Where some would find countless issues with organization and time management when working alongside other creatives, others have found ways to navigate through the barriers by implementing strategies which work for everyone involved, and connectivity and communication are at the helm of the core values.
To work efficiently as a group is always challenging and requires a great degree of confidence in both your skills and your ideas. Above all else, you have to devise means to make it work. Here’s how:
Have systems in place that ensure that client demands are met on time and on budget. Share a networked calendar/workflow manager. In this case, even when anyone makes an update to the calendar/workflow, each member on the team is immediately updated through an instant alert on phone or desktop.
Implement a server side directory structure for all client files that gives anyone working on the project access to jump in and out of a project virtually seamlessly.
Collectively review projects amongst the entire team before anyone makes a move. With this, a strategy is determined, and the most appropriate member or members of the team are deployed. All work should be created collaboratively with everyone weighing in along the way. Once everyone on the team approves something, it is pretty much done.
Everyone on the team should be able to trust each other implicitly. Trust is very important in creating collaboratively designed work. You need to be totally confident in your coworkers capabilities if you’re to hand them work you’ve taken 50% of the way and rely on them to complete the project.
When dealing with clients, budgets don’t dictate the level of creative resolve. Our greatest frustration as creatives remains harnessing our creativity respective to client budgets. With larger budget projects, we’re afforded a great deal more time to both concept and communicate our ideas and their evolution to our clients. When budgets are tight there’s a great deal of pressure to ensure that our client shares our vision and vice versa before work begins.
In the end, tenacity, focus and flexibility blend together to create a winning combination.