorming sessions using a mind mapping tool.
• Each team member contributes ideas and concepts.
• Document and categorize ideas on your project management software.
• Refine and select the most suitable concepts for development.

3. Execution and Creative Production

Objective: Bring the best ideas to life and move everything into a live state.

Participants: Designers, Copywriters, Videographers

Steps:

• Designers create visual assets such as graphics and social media images.
• Copywriters develop written content including blogs, social media posts, and email copy.
• Videographers produce video content.
• Collaborate to ensure all creative elements align with the campaign’s objectives.

4. Review and Feedback

Objective: Gather feedback and review the work to allow for revisions and improvements.

Participants: Marketing Manager, Creative Director, Senior Management

Steps:

• Present completed creative assets to the Marketing Manager for initial review.
• Incorporate feedback from the Marketing Manager and make necessary revisions.
• Submit revised assets to Senior Management for final approval.
• Gather additional feedback and make final adjustments.

5. Refinement and Finalization

Objective: Refine and polish final deliverables to ensure they meet the highest standards and customer expectations.

Participants: Designers, Copywriters, Marketing Manager

Steps:

• Finalize all creative assets based on feedback received.
• Conduct a thorough review to ensure quality and consistency.
• Prepare final deliverables for distribution.

6. Delivery and Distribution

Objective: Hand off the completed creative deliverables to the client and execute the distribution plan.

Participants: Marketing Team, Social Media Manager, Email Marketing Specialist

Steps:

• Launch the campaign according to the content calendar.
• Schedule and publish content.
• Ensure all deliverables are correctly distributed across chosen channels.

7. Evaluation and Analysis

Objective: Evaluate the success of the campaign and analyze the results using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) or metrics.

Participants: Marketing Manager, Data Analyst, Marketing Team

Steps:

• Monitor campaign performance.
• Analyze data to assess the effectiveness of the campaign.
• Document insights and learnings in a post-campaign report.
• Share findings with the team and identify areas for improvement for future campaigns.

Keep in mind that you'll need to do some marketing resource management for these marketing workflows. Marketing resource management software can help you estimate, assign, and schedule resources for your marketing projects.

Quick Tips & Mistakes To Avoid With Creative Workflows

While building your creative workflow, here are some mistakes to avoid and tips to keep in mind.

1. Avoid Multitasking

Multi-tasking might be tempting, but it can leave room for oversight. It may seem time-consuming, but building creative workflows requires close attention. Focus on one task at a time to maintain productivity and avoid getting overwhelmed. 

2. Set Realistic Expectations

Be mindful of your expectations and time constraints, and set achievable deadlines to prevent failed attempts to develop simple creative workflows. Make sure to consult other stakeholders and subject matter experts who can help determine realistic goals around your company’s workflows.

3. Embrace Flexibility

Allow room for adjustments and changes in your workflow as creative projects often evolve. Consider all alternatives before adopting a one-way approach. Incorporate flexibility that allows creative teams to do their best work and deliver the results that customers expect.

4. Regularly Review Workflows

Workflows shouldn’t be a set-and-forget practice. As your business's environment, customer needs and goals change, so should creative workflows. You should regularly conduct a review process for all your workflows to ensure they align with your company’s needs and customer expectations. 

5. Continuously Improve

Even if your company's goals do not materially change, you should always identify areas for improvement. Experiment with new techniques and project management software tools to enhance your productivity and creativity.

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