Workflow design

What workflow design is

Workflow design is writing down the order of steps a piece of content passes through, from the moment somebody decides it should exist to the moment it is live and checked, with a named person and a time limit against every step. The result is a short document plus a one-page version that fits on a wall. The test of it is whether somebody who joined on Monday could follow it on Tuesday.

It is not the sign-off path on its own. Who approves what, in what order, and what happens when that person is away is the approval workflow, a separate piece of work in the strategy pillar. Workflow design covers the whole production process from brief to published page, of which sign-off is one stage among seven or eight. If drafts stuck in one inbox is the only symptom you have, buy that one and leave this alone.

When you need one

The common case is three or four people involved in content and none of them certain whose turn it is. Somebody writes, somebody else checks, the owner approves, and the piece stops between two of them every single time. Nobody is lazy. There is no agreed order, so each piece gets negotiated from scratch.

The second case is a handover: the person who held the whole process in their head is leaving, going on parental leave, or moving to another job inside the business, and none of it is written anywhere. The third is a business that has just paid for a plan and wants a way of running it that does not depend on the owner remembering.

You do not need this if one person writes, approves and publishes everything and intends to keep doing so. A workflow with one name on every line is a to-do list, and you already have it. What that person usually needs instead is a dated schedule of the work, so the pieces have deadlines rather than intentions.

What goes in it

• The stages. The steps your content really passes through, named in your words: idea, brief, draft, edit, technical check if you need one, approval, build, check, publish, file. Stages you do not need are removed rather than left in for tidiness.
• The owner of each stage. A person, by name, not a department. Where a stage could fall to two people, the document says which one, and who covers in their absence.
• The time limit on each stage. How long a stage may hold a piece before it moves anyway, and what moving anyway means: without the comment, to the deputy, or back a stage with a reason attached.
• The hand-offs. What is passed, in what form, to where. This removes most of the delay, because a stage stalls when the next person cannot tell whether they have been given anything.
• The exceptions. The short list of things allowed to skip stages: a price change, a correction, a safety notice. Without a written exception, urgent work either breaks the process or waits behind it.

What you get

The process document. Two to four pages in plain language: stages, owners, time limits, hand-offs and exceptions, written so it can be read in one sitting and argued with in the second.

The one-page version. A single sheet showing the process as a line of boxes with names and days on it. This is the one people actually use. The longer document is what they consult when something unusual happens.

The templates the process needs. Usually three: the brief, the hand-off note, and the checklist run before a page goes live. Editable, set up in whatever project tool you already use or on a shared drive, whichever your people will genuinely open.

A walk-through. Half an hour with the people who have to follow it, so objections are raised before the process is published rather than six weeks after.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A twenty-person accountancy firm publishes a monthly tax explainer and updates about forty service and guide pages a year. Four people touch every piece: a marketing coordinator, the writing partner, a second partner who checks anything with a number in it, and an office manager who builds the pages. Pieces take between three weeks and four months, and nobody can say what makes the difference.

Mapping it takes one afternoon of interviews. The delay turns out not to be approval at all. It is the technical check, which has no time limit and no deputy, and which sits with a partner who disappears for the whole of tax season. The designed workflow gives that check three working days, names a second partner as deputy, and says a piece not returned inside three days goes forward with a note recording it. The build stage moves to after approval rather than before, which stops the office manager building every page twice. Nothing else changes, and the firm publishes eleven explainers that year instead of five.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Who is involved, what gets published, and where it currently sticks. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Agreed before anything starts.
3. Interviews. Twenty minutes each with the people who touch content, separately, because they will tell me different things.
4. The map of what happens now. The current process drawn as it really is, including the parts nobody says out loud.
5. The designed workflow. Drafted, sent for comment, revised once. Five to eight working days after the interviews.
6. The walk-through and the final version. Half an hour with the people who will follow it, then the document and templates handed over.

What it costs

Quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, because the size depends on how many people are involved and how many kinds of content the process has to cover. A two-person process is a short piece of work; one covering a website, a blog, a newsletter and print material across six people is not. The pricing page shows the four ways I work, so you can see the shape of it. The number is fixed in writing before anything starts.

What happens next

Most businesses put the process to work by building the first production schedule against it, so the stages acquire dates. Some hand the document to their staff and ask for editorial process training, which is the same system taught rather than posted. Others read the finished workflow, decide they do not want to run it themselves, and move to content production management. None of that is assumed. The workflow is a complete piece of work on its own, it is yours, and nothing further follows unless you ask.