Supercharge your workflow with Adobe + Wrike

Collaboration may be the biggest buzzword for digital marketing and creative teams as of late. There’s no doubt the pandemic emphasized the need for creatives to stay in close contact with their teams, and still produce exceptional work. Yet even as most of us continue to work among far-reaching teams, the workload tends keeps increasing. To keep pace, look at your team’s processes, pinpoint where the bottlenecks lie, and assess what tools you can potentially add to lighten the load and stress of managing everything. Tools like a creative project management software that empowers teams to stay in the zone while not adding administrative work to already-full plates.

A relatable timeline of events for new design work

No matter your role on the team, you’ve likely experienced a version of a series of events in project management for design professionals:

1. New requests come through multiple channels

We’ve all received new creative requests via a multitude of channels- Slack, email, or video call. This combination of channels is disjointed because there’s no single project intake method. As you begin to review the request, you realize there are critical details missing — you don’t have all the necessary specs or the context to begin. Where’s the approved final copy? What file types and sizes are needed? Who is approving the final asset and what is the deadline? You end up chasing down the requestor to clarify all these details, wondering why the request was even made.

2. There is no central hub to submit and review work

As you submit the first cut or draft, where do you upload the asset for stakeholders to review and provide feedback? Is it Google Drive, Figma, or Microsoft SharePoint? Regardless, there is no agreed-upon destination where all parties can access the file and share feedback. Without an established single source of truth, some stakeholders may provide comments in Slack, whereas others do it in video calls. Not having a unified method to collaborate where all comments get shared automatically slows down the review cycle and delays work progress.

3. Manual approvals take too long

After multiple rounds of review, and with the project near completion, you are ready to get the asset’s final stamp of approval and move forward, without any additional time-consuming administrative tasks. An automated approval sustem to notify the correct stakeholders would be helpful here, but there isn’t one in place, leading to more one-off emails and Slacks being sent out.

It’s a messy process for many creative teams — but it doesn’t need to be.

Adobe + secret ingredient = OSF Healthcare’s euphoria

OSF Healthcare offers a variety of medical services across 13 hospitals and 150 medical offices in Illinois and Michigan. With a growing number of hospitals and medical facilities, the healthcare provider’s creative team struggled to manage the increasing volume of work. They already worked in the Adobe Creative Cloud suite, but constantly felt stymied in their quest to move faster and collaborate efficiently.

The facts:

• 11 different marketing teams
• 7 designers
• 400 creative requests fielded each month
• 1 restrictive homegrown system to manage everything

As Andrea Bonk, program manager of Market Research and Operations for OSF Marketing and Communications, says. “Before we started looking and found Wrike, it was difficult for us to monitor requests, triage work, and delegate assignments.”

The team needed flexible project management tools for creative teams to centralize requests, assign work, and collect feedback. The solution also needed to streamline the design, review, and approval process.

Like OSF, you may also have first-hand experience that tracking asset files and revisions through email is messy and time-consuming. When you pair Adobe with Wrike during the creative process, it’s game-changing.

According to Heidi Wessler, OSF Graphic Design Coordinator, “From InDesign, I just go into the Wrike extension, see what changes need to be made, and then upload a new proof until we land on a final version. I no longer have to adjust my PDF settings, export to desktop, start an email, attach the asset, and send it. I just click the add button in Wrike directly from within InDesign and it’s out there.”

Creative collaboration doesn’t take a hit either because feedback is all in one comment thread, providing enhanced visibility for all stakeholders involved.

“From an operations standpoint, the transparency is amazing,” says Bonk. “I’m able to very quickly pull reports for my boss, so she can report up to her boss the kind of work that we’re doing. The ability to do that quickly is just fabulous.”

After implementing Wrike, OSF Healthcare experienced:

• Fast-tracked revisions and approvals.
• 50 percent less time searching for project details.
• Fewer emails and greater visibility with all comments in a centralized hub.

OSF Healthcare isn’t alone. Many companies still rely on email to communicate while working within fragmented processes in desperate need of updating. Rather, more companies are transitioning to collaborative work management (CWM) solutions to be their single source of truth, with built-in functionality for design assets and fast-tracking approvals.

The dream scenario

Creative, virtual teams do their best work with Wrike and Adobe together. With Wrike acting as a system of record, design teams get the visibility and efficiency they need without leaving Adobe Creative Cloud. It’s not a fantasy, it’s reality. With the extension you can:

• Collaborate with team members in real time.
• Attach previews of your projects to Wrike.
• Update and track different versions of your attachments.
• Submit assets for approval.
• View proofing markups.

Wrike’s extension is available in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Premiere Pro.

But wait, there’s more

Join us Wednesday, October 27 from 10:30 AM — 11:00 AM PDT for an Adobe MAX session with David Mekereshvili, senior director of Wrike Design at Citrix, as he presents “How To Manage Less and Design More”. This presentation follows his session at Adobe MAX 2020, where he shared his insights into how CWM systems can bring design teams together.

This is an Adobe MAX 2021 article sponsored by Wrike.