How adding an approval step increased throughput

This is a personal story.

One of my teams is a small marketing content staff. We try to write relevant content and publish it to help people. As a marketing manager, you’ll read a lot, and see a lot, and you may encounter some of these challenges:

1. Authorship (getting people to write content)
2. Editing (workflow to assess cross-functional accuracy)
3. Style (matching corporate messaging and tone standards)
4. Approval and publication (sign off)

Because of these challenges, we published less the last two years than ever before. Also, nearly half of what was published had to either be edited or removed because it didn’t meet corporate guidelines.

We were also struggling greatly with authorship. We had a content strategy planned out, but for some reason it kept falling just short of producing anything valuable.

Skip forward to today. We have instituted a simple approval system for any content, from a simple tweet or a full-fledged article. Content authors are assigned a task to author content which matches our forward schedule of content. Once written, a new task is given to an approval team who reviews the content for accuracy and tone. Both of these have due dates and the assignees have been completing tasks at an unprecedented rate.

There is added bureaucracy so the process actually takes more time than the previous method, but we are publishing much more content than before. Here are the three things we learned:

1. When tasks have assignments and due dates, work gets done
2. With an approval system, content doesn’t fall through the cracks
3. With an approval system, poor quality and tone-deaf content doesn’t get published

Setting expectations of authors, having a strategy to match tasks to, and having a predefined style guide have been instrumental in getting our content engine back up and running. Adding approval to this process changed it from complete chaos with little output to an organized and aligned approach with 100% more productivity.

Approval Essentials is an in-depth article with many more intricacies of approval explored. If you’re a leader, process engineer, designer, or application developer you have no doubt dealt with approvals. We would love to hear your stories, tips and challenges. Please ask [email protected] a question. Finally, to read more about the technology we use to solve these challenges check out The Kinetic Platform.

p.s. if you like the picture in the header it can be downloaded from our Approval Types Cheatsheet here!