John - Yeah, lots of choices with murky implications. Here are some options: 1) Task-centric charging a. You create tasks to model the work and assign resources to those tasks, with planned hours for each resource; b. People charge time to tasks; c. The work in creative isn’t really one task - one deliverable - it is many: i. Create original deliverable (Draft 1); ii. Review Draft 1 with client and Implement improvements to Draft 1 producing Draft 2; iii. Review Draft 2 with client Implement improvements to Draft 2 producing Draft 3; iv. Review Draft 3 with client Implement improvements to Draft 3 producing Draft 4; v. Gain signoff on Draft 4; vi. When you forecast/price out/write SOW for artifacts, you assume a certain number of create/review/improve/review/improve/etc cycles. Model those cycles. vii. That way, when you deliver Draft 1, close the task, and open the Draft 2 task. When the client says, looks great, but can you change the color palette and all of the actors in the ad, and can we have this in Spanish and French? You have a task open to handle those changes; viii. This approach produces a larger number of tasks in your plan, but boy-howdy, you know exactly where you are on every project, every deliverable. ix. This approach helps you know when you’ve been cycling through the revision cycle and moved the work into an unprofitable range; 2) Timesheet Buckets a. You create tasks to model the work and assign resources to those tasks, with ZERO planned hours for each resource; b. You create one task per deliverable; c. That one task models the creation/review/improve/review/improve/etc cycles; d. You create one task called “Client Z - Sugar Plum Print Ad” and allow everyone to charge time to the task (be sure to NOT assign the resource to the task, that messes up capacity planning and user utilization). Let’s call this the “Timesheet Bucket”; e. Have people charge time to that task directly - and then pin it to their timesheet; f. This makes it real easy for people to know where to dump their time, they have a bucket that encompasses a wide range of activities, but they all center on that clever Sugar Plum Print Ad; g. This does not facilitate schedule management or knowing where we are on the review/improve cycles; h. This does not provide any constraint to remind the team that review/improve is not an endless process, at some point it has to stop; My recommendation, having done this in Marketing, is to get good at the first option. What do you think? Thanks, Eric
