speaking engagements

Cohen Miller Consulting offers the following diverse range of customized event topics that have been created to appeal to in-house creative and marketing managers and which focus on overarching or specific critical operational and organizational areas:

1. Organizational and Staff Management Structures & Strategies

Want to make your team indispensable to your company? Wondering how to leverage and build your team to help you sell value-added internal services? This event will introduce best practice management solutions to building, managing and nourishing an in-house creative team. Discussion will focus on organizational and inspirational management strategies and systems that ensure a strong, motivated and dedicated team, providing you the ammo you need to gain credibility and value with both management and clients.

You’ll leave this session with information that will help you:

  1. Re-envision your organizational structure based on 5 best practice strategies
  2. Develop and nurture a sustainable, responsive and value-driven in-house creative team
  3. Increase staff morale and your team’s efficiency

2. Work Segmentation – Aligning People, Process and Priorities

When it comes to designing the right solution for each in-house client’s problem, one size definitely does not fit all. So how do you decide when to jump through hoops and when to push back? This session delivers detailed information on the key questions to ask to quickly segment projects into tiers based on importance and complexity. Then, discover how to use tiering as the foundation for deciding the who, what, where, when and how of any project you encounter, allowing you to streamline workflow and make your team more efficient than ever before.

Attendees will learn

  1. A simple system for asking the right questions and mapping projects into a tiering system
  2. How to use tiering to get projects on the best process track and into the hands of the right people for design, production and approvals
  3. How tiering levels the playing field and empowers the in-house creative team

3. Creative Briefs

Done right, creative briefs share valuable information, align everyone’s expectations, and set clear objectives. In practice, this means better business results as well as a smoother, faster creative process. And yet, for many reasons, creative briefs are rarely used to their full potential. Alongside practical advice on how creative briefs should be used to streamline your development process, this session will also provide concrete tips, tools, and techniques to ensure that your organization is not only creating great briefs, but also getting the most out of them. Most importantly, you’ll learn how to use creative briefs to tighten the link between business goals and creative strategies, and tactics.

You’ll leave this session with information that will help you:

  1. Develop succinct, value-added and effective creative briefs
  2. Better align client expectations
  3. Differentiate between stakeholders and approvers
  4. Mitigate subjective approvals later on in the relationship

4. Funding Structures – Chargebacks/Cost Allocation Systems

Given today’s economic situation, there’s greater emphasis on fiscal responsibility and cost containment. It’s more important than ever to manage the business of design like a business. This session details the best methods for setting up workable chargeback systems. From estimating through accounting, the focus is on actionable methods that will help you rationalize hiring decisions, gain accountability from clients, and demonstrate the real value that your team provides.

5. Operational and In-Process Metrics

To support the growing need for accountability and transparency, this session will discuss the best means of collecting and reporting on meaningful metrics for your organization. Discussion will focus on key metrics that can be captured by in-house organizations to demonstrate the value and effectiveness of their internal creative teams(s), as well as metrics to indicate operational performance and improvement opportunities.

6. How to Redesign and Refine Your Operating Processes

Is your department getting the most out of the resources you have to work with? Are you facing reactive client and account management systems, poor funding structures, and ineffective operational processes? You’re not alone. Most internal creative departments are in the same boat. Leveraging her years of industry experience, This session will highlight a variety of best practices that will teach you how to optimize processes and workflow, improve quality, reduce revision and cycle time, and ultimately streamline costs so you can save your company a load of cash.

You’ll leave this session with information that will teach you:

  1. How to align the right people to the fastest process track
  2. The pro’s and con’s of chargeback systems
  3. Best practice process management tools

7. Managing a Cross-Generational Creative Team

Managing a creative team that contains designers of widely varying ages doesn’t have to be a communication nightmare. This session will focus on the core qualities of three generations—Baby Boomers, Gen Exers and Millennials (or Gen Y)—and explore the inherent challenges of managing each group. The goal of this session will to explain the context in which your employees respond in the workplace, so that you can improve communications and mitigate potential cross-generational conflicts.

You’ll leave this session with information that will teach you:

  1. Key characteristics and styles of each generation
  2. Cross-generational management skills
  3. Tips on effectively communicating with each group