KonzeptioNerd

Agency Workflow 1.0

When Alice, in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, first enters the garden outside the house behind her mirror, she finds things quite curious indeed. She walks around, talks to some rather haughty flowers, until she encounters the Red Queen. From here, things become deceidedly weird.

(”Just at this moment, somehow or other, they began to run”, Peter Blake)

The Red Queen grabs Alice by the hand, and, without warning, they begin to run, faster and faster until, at east, they managed to remain just where they started.

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

(Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glas, quoted taken from Literature.org - The Online Literature Library)

“Now! Now!” cried the Queen. “Faster! Faster!”

At the risk of sounding unnecessarily snide, this is just how I experienced project workflows in most digital agencies I’ve worked for (and I’ve seen a few). A client brings a projects, it slowly trickles through project management to the operative crew and then, somehow or another, everyone begins to run. We know how web works, we know what to do and we just do it. And that’s not even finger-pointing. Aiming to deliver projects IN TIME (and ON BUDGET) is a great virtue, however, more often than not, the JUST DO it approach leaves us not much further advanced than our starting point. Usually with muddled workflows, shrinking margins and hardly innovative results.

Enter Planner

The situation changes, when some sort of Planning comes in. In digital agencies, that usually happens with the installation of a Concept Development department (often alternatively called “Information Architecture”, “User Experience something-or-other” or even “Usability”). As soon as this role has been established in the workflow and designers as well as developers have experienced first hand how much better their work becomes if they can base it on an articulate spec, things calm down a little.

I do believe that digital artifacts can be created organically, by playing with the material and shaping it in an iterative and procedural manner. Modern design and prototyping tools (as well as knowing a bit of HTML, CSS, JS) go a long way in this. But with the complex communicative and interactive environments we build today, this approach is deadly. Without a plan, we tend to invent the wheel over again, things fall be the wayside (traffic to the site? expansion after launch phase? Help-section?) and we get feature creep instead of change requests.

Exit Planner

I’ve been working for an advertising agency for half a year, now, and find that in this world, things work a little differently. Account Planning has been part of advertising services since the 1980s. Planners provide the groundwork that supports the Account Directors’ consulting (and sales) and it grounds the work of the “creatives” (even though text/design teams in advertising agencies around the globe are probably the last strongholds of the Romantic Genius Concept of creativity). 

While digital agencies are slowly adopting the idea of planning, Planners in advertising are already taking the next metamorphosis into Strategists who model and evolve all touchpoints between people and brands. No strategy, no project. And I think that, if advertising agencies start to hire wisely, strategists as well as designers and developers, this culture of strategic planning will give them a huge advantage in the digital realm, one that original digital agencies with mainly executional expertise will find hard to catch up on.

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