Yet another good session:

Ramping Up Workflow

Presenter: Dennis Warlick, VP Technology, Deutsch Inc.

XUG members and others with approved XUG logins may download this presentation.

XUG member Dennis Warlick just gave an excellent presentation that covered both technical and personnel issues involved in bringing in a new workflow. Dennis described Deutsch as having an "insatiable culture"; they're never satisfied, always learning new things, always pushing the envelope. [Click Read More, below, to continue reading.-->]

He also described the agency as an "independent IPG agency." IPG, or Interpublic Group, is the parent company of such global agency brands as McCann Erickson, Draftfcb, and Lowe Worldwide (each of which, by the way, also has members in the Xinet Users Group).

The presentation began with a brief description of the main elements of the DAM workflow at Deutsch (based on Xinet and DALiM). Dennis then went through the detailed series of steps he used to ramp up the workflow at Deutsch.

Step 1: Know Your Team. He described the three main components of the agency team: the account team, the creative team, and the production team (which he described as the one "in charge of reality," which brought a big laugh from the audience).

Step 2: Know Your Tools. In this case, Xinet and DaLIM.

Step 3: Define Your Goals. (More detail on that later.)

Step 4: Create Workflows

Step 5: Pick Guinea Pigs. Dennis advised to start smart and start small in the initial rollout phase. You want early adopters and people who are informal group leaders--those who have the ability to influence the leanings and attitudes of their coworkers. They should be heavy users, as well.

Step 6: Train With Benefits. No, this is not like a friend with benefits! This strategy says undertrain, provide minimal documentation and NO hand holding, stress the benefits of what you're having them use, and personalize the improvements (i.e., let them know clearly how it's going to help them in their jobs).

Step 7: Evaluate and Refine. Get feedback from informal leaders. Examine the troubles that result from undertraining. Analyze support requests and process logs, and evaluate the realized project timelines.

Step 8: Rollout. Because Deutsch was very comfortable with the Adobe Bridge approach to inputting metadata, they set up their Xinet customer interface with a look that was intuitively similar to that in Bridge. They provided comprehensive training materials, held both formal and informal meetings, conducted client training (both remote and onsite), and set up tech support.

Now, as promised, a closer look at the key Step 3: Define Your Goals. Here are the goals Dennis described:

Goal: Empower Account Team. Use their input to develop and refine the Portal implementation that their clients will depend on. Set up online review and approval. Emphasize intelligent file processing.

Goal: Track Image Usage. Here you're setting up to track rights management, metadata and XMP, image placement and automatic image management.

Goal: Enhance Creative Development. Dennis described this as the number one goal! That's right. The number one goal is not to lay off workers--it's to enhance your creative development so you're producing the best possible product for your clients. Here you're working on DAM access to the library; link-enabled PDFs; and rights management.

Goal: Generate Custom Pieces. This would include spreadsheet data workflow, efficient tagging system, streamlined quality control, and automated distribution.

Goal: Refine Production. With Xinet FullPress and WebNative you have an integrated PDF process, streamlined quality control, enhanced job proofing and release, and user-friendly workflow.

Dennis concluded with these main points:

1. Process designers must know team, tools, workflow mechanics.
2. Start small and smart.
3. Revisions are inevitable--even desirable!
4. Don't automate everything: "Interaction between people is GOOD!" 

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