Pain Points & Challenges

When I first joined the team, the design team's schedule management was being operated in a very inefficient way.

Emotion	Problem Area	Challenges
🥲	Ad-hoc Task Assignment	Editors & Marketers assigned tasks unpredictably, handled case-by-case by a single junior designer.
😫	Unstructured Workflow	Requests came with immediate deadlines, leading to excessive workload pressure.
😰	Lack of Visibility	Personal schedules were tracked in Spreadsheets or paper, making it hard for teams to coordinate.
🫨	Scalability Issue	With an additional junior designer, a structured task distribution system became necessary.
⏳	Constraints on Solutions	Developing a custom tool was time-consuming & costly.
Using Jira or Confluence required internal approvals, delaying execution.

Solution

Dual Scheduling System
- Release Date: The deadline when assets must go live.
- Design Date: When designers begin work (set one month prior, later adjusted to a two-week window).
Automated Task Management
- Task requests directly logged in Design Calendar, reviewed & assigned by the lead designer.
Cross-Team Integration
- Linked editorial schedules to avoid redundant manual entries across multiple documents.
Reusable Templates for Efficiency
- Commonly requested assets formatted into Notion templates for quick edits by requesters.
Performance Tracking
- Filter functions enabled designers to quantify their output, useful for evaluations.
Scalability for External Collaborations
- Calendar framework was later adapted for Vietnamese agency collaboration, making handoff seamless.