Most in-house creative teams do not have a capacity problem so much as a capacity visibility problem. Work gets allocated to whoever answers first, nobody can see who is already carrying too much, and the team only finds out it is over capacity when something is late. Fixing it starts with knowing what your actual available hours are, then allocating against them rather than against a guess.
Growth is the point at which informal resourcing stops working. When there were six of you, the person doing the allocating could hold the whole picture in their head. At sixteen, they cannot — but they usually keep trying, because nothing forced the change.
What follows is the same in most teams. The reliable people get more work because they are reliable. Someone is quietly at 130% while someone else has room. A campaign lands and everyone agrees it will be fine, right up until the week it is not. And when the team finally asks for another designer, the request goes in without any numbers attached, which is why it does not get approved.
Four words get used interchangeably in these conversations and should not be. Capacity is the time your team can realistically make available. Workload is what has already been assigned to them. Demand is everything the business is asking for, accepted or not. Utilisation is how much of your capacity is actually being used. Comparing all four is what tells you whether you have an allocation problem, a process problem or a genuine shortage of people.
Read more Marketing teams were once relatively stable structures with brand and direct marketing teams, perhaps a communications or events team, and a few agency partners. That has changed with the addition of significant digital, content and social requirements, perhaps a customer experience or sales function, data management requirements, product marketing, a plethora of smaller agency partners, and so on. These days marketing team restructures occur relatively often: every couple of years, if not more frequently.This is driven by many factors: the advent of new channels and the resulting adoption of new marketing tactics and disciplines, the emergence of agility as a desirable marketing quality, new technology that enables centralised data management, and changing corporate strategies and structures.
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