speaking engagements

Topics we have spoken about have included:

management strategies for in-house creative teams

Want to make your team indispensable to your company? Wondering how to leverage and build your team to sell value-added internal services? In this session, we will show you how and introduce best practice management solutions to building, managing and nourishing an in-house creative team. We will also share 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:

• Demonstrate value and gain internal credibility
• Re-envision your organizational structure
• Increase staff morale and team efficiency

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, lack of accountability to costs and schedules, and process bottlenecks? You’re not alone. Leveraging our years of industry experience, we will discuss 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.

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

• How to get work on the fastest process track and in the hands of the right people
• The pro’s, con’s and basics of implementing chargeback systems to gain accountability
• Best practice process management tools

creative briefs – aligning expectations and measuring results

What is a creative brief? Why do you need one? When do you write one? As consultants to in-house creative teams, we are on a mission to help corporations, designers, marketers and strategists improve how they collaborate to develop smartly-crafted creative briefs that achieve results. Creative briefs are typically repetitive, long-winded, over-reaching and, at worst, a manifestation of corporate politics and insecurities. The best creative briefs provide a clear set of expectations and define measurable objectives to guide the progress and success of a project. As an added benefit, the creative brief and the development process support the value and power of thoughtful, strategic design in achieving creative results-driven solutions.

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

• Define and sell the value of creative briefs to clients and staff
• Better align client expectations
• Differentiate between stakeholders and approvers
• Mitigate subjective approvals later on in the relationship

developing a work tiering strategy to align people, processes & priorities developing a work tiering strategy to align people, processes & 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 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, 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

• A simple system for asking the right questions and mapping projects into a tiering system
• 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
• How tiering levels the playing field and empowers the in-house creative team