Picture this: It’s Friday morning and your marketing team is approaching an end of the week deadline, but no one is quite sure where things are in the approval process. While the deadline slowly approaches, emails are sent back and forth, delaying the process even more and increasing the hours allotted to the project. It looks like the project is being managed, but things don’t seem to be moving forward.  

Your review process doesn’t work. It hinders productivity. It adds stress and leaves your  team   feeling bogged down with emails and meetings. Even small changes take hours to complete. 

If your approval process feels broken, you’re not alone. Many companies, both big and small face these problems. Here are four ways that you can improve the efficiency of your creative process: 

Move away from email 

Stop relying on email as much and start using more efficient technology. Our team at Oblique is always available to our clients via email, but we also use tools such as Slack, Dropbox and InVision to improve communication and move projects forward. These tools allow us to keep communication within segmented channels and track feedback and changes in real time.  

Have fewer and better meetings 

Some companies are bogged down with meeting after meeting after meeting.  This is something we try to avoid at Oblique.  While we love the facetime with our clients, in order to save everyone time and increase efficiency we consider carefully before scheduling meetings. Sending work via email is sometimes all that’s necessary. If a meeting does need to be scheduled, we’ll always consider who actually needs to be there so we’re not wasting anyone’s time.  

Determine who is involved in the approval process 

Have you ever pushed a project close to the finish line, only to realize someone that needs to be a part of the approval process hasn’t signed off on the latest revision? Before you start sending around a draft or revision, figure out who needs to sign off on the final draft and make sure that they’re looped in.   

Make sure you’re sending the latest version 

As clients weigh in with feedback and the agency makes updates, keeping track of new versions of a project can be a challenge. To make this easier, we save the latest versions of our work to the same Dropbox folder and  make web design updates in InVision so our creatives and clients can be sure they’re reviewing the latest round of the project at hand.  

At Oblique, we focus on making the approval process more efficient and effective for both our clients and our creative team. If you need help on your  next branding, website, packaging or print project,   let’s collaborate.