Discovery creative production template

Creative work is complex, often involving many requirements and handoffs between different teams. Without a system to centralize and track all your creative workflows, things can get disorganized quickly—leading to delays, missed steps, and inconsistent practices.

That’s why Discovery developed their own custom creative production template in Asana. A master of media production at scale, Discovery Digital Studios uses Asana to produce thousands of videos and creative assets every month for their consumer apps, social channels, and web properties. Use their template to apply Discovery’s proven systems to your own work—capture all your creative production in one place, streamline handoffs between teams, and ensure no requirements slip through the cracks. 

Why use Discovery’s creative production template?

Discovery’s creative production template is a pre-made framework to help streamline your team’s creative workflow. It includes all the components you need to create—and customize—a centralized production system, with seamless handoffs between stakeholders and teams.

Create a system of record for all creative production

Discovery’s template centralizes all creative work in one place. Instead of searching for information across disconnected emails and apps, your team can easily find the most up-to-date information about creative assets—from video production to social media posts. See a high-level overview of all content in development, or dive deeper to understand what’s left to do and what tasks have been completed. 

Streamline handoffs between teams

During creative production, it’s hard to know when a task is complete and when the next one is ready to start. This can make handoffs difficult, especially if you’re coordinating work across copywriting, web design, marketing teams, and other creative stakeholders. Discovery’s template solves this problem with automated notifications. Waiting on blog copy to create hero images? No problem—instead of constantly checking on the status of work, you’ll get an automatic notification when your teammate has completed their task. 

Standardize processes

Before Discovery used Asana to manage creative production, one of their biggest pain points was inconsistent processes. Video formatting guidelines were forgotten, deliverables would fall through the cracks, and assets sat unused because they weren’t shared with the right people internally. Discovery’s customized template addresses these challenges by standardizing the production process for each creative asset. That way, team members can follow a predefined roadmap for each deliverable—including key tasks like building production schedules, creating video thumbnails, and sharing published assets with stakeholders. 

We used to have half a dozen workflows that were tracked separately in spreadsheets and email. Now they’re all managed in Asana, so we can see dependencies, asset status, who’s responsible, and when they’re launching.”

How to use Discovery’s creative production template

Discovery’s template includes all the key components you need to create an efficient creative production workflow. While it’s built off their processes, this template is completely customizable—so you can adjust it to fit your specific project management needs. As you use Discovery’s template, here are some best practices to keep in mind: 

• Identify what high-level information you need to track. For Discovery, being able to see the status of each asset is important—so their template includes color-coded custom tags to indicate if deliverables are processing, in editing, ready to publish, or completed. Consider what details you want to track, and add them to the template. For example, this could include content channel, target audience, or related campaigns. 

• Find automation opportunities. Within your production workflow, identify places to implement automations—programmed rules that seamlessly pass the baton between different stakeholders and teams. Discovery’s template includes some sample automations, but the sky’s the limit here. Instantly notify team members when they can begin work on tasks, assign work, move tasks between different template sections, and more. 

• List standardized steps for each content type. Different types of creative work—like blog posts, webinars, or infographics—each have different requirements. List out the steps needed to complete each asset type, and create corresponding template tasks. That means your team can just copy the “blog” template task when they’re starting a blog post, and follow a predefined creative process.

Integrated features

• Custom fields. Custom fields are the best way to tag, sort, and filter work. Create unique custom fields for any information you need to track—from priority and status to email or phone number. Use custom fields to sort and schedule your to-dos so you know what to work on first. Plus, share custom fields across tasks and projects to ensure consistency across your organization. 

• Automation. Automate manual work so your team spends less time on the busy work and more time on the tasks you hired them for. Rules in Asana function on a basis of triggers and actions—essentially “when X happens, do Y.” Use Rules to automatically assign work, adjust due dates, set custom fields, notify stakeholders, and more. From ad hoc automations to entire workflows, Rules gives your team time back for skilled and strategic work.

• Dependencies. Mark a task as waiting on another task with task dependencies. Know when your work is blocking someone else’s work, so you can prioritize accordingly. Teams with collaborative workflows can easily see what tasks they’re waiting on from others, and know when to get started on their portion of work. When the first task is completed, the assignee will be notified that they can get started on their dependent task. Or, if the task your work is dependent on is rescheduled, Asana will notify you—letting you know if you need to adjust your dependent due date as well. 

• Subtasks. Sometimes a to-do is too big to capture in one task. If a task has more than one contributor, a broad due date, or stakeholders that need to review and approve before it can go live, subtasks can help. Subtasks are a powerful way to distribute work and split tasks into individual components—while keeping the small to-dos connected to the overarching context of the parent task. Break tasks into smaller components or capture the individual components of a multi-step process with subtasks. 

Recommended apps

• Figma. Teams use Figma to create user flows, wireframes, UI mocks, prototypes, and more. Now, you can embed these designs in Asana, so your team can reference the latest design work in context with related project documents. And, unlike screenshots, live embeds update in real time to reflect changes made in a design file, eliminating the overhead that comes with finding the right files and updating images.

• Adobe Creative Cloud. Creative teams do their best work when they can focus on designing. With the Asana for Adobe Creative Cloud integration, creative and design teams can easily access the information they need to kick off work, get feedback from reviewers and approvers, and deliver final assets without leaving Photoshop, Illustrator, or InDesign. See new tasks, share designs, embed XD share links, and incorporate feedback delivered in Asana—all in Adobe Creative Cloud.

• Dropbox. Attach files directly to tasks in Asana with the Dropbox file chooser, which is built into the Asana task pane.

• Google Workplace. Attach files directly to tasks in Asana with the Google Workplace file chooser, which is built into the Asana task pane. Easily attach any My Drive file with just a few clicks.

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