A Better Workflow – Posts

Creative Ops: How to Make a Plan

May 6, 2016 by Author

About the Killer Ops series:

How can creative teams increase their Value Proposition? How can they become better strategic partners in the organization? Following the entrepreneurial model of Product Development, creative teams – and organizations – can learn to think and act like a startup, to develop a framework for continuous innovation, improved operations, and greater success.

What This Is: A results-oriented series of steps to flesh out an idea and carry it to the finish line.

[Read more…]

Creative Ops & First Steps of Discovery

April 30, 2016 by Author

About the Killer Ops series:

What This Is: Put on the thinking cap and come up with broad ideas about how to improve Creative Operations.

Why It’s Important: Without a plan, we won’t know where we’re going.

[Read more…]

What Can Creative Ops Learn from Product Management?

April 25, 2016 by Author

About the Killer Ops series:

As a Creative Operations leader you see your team struggling on a daily basis to get the work done, in an environment that sorely needs a makeover.

The creative workplace is largely reactive — lurching from crises to crisis, shooting at everything in sight, rushing to meet deadlines, and driven by creative visionaries with their mercurial ways.

We need to make some changes in our approach. As the Grail Knight said to Indiana Jones in “The Last Crusade”: It’s important to choose wisely.

[Read more…]

Conference Talks: Building a Creative Ops Ninja Team

March 31, 2016 by Author

In just a few weeks, the 2016 Henry Stewart DAM NY Conference will feature an all-new Creative Operations track. I’m thrilled to return as a speaker.

Save the Date: May 5-6, 2016

For the past two years at the conference, I’ve talked about Comedy Central’s digital content hub at — first as a case study focusing on the benefits our system offered to our creative team. Last fall, at the Los Angeles conference, I dove a little deeper into our strategy and development process, and the business benefits of the in-house product development of our solution to address several core creative operations needs.

What interests me most right now, and what I’ll be talking about, is a strategic approach for improving creative operations. A lot of organizations haven’t yet reached the point where creative ops are regarded as a distinct and essential business role requiring leadership and focused attention.

[Read more…]

The Evolution of Comedy Central’s Creative Content Hub

February 22, 2016 by Author

This is a tale of two departments that tore Comedy Central’s digital creative content hub in half.

I jest! We’re comedy natives — no drama for us!

A core goal of CC Share (the name of Comedy Central’s Content Hub), was that it should serve the needs of two separate business units that each needed a way to manage multimedia content. We started out thinking we could solve everything with a unified code base. But when that strategy hit a wall, we pivoted to a multi-tenant platform that gave us more flexibility to create a focused and unique interface for each group.

[Read more…]

Comedy Central Dumps its Obsolete Optical Media Archive

February 3, 2016 by Author

Comedy Central migrated its entire Brand Creative archive to a modern system, and tossed 18 years worth of optical media into the dumpster.

Here’s how.

We had amassed 800+ CD’s and DVD’s in a comprehensive archive of all source files — for every single print project generated by the Brand Creative group since the team… well, pretty much since the team’s very beginnings.

[Read more…]