The Future of Automation is Friendly

Agencies are tasked with a unique challenge these days: juggling creativity with efficiency, while also being on the forefront of technology.

It’s for this reason that automation is being pushed to the agency community, particularly in the form of project collaboration software. It’s also the reason that many agencies are pushing back against automation. The idea of robots overriding creativity sounds like a nightmare to most people in the creative industries, after all.

But what if automation could actually be your secret weapon? Here’s why it’s worth embracing, even just a little bit.

Automation in digital project management frees you up for what’s important

A common reason for resistance when it comes to process automation is the idea that it will take away jobs. If supermarkets move to automated checkouts, what will happen to the cashiers? If data entry becomes automated, what will happen to data entry clerks?

The truth is, incorporating automation into digital project management frees up you and your team to focus on the tasks that excite and engage you. Using project collaboration software to automate mundane elements of the process is actually about making your life much easier. For example, project collaboration software gives you the opportunity to invoice automatically, set reminders, have data inputted, auto assign tasks and more.

The goal of automation in digital project management isn’t to replace your job, or your team members for that matter. It’s to streamline tasks that you already spend too much time on, which frees you up to look at the big picture and take your projects to the next level.

Automation is more than just standardization

Another belief many people have about process automation is that its end result is purely about standardization, which leaves no room for creativity or a human element. If you work for an agency, you know that creativity is a big part of what agencies bring to the table, so using this logic, it’s understandable that people would be hesitant to embrace a concept that could stifle that.

Far from streamlining projects into something cold, template-driven and utterly predictable, automation lets you focus your energy on creativity. All projects need an outline and some defined boundaries to help shape that creativity and having structure built into that process actually makes it easier to innovate.

Automation doesn’t reduce the need for human contact, it encourages it

If robots are running everything, doesn’t that mean less interaction with actual human colleagues or clients? When you consider the fact that agencies are staffed by humans solving problems for other humans, collaboration and the human element is a pretty crucial component.

Automation in digital project management however, actually has the potential to break down silos in an agency environment. Automatic status updates, for example, keep your whole team up-to-date and engaged with little effort. The hassle and time that multiple status meetings entail sometimes means that just the opposite happens; teams abandon the idea of staying in contact and there tends to be less cross-department collaboration.

Automation also gives those working in digital project management roles – or higher up – the ability to see things from a bird’s-eye-view, which has the potential to make them feel more in sync with their teams. Staying on top of each team manually has many of the same problems, including the tendency to feel so time-consuming and disorganized that it’s not done as frequently.

As you might imagine, automating tedious manual tasks means more time to have meaningful interactions with your team members.

While it might not be a surprise that some agency partners are sceptical about embracing automation in an environment that’s designed to spark creativity, the truth is that automation is a fantastic compliment to a creative environment. Far from replacing jobs and encouraging mass-produced work that’s completely devoid of human elements, automation in digital project management is really about freedom. It’s about freedom from mundane, time-consuming tasks and empowering you and your team to do what they love doing: collaborating and creating.

Want to see how TaskBranch can help your project team free their creativity by leveraging automation? Start your free trial today!