[Quick Tips] How to turn half-baked requests into fully baked tickets

We have all seen those half-baked tickets or worse, those tickets with absolutely no information and a deadline of tomorrow and you know, just thinking about it is giving me some painful flashbacks

Most of the time, these stress-inducing tickets are due to what I like to call upstream dependencies not having solved themselves before the ticket hits your production queue.

Definitions

To solve this problem, let’s first define upstream dependencies. These are all the puzzle pieces that need to fall into place before you receive an actionable campaign ops ticket i.e. someone needs to write the copy, design the creative assets, find the speakers, determine the webinar times, select the venue, title the white paper, find a client for the case study, on and on all the way to someone actually submitting the darn ticket for the ops build

Solutions

So what’s a beleaguered Campaign Ops specialist to do?

Here are a few ideas:

✅ Create and enforce Minimum Valuable Production (MVP) requirements. Require your stakeholders to submit a certain amount of details with their ticket to ensure that a meaningful amount of work can be completed once a ticket is actioned

✅ Develop content submission documents to help identify and collect these MVP requirements in one central spot and thus streamline the entire campaign execution process.

✅ Use a project management tool to track the status of tickets and communicate to your stakeholders that a ticket won’t be moved to In Progress until for example the MVP requirements are submitted via a content submission doc.