At your agency, how many times has a client tacked on “one more thing” to a requested project — that actually turned out to be a project in and of itself? Has a client request ever been buried in emails so that it gets missed? Has your team ever played hot potato with a task because it wasn’t clearly assigned from the get-go? Issues like these can be project killers. In fact, 53% of small businesses cite portfolio management capability as key to their project success. With that in mind, CROOW has a new update aimed at streamlining your project management process.
Requests were borne out of frustration with an inefficient workflow. Creatives were struggling with keeping organized across emails, project briefs, and meetings. In an effort to eliminate emails and extra interactions in third-party tools, the Requests feature was added to CROOW to bridge the gap between clients and agencies.
Creating a request is simple! Navigate to the left-hand menu of CROOW, and under Project Tools, select Requests. Any existing requests that have been assigned to you will show up right away, under your “Requests” tab. For a new request, select “New Request” to the right of that. There are three default request templates you can choose from, and after you fill out the requested form information, your request will be submitted to whoever you assign it to.
We know that your business likely has numerous workflows already established, which is why we have also built a “Form Builder” section into Requests. This allows you to create a form template you can use over and over again, so that you can ensure all the information you need to successfully complete requests on your team is included by the requestor.
Another important feature of Requests is the ability to manage permissions. Just as with permissions throughout the rest of CROOW, three permission levels are allowed, including managing, contributing, and view-only capabilities. In addition to these user profiles, Requests will have a requestor, and an assignee. On the requestor side, all of the information included in the request will remain visible. On the assignee side, that person will see this plus statuses, dates, and the options to tag to-do’s, approvals, and workspaces, and upload files. This helps keep all the work centralized and easily accessible by anyone who is working on the request.
Once a request is submitted, an assignee can either continue owning the request, or assign it to someone on their team. This allows for requests to go through a central managerial person who can ensure work is distributed evenly and appropriately.
By streamlining your request process, you can support clients, teammates, and other agency departments in funneling their needs through an organized system. You’ll then be able to determine whether a request will become a project, a to-do, or some combination of outcomes.
Our CROOW developers will continue to strive for workflow features that will make creative collaboration easier, more efficient, and centrally organized. If you ever have questions or want to learn more, CROOW members are standing by to help.