How to fix a creative request process in 30 days
One intake channel, one required brief field set, one weekly triage, one owner per request, one measurement. Thirty days, no new software.
Most teams that ask for a workflow overhaul do not need one. They need five decisions made and held for a month.
Run these in order. Each one takes less than a day to set up and the whole thing costs nothing but the willingness to say no to the old habit.
Close every door but one
Requests arrive by Slack, email, hallway, and calendar invite. Pick one channel and route the rest to it. This alone surfaces how much work was invisible.
Make five fields required
Audience, deadline, channel, approver, and what success looks like. If a request cannot answer those, it is not ready to start.
Triage once a week, not continuously
Thirty minutes, same slot, one person deciding. Continuous triage is just interruption with a nicer name.
Name one approver per request
Feedback from four people in three tools is the single most expensive habit in creative work. One name on the line, others advise.
Measure one number
Days from request to approved. Not hours logged, not tickets closed. If that number drops, the fix worked.
Twenty years leading in-house creative for B2B marketing teams, most recently as Creative Director at a global software company. Now takes creative direction, presentation design, and creative-ops work one project at a time.