What is the role of agency process in a real-time world?

May 3, 2011 | Author: Tim Williams

A story in the insightful book Leadershift by Emmanuel Gobillot illustrates the way process should work in a creative services firm. 

Two universities undertook major building programs at the same time.  When it came to mapping out the paths connecting the buildings, one university president consulted with the architects and contractors to painstakingly design the best paths.  

The other president took a different approach.  He asked the contractors to postpone laying the paths for a year.  One year later, the president and the lead architect took a helicopter ride over the campus.  As they gained altitude, they could see the natural paths the students had carved into the lawns by repeatedly walking across the same grass.  The president then remarked to the architect, “These muddy areas are where we’ll have our paths.” 

If you visit these two universities today, you can observe one school with beautiful, logically laid but never-used paths and a lot of muddy lines, and another school with well-trodden paved paths and beautiful lawns. 

The point of the story, of course, is that it’s human nature to take the shortest route, whether it’s walking across a university campus or moving an assignment through an advertising agency.  Many agency processes get routinely short-circuited because they are ineffective ways to get work done. 

Relics of the past

Consider the thousands of agencies who still have paper job jackets, printed job tickets (sometimes on specially-colored paper), and an archaic manual system of submitting revisions to a job.  No wonder agency professionals veer off the process path.

Most agency processes in place today are relics of the days of typesetting, and most agency principals are too far removed from the agency system to champion a new one.  So the firm lumbers on with outdated procedures that are circumvented at every opportunity. 

A framework in place of steps

The answer to this problem isn’t not to have systems, but to have better ones, adaptable to today’s always-on, 24/7 marketing world.  In fact, what is needed isn’t a linear, step-by-step process, but rather a framework and a suite of tools that can be used depending on the task at hand. 

At the foundation of this flexible framework should be one of the many excellent project management systems available for creative services firms.  In addition to the server-based systems that have been around for several decades, there are many new excellent cloud-based systems as well.  Firm-wide adoption and use of one of these systems is foundational to everything else. Boston-based Partners+simons uses Basecamp to manage projects, and principal Tom Simons has made his expectations very clear.  “Using Basecamp is part of the price of citizenship at this agency,” he recently reminded his staff.  Beyond that, agency associates have at their disposal a toolkit of other software solutions designed to optimize personal and organizational effectiveness.

Moving forward, agility is one of the keys to improved margins in the agency business. If you want to make your firm more agile, assign a small team to observe how work really gets done in the agency.  Then build your systems around that.