Last weekend I was thinking a lot about the various tasks that needed tracking as part of the Agenceum project load. It had gotten to the point where I was starting to worry if I was forgetting something, and it also seemed that I needed to formalize some processes. The idea of making a map of everything seemed useful, so I started sketching it out on Sunday, and have been refining it over the past couple of days. The result is a fairly complete process list of Agenceum business functions. In short, it’s an idealized process guide to everything that has to get done at Agenceum, based on my prior experience at various small agencies and my own freelance practice.

The general idea is that any task that I’m doing on Agenceum (or David Seah/Associates, for that matter) corresponds to one block somewhere on this diagram. Once I know what block that is, I can then see what needs to happen next. Eventually, I can create tickets for each of these tasks, and use this overall process diagram to manage the workflow.

Some other notes:

• In general, tasks start from the left and move on through the right until results are achieved. The result may feed into another process; for example, many of the marketing processes result in an INQUIRY, which can then be handled by the INQUIRIES process line.
• Several tasks have iterative cycles baked into them, for example the typical design-review-refine cycle.
• Also, the processes are roughly ordered from top-to-bottom as outward-facing  to inward-facing activities.
• Each box has a word or short phrase that evokes what needs to be done. So theoretically, the way to use this diagram is to wonder what the hell you’re doing, look at the process diagram, and then see what you need to be working toward. There is also some implied creative strategy baked into some of the processes, which I could write about at length but will save for some other time.
• The first four MARKETING lines have a vertical hash line that indicates that you can jump from any of those four starting points to a different tactic to generate inquiries.
• For the FINANCIALS and EXECUTIVE lines, the left-to-right process is arbitrarily defined. I tried to think of the most important things to be mindful of with regard to these functions as I understand them. Your mileage may vary.

You can download the latest version of this file here as a PDF: » AgenceumSystemProcesses.pdf