Editorial Project Management

[templekristin]

Our organization has a news center where we publish stories. We have a team of writers who write these stories, in addition to other responsibilities. For the past year, we've been trying to move this editorial process into Workfront, but have been running into issues. 

Our plan was to have the one central person who manages the news center create and assign out projects for each story. Recently, we got a request to have the individual writers act as PMs and create and manage their own projects. We think this is a bad idea because of the challenges that come along with making sure an entire team is trained as planners in the system, and we're concerned about accountability for the writers.

We'd love to hear if anyone else has experience with managing a similar workflow in Workfront and if so, what has worked for you, especially as it relates project management responsibilities. 

Thanks in advance! 

[Madalyn_Destafney]

Based on this, I take you do not have PMs in your org? It is ideal to have a PM or acting PM be the person to create and monitor projects and assign to writers based on workload. If you don't have this in your org and the writers need to serve as own PM, how are they getting assigned stories/who is assigning the stories and its writer? Perhaps that person can serve as this role. If not, then I suggest an admin at least creates a template to use for the story projects (assuming you have 1 project = 1 story), maybe 1 template per writer so the tasks are already assigned to the respective writer, and this will help the writers set up projects quickly. Essentially doing whatever possible to make project creation as easy as possible so they are spending less time creating projects than writing, their true job.

[templekristin]

We do! The PM team has just never been involved in the editorial process, and we aren't currently staffed for that. There is an editor who assigns work to the writers, and that's exactly who we intended to act as the PM, but then we got some pushback which led to the suggestion to have writers self-manage.

And we do have a template for these stories, but I like the idea of creating writer-specific templates that come pre-assigned. That may also make the editor more open to creating and managing the projects. Thanks for your suggestions! 

[Madalyn_Destafney]

Good luck! Anything you can do with templates that helps the speed of project creation the better. If you have a good structure, you can create a project in basically a minute and it doesn't need to be perceived as a burden to the editor or the writers if they end up doing themselves.