The five commandments to supercharge your review and approval
Table of contents
- Introduction
- Approval Software? What’s That?
- What Are the Benefits of Using Approval Software?
- Is Installing Review Software the End of My Troubles?
- Final Thoughts
Remember the anger, frustration, and a feeling of impending doom that you feel while chasing down feedback to meet a looming deadline? You’re not alone. Project timelines can often come to a grinding halt while waiting for reviews and approval process from stakeholders, leading to team contention and constantly shifting deadlines that are bad for every business.
If this sounds like your setup, you need a review and approval software like QuickReviewer. This blog post will help you understand how review and approval software can help your organization boost productivity, improve efficiency, and meet deadlines reliably and consistently.
Approval software? What’s that?
Creative teams work with multiple content types, including graphics, videos, animations, audio and text—making creative workflows virtually impossible to manage through emails and text.
Approval software helps creative agencies and teams meet deadlines, stay organized and avoid bottlenecks and last-minute scrambles. These tools use version and permission controls, notifications, and many other features to help streamline your approval process and get things done faster.
What are the benefits of using approval software?
Emails and messaging platforms are opaque. They do not provide any transparency on the overall approval process, which is critical to meet deadlines. Approval and review software such as QuickReviewer focuses on boosting workflow transparency and streamlining your approval process, so creative workflows can work better and faster. Here are the top 5 benefits of using review and approval software:
- Improved security
With no email attachments or files shared via USB/shared drives, you can ensure company-wide compliance and total peace of mind through cloud-based content sharing.
- Reduced timelines
With clearly defined dependencies, stakeholders know if they are holding up a review and end up reviewing faster, speeding up project completion.
- Teamwork—in the true sense of the word
Workflow management helps teams communicate and collaborate seamlessly. With tagging, online communication and status-based routing, there are no missed emails to blame, and teams work together regardless of location or time zone constraints.
- Reduced rework
Tools like QuickReviewer use markup and annotations to help reduce rework cycles and risks of misunderstandings. With clear, actionable feedback, your teams improve content quality and ensure timely delivery.
- Streamlined client approvals
With cloud-based reviews, clients can quickly review completed jobs and drafts and provide approvals or comments directly to creative teams, helping them get first-hand inputs.
All these and many other features make review software such as QuickReviewer essential for creative teams in any organization to ensure client satisfaction for every project.
Is installing review software the end of my troubles?
Nope. Simply installing or rolling out review software without understanding how it will impact project success and boost teamwork is worse than not having such a solution in the first place. This is where our five review workflow success commandments come in!
- Thou shalt remove unwanted approval steps
If you use your review software to mimic your existing workflow, things will not get any better. Approval workflows only help you save time and boost productivity if you introduce automation that makes the approval workflow streamlined and easy to follow. Additionally, approvers must have the flexibility to complete their job anytime, anywhere.
- Thou shalt set clear roles and responsibilities in the workflow
If you’re a small team, anything and everything works fine. If you’re a large team with more than 3-5 people involved, this is where things go out of hand. A typical review process involves a creator sending a draft for review or approval. Once reviewed and approved, the job is deemed complete. Although this sounds simple on paper, they can get out of hand in large organizations. You must set all roles and expectations beforehand to ensure transparency in the review process.
- Thou shalt avoid unnecessary approvers or reviewers in the workflow
Many creative projects require multiple levels of reviews or approvals. However, getting carried away easily and adding too many people to the review process is easy. The best approach is to visualize your existing review process, automate what is needed to avoid unnecessary bottlenecks and only include those critical to project delivery. For example, suppose the creative head is the approval authority but you include the VPs of project management in your usual email CC chain without needing their input. In that case, it is OK to remove them from the approval workflow and drive efficiency into the project. This helps reduce confusion, keep one level of approval per project, and brings clarity and a sense of responsibility for everyone involved.
- Thou shalt set expectations at the outset
A workflow will only work as intended if everyone is clear about what is expected from them. Reviewers must know when and how to give feedback, and what to include in their feedback. Helping bring everyone on the same page will set the right expectations and ensure that everyone in the chain of command understands their role and how they can hold up the approval process.
- Thou shalt facilitate clear communication channels
Communication is key to success. Ensuring that your team and the reviewers can communicate seamlessly through your review platform can significantly reduce the time taken for approvals. Platforms with in-built communication capabilities such as QuickReviewer are beneficial for facilitating communication through threaded responses to comments.
Once you’re done following our five commandments to a successful review workflow, we’re sure that your team will be on its way to success with efficiency, reliability, and transparency!
Final thoughts
Missing files, slipped deadlines, and obscure feedback do not need to be a part of your team’s content creation process. A robust and intelligent review and approval workflow management system such as QuickReviewer will help your team work faster and smarter than ever!
With QuickReviewer, your teams can collectively save at least one day per workweek. The time saved in not having to go through email attachments or reviewing websites and videos with screenshots is used in ensuring that all clients get a superior user experience. Quickreviewer can help your organization work as a truly agile team, helping your content get approved and out to your customers faster!
