WorkFlowSoft: the story of our friendship

Hello. My name is Lydia, and for seven years I have been working in the Softline marketing department. In this article I will talk about how differently you can approach the issue of organizing the work of a creative (yes, in essence, any other) team, and how different - cardinally opposite! - results can be achieved.







Our department in Softline is engaged in the production of design and content: this means that we write articles on IT topics, publish a magazine for clients and create many other printed materials, decorate events, help web designers, draw cute banners with funny slogans. In general, the work is very creative, and it has one peculiarity - we always have time for everything, we keep deadlines, do not lose letters with edits, do not stay at work ... And no, we are few, but there are very few tasks. I am not bragging now, I just want to openly share the “secret of success” - but about him a little later, but first the background. This was not always the case.

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When will the muse arrive?

Ten years ago I was invited for an interview at a large publishing house for the post of editor in a glossy magazine. The publisher, a stern girl with icy eyes, said she was looking not for anyone but anyone, but for a “Hitler girl”. It was necessary to immediately strain on this remark, but I did not give it enough attention.



- We have such people working as you explain ... They are used to doing everything in their own way, the creative team. Can you teach them to schedule? The publisher asked. - They are all in art.



In general, I agreed to try.



Trying was delayed for three years.



The editors, of which I became a part, consisted of only seven people - editors and layout designers. They were all very colorful personalities. They were united by absolute indifference to the fact that during the time of the year stood in the yard, as well as what time it was and what day of the week. They went to work only at will, and they did it when the muse arrived. The muse was usually to all at once and exclusively for three days before the delivery of the number to the printing house. This is what annoyed the publisher to report to European partners, who in part oversaw the project.



Many worked at night, some - came to the editor to sleep on the floor ottomans.

Two weeks a month there was practically no one in the office. A week before the delivery of the number to the printing house, the editor-in-chief appeared and began to loudly accuse others of sabotage and betrayal with the transition to personalities. For the last four days, the staff occupied the editorial office, did not sleep, smoked a lot and frantically completed 164 pages of the magazine for all the same cries about sabotage.



However, the personal schedule of the employees, as the main production organizer, worried me not as the fact that colleagues simply did not inform others about what they were doing and how. Editors suddenly changed the topics and volumes of the articles, the art director forgot what he ordered and whom, the layout designers reshaped the layout of the issue - it seemed that everyone was making his own journal without warning others; but in the end I had to collect a picture from this mosaic.

Around the riddle

I started putting things in order and working together by creating a shared folder with a single version of the Excel number plan that only I could change. In theory, the entire editors had to stick to it and check only with him. However, the idea did not work: in the process of working on the magazine, people are faced with a number of tasks, and it’s difficult to reflect the progress of their implementation in one Excel, especially considering that they still forgot or simply did not try to write or talk about they have things to do with their articles. Because they themselves were not sure: often the tasks and instructions were formulated vaguely, several responsible persons were appointed, etc.



For clarity, I introduced a whiteboard in the editorial office on which I painted Processes and Performers with markers. The latter, however, were actively drawing little decent pictures on the same board, and if they tried to write something useful, they would get a cipher rather than a report.

Continuing the work visualization policy, we stuck printed pages of the magazine in several rows so that everyone could see who passed and who squeezed. The “wallpapers” existed for three or four months, then they just stopped paying attention to them. Exclusively related subdivisions were admired with printouts in order to give “valuable” design advice.



I liked to make a magazine, but to answer for general chaos and work at night is not. Support "from above" did not appear. After my departure, the publication existed for another three years, and then closed, owing employees more than a million rubles.

Fiction Department - in the next room

Transparency, understanding of current affairs, clarity in setting tasks - do creative artists in general? I wanted to try a reasonable approach to managing the flow of work, which would be based on a certain system, but not on a paper protocol.



At first it was difficult to articulate what it could be, since I had no experience with any software product, sharpened by streamlining the workflow in the company. And then I just saw him in action - it was WorkFlowSoft , which we began to use in Softline.



Why them, now I will explain. Prehistory Life to WorkFlowSoft looked like this:



The department received dozens of incoming requests every day, the team of executors accepted them, and all processes had to be resolved. To do this, lists of tasks were kept on paper. Every day in the morning we went through the list, checked the status of each task, set priorities for the day. It took a lot of time, it was easy to overdue something, or simply not to pay due attention. In addition, colleagues and executives came to regularly with “urgent”, who moved the rest of the queue. Plans changed, but it was not immediately clear if there were resources for a particular project, or not, and when they would be.



To a large pool of tasks, in addition, it was necessary to know the approach. For example, it was necessary to remember by heart what to do if the text on the finished layout of the advertising module was rejected. The answer is to go back three steps, again contact the chief editor with a request to write a new text, coordinate it with anyone, make sure that the text fits into the finished design.

Another frequent question is which designer is better to entrust one or another type of layout.



This is a rather delicate moment, because our designers, on the one hand, are versatile persons, on the other - I understood that Petya does the posters better, and Misha’s banners. In general, a hitch about who should be commissioned to someone always meant a waste of time. Or even a mistake, because every designer and editor also has his own little specialization. So, only the editor Boris is engaged in processing texts in English, although everyone knows quite well everything - it just happened.



In general, the devil is in the details.

What was done?

Softline is a major IT integrator whose departments work with a variety of solutions and share useful experiences with each other. Colleagues-programmers, for example, advised to try their task trackers (which testers also use): they get all the bugs, tasks, etc. in the system.



The idea is good, we thought, something similar is needed, but with a more appropriate functionality for our working realities. In the trackers of programmers there was no possibility of returning back and transitions in the process according to specified conditions. Why for us it is so important, I will tell below.



He who seeks will always find: having gone through several options, we learned about the existence of WorkFlowSoft, an online business process management system. In short, WorkFlowSoft has a very simple interface in which you can launch applications using predefined patterns with routes. As a result, you always have a list in front of your eyes, you can check who does what and what is the progress. Nothing is lost. The assignments are formulated, the deadlines are set, and the TK is not going anywhere from the application, and the notifications will fall as the play progresses. Some things mean not one, not two, but a whole series of performers, when everything is done little by little one after another and passed on along the chain. Or return a few steps back for approval. This, for example, happens when creating presentations for company speakers, producing leaflets and brochures, and decorating events.

Has a miracle happened?

In general, it really happened.



What I did with WorkFlowSoft: I saved the conditions inside the processes myself. It had to be done only once, it took half an hour. It's pretty easy, despite the fact that I would not call myself an advanced caster of new IT systems for myself. Now the process route goes automatically. Based on what the customer requested, the performers are selected. If you need to make changes to the previous work, the route is automatically "rolled back" to the previous steps. Once again, it is because of this that the systems of projects or tasks did not fit us. The ability to automatically select only those tasks that are needed in a particular order and to go back there is only in process control systems, such as WorkFlowSoft.







By the way, about how the work with the requests for the creation of design and content actually looks like, we were even told separately, right here .







Separately, I note that the solution is suitable for processes that occur in development departments, as well as many others, where technical specialists and engineers work (one of our employees already wrote about this ).



As you know, there is little to find a solution, we must also make sure that people accept it and begin to use it. I was tormented by vague doubts: what if the situation repeats itself, and the software "will not work"? It can start to ignore, as the proverbial whiteboard ...



Here are connected leaders. We made a decision not to take tasks into work, if applications for WorkFlowSoft were not filed for them. That is, they simply obliged colleagues, firstly, to start each task in WorkFlowSoft, and, secondly, not to do any “leftist” of the mail, even if requested greatly. As the performers motivated: each completed application is assessed by the customer, the estimates are collected and the KPI is calculated, on which the premium depends; the higher the points, the higher the amount.



People work with WorkFlowSoft both from home and from the office. Everyone quickly got used to the interface (it's really very simple), and no one wants to go back to what it was before WorkFlowSoft). And when I start telling scary stories from the “past life” in a different edition, they only wonder if someone really can do this ... “strange” to work ?!



Do not work "strange", work with pleasure.