Project management tools often make the mistake of trying to be everything, to everyone. They create masses of functionality without a real vision of workflow and how the tool might be used by ad agencies and their clients to deliver projects. They start loading in masses of functionality for every type of agency and work but without any real focus. The challenge with that approach is by being too generic, internal process has to be shoe-horned into the project management tool.
Admation is refreshingly different – it’s a project management tool created by people who truly understand the madness of delivering large-scale online ad and marketing campaigns. They’ve created a rock-solid product designed to provide clarity and simplicity to what can often be a crazy process. Admation truly supports delivery – from brief to final delivery of high volume, complex marketing campaigns and projects with lots of collateral.
Here’s an overview of the workflow and some of the key features that support it:
Better Project Briefing Gets You Started More Quickly
Projects often go off the rails before they’ve even started, or end up taking far longer than they should because of a poor brief. Admation prevents poor briefing by forcing the person writing the brief to think through all the things that they need to consider using a (configurable) templated online brief that contains all of the information and specs you need to get the project started. The online briefing forms allow you to make fields mandatory, ensuring your initial brief is complete and provides all the required information. So instead of spending your time chasing details and content from stakeholders you can accept the brief and get the project started.
Simplified Resource Scheduling And Management
Resourcing for marketing campaigns can be pretty predictable so Admation has built-in resource templates to enable you to take the brief and quickly resource your project using a resource template. At the click of a button you can add the required resources and tasks to your project. Of course you can edit the any project resourcing requirements once it is added to your project from a template.
After you submit your project resourcing, the Department Managers then schedule and assign tasks to their teams. At a glance, Department Managers can see the capacity of their team, and who is working on tasks and projects as well as utilization. This transparency allows Department managers to allocate tasks to those team members with capacity or to move tasks around where required. Tasks are colour coded by Client quickly highlighting which work is for which Client. Managers can also re-assign work should someone call in sick or they need to move workloads around. To help with capacity planning and ensure you’re planning for the future, Admation also includes a marketing calendar feature to provide an easy to digest visual displaying the progress of current projects.
Clearer Briefing Of Tasks Expedites Production
Rather than firing off random emails to resources, when a project is in Admation, project managers can then brief tasks to different departments. The task briefing form captures which Project the task is for and similarly to the project brief, gives you a dedicated field to write the task brief and allows you to provide resources on the number of hours allocated to complete the task. You can also upload attachments or link existing project documents to the task. This is handy for all concerned as everything you need to complete the task is all connected.
Dynamic Approval Workflow Simplifies Signoff
Admation does not prescribe the steps in your approval workflow, but instead offers flexibility, accommodating any internal and external approval process. The approval process is well managed and can be a simple single level approval or a tiered approval with a sequence of approvers. Helpfully, Admation also keeps you on track and helps manage deadlines with automated reminders that can alert you your mobile device.
Online Proofing Creates A Handy (E)paper Trail
As part of the approval workflow, Admation contains a built-in markup feature to give you the tools and feedback to more quickly get through your approvals and brief changes back to design. You can use the tool to mark up changes faster than documenting feedback and changes than email – and you’ve also got a handy record of who said what, when. Online mark ups are easier to interpret, and can also been accessed by project stakeholders, reducing duplication and confusion. Comparing revisions side-by-side is another popular feature that serves as a checklist for you to ensure that any requested changes were actioned.
Asset Management Provides Ad Storage For Each Access
Admation’s ad storage stores your approved and completed projects, including all project information, documents and production files. Clients love this feature as it simplifies adapts/translations for local markets and streamlines small changes to existing work. To compliment the ad storage, Admation gives you an asset library where you can use in place of ftp to store image assets, logos, brand guidelines etc and share them easily via the cloud.
Marketing Compliance
Admation’s built in features, you can have the confidence that your marketing is compliant. You no longer need to trawl through a thread of emails, meeting notes or try to recall phone conversations. With admation, you have access to a complete audit trail, allowing you to navigate between revisions, comments and feedback to see how marketing collateral has developed. All communication, feedback and revisions are stored within the project folder and can be accessed at any time.
Conclusion
If you’re in the business of project managing marketing campaigns, Admation might just be the perfect project management tool for you. It’s been designed intelligently and with real insight into how clients and agencies work together to deliver campaigns. It addresses incredibly simply the needs and workflow of project managers and their clients to make things simpler, more organized and lets people get on with the work. With the comprehensive tool set of briefing, resource scheduling, task management, approval workflows, proofing and asset management, Admation really is a comprehensive tool for your marketing projects from initial brief to final approval whilst managing people and the process along the way.
If you are thinking admation could be the right tool for your creative team, then head over to www.admation.com, and register for their webinar on-demand now!
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