Letter #74: Is your content workflow broken?
Expert interview on reviewing and optimizing your workflow
Whaddup, fellas?
I’m sitting with a green tin of sour cream and onion Pringles and trust me when I say, it’s flirting with me.
I mean: it’s flirting when someone’s ignoring you but you keep inching close to get their attention, right? Ahm, I may or may not have pulled it a little closer 🙈
Anyhoo, workflows — aka lifesavers for content teams, no matter their size. They:
👉 Speed up content production
👉 Set expectations around ‘who’ is responsible for ‘what’ and by ‘when’
👉 Give you an overview of your content processes, helping you stay on track
But just as with anything in life (yes, that includes Pringles), excess (read: long) content workflows become toxic.
In fact, long workflows with unnecessary steps can slow you down, rather than speed you up.
Question now is: how can you tell if your content workflow is helpful rather than harmful? Like me, you could be thinking, my workflow is 🔥 what could possibly be wrong?
To answer that, we’ve content and communication strategist, Robert Mills, founder of Fourth Wall Content with us today to talk about reviewing workflows.
As is our alternate Tuesday ritual, I asked Robert the following 3 questions:
A mistake he made when optimizing content workflows
An actionable tip to get you one step closer to creating a friction-free workflow
And a secret tip to maintaining effective workflows
But, hang on: how are we defining an ideal content workflow here?
Robert says,
“An ideal workflow is an efficient process that makes getting content from one stage to another easier or with as little friction as possible. An ideal content workflow is one that is fit for purpose.”
Two more things:
Your workflow should only have as many stages as needed
“There’s no magic number for what the perfect number of workflow stages is. Arguably, the more you have the less efficient the process is and the more open you are to risks, delays, and issues.”
Everyone involved should understand the process and their role
“If an individual like a subject expert is responsible for the ‘review’ stage of the workflow, they should know what ‘review’ means in the context of the process and the content being reviewed.
Does review mean checking for accuracy or spelling and grammar issues? Perhaps it means fact-checking or reviewing against the organization’s style guide.”
Now for our regular tips:
👉 Learn from Robert’s mistake: Not reviewing the workflow often enough.
“When everyone is busy doing the work, it just doesn’t come to mind to review the process until it’s too late.”
The problem though? “It’s always a broken process that acts as the catalyst for remembering to review and refine the workflow,” notes Robert.
However:
“There are so many factors that can quickly make a process suddenly not accurate. It can be affected when:
People within an organization change roles
When people leave or join a team
If new tools are introduced or current tools are no longer used
Even a small change can have a big impact on how accurate and useful a workflow is.”
“Sometimes the small changes don’t have an immediate impact, but they compound and then a gap, overlaps or bottlenecks reveal that there’s an issue with the workflow.”
The lesson Robert learned?
“It’s really worth scheduling regular review sessions for the workflow. Even if the outcome is that it is still exactly as needed, that’s good reassurance.”
👉 Do this today: Document or visualize your workflow.
“If you use post-it notes (paper or digital) you can put each stage on a post-it. Then underneath those, add post-its for the people assigned to each stage, plus their roles and the tasks they need to complete at the stage they are responsible for. If possible, add timescales for each stage.”
“At this point, you may already be seeing overlaps, gaps, and bottlenecks. You can then share this with everyone involved and collaboratively review if it accurately describes the process they experience.”
“When a process is visualized it is often easier for people to comment, review and critique. Once you have the workflow documented, it makes it easier to review next time and then at regular intervals. It’s also useful for onboarding new members of the team.”
👉 The secret tip for maintaining well-oiled content workflows: “Proper governance.”
“As well as having the workflow documented somewhere, there needs to be an owner, or owners [someone responsible for defining, sharing, reviewing, and updating the workflow — could be a content manager, content strategist, head of a digital team, etc.]. They should set regular review sessions and then communicate that the process has been reviewed and is still fit for purpose or share any changes that have been made and why.”
“Then the visualization of the workflow should be updated ahead of the next review cycle.
This process should be documented should the owner leave or change roles and then it should be repeated regularly.”
So today’s takeaways:
Regularly review your content workflow before tiny problems grow into big bottlenecks
Visualize your workflow to identify issues and ways to optimize it
Make sure someone owns the entire workflow production and updating process
That’s all for today!
Here’s hoping you take a look at your workflow soon.
Cheers,
Masooma