1. Make sure your agency has someone acting as a workflow facilitator. This person is usually the traffic manager, but it can be someone (or several people) other than the traffic manager. Agency workflow account coordinators, studio managers and/or production managers come to mind. You cannot run any kind of productive agency with 100 or more jobs and no work flow management.
2. Commit to a grid system of critical path management. This means that you run your agency just like they do in manufacturing. Devise a grid form where all agency jobs are listed vertically down one side of the grid and all the step-by-step functions run horizontally across the top. The traffic manager charts the course of each project by developing a critical path, then follows each job’s critical path so that the projects can be completed on time. It is a good idea to computerise this grid-making and tracking process. It is critical for your agency to be as efficient as possible because billing time and fee revenue is paramount.
3. Manage the grid closely each day. Insist that no-one go around the traffic and production managers. All requests should go through traffic and production, or at least demand that people inform traffic about every issue.
4. The traffic manager publishes the daily recap, or “hot” sheet. By doing this daily, it is far more likely that the agency will be dealing with the latest information about any project, job, campaign or change. We’ve seen agencies where the daily sheet has been taken a step further and become a daily agency communications device in addition to being a schedule. One agency even puts “who’s in/who’s out,” “who’s coming to the agency to visit,” when all meetings are, etc. and the latest recipes and agency news / gossip. All in all, the daily recap is a very useful document.