Streamlining creative operations at the University of Leicester through bespoke Work Management implementation
The University of Leicester is a leading research-intensive university based in Leicester, England. Renowned for the discovery of genetic fingerprinting, today the university serves over 20,000 students and 4,000 staff, all committed to the university’s mission of being ‘citizens of change’.
Facing increasing demand for high-quality and creative marketing materials from multiple channels, including email, instant messaging, phone calls, and even corridor conversations, Leicester’s in-house creative services team struggled to manage workloads, track progress, and maintain efficiencies.
To streamline asset development and enhance project management, the university’s Marketing and Content Traffic Officer and Head of Creative partnered with Bluprintx to integrate a new Work Management platform; structuring project intakes, improving resource allocation, and enhancing collaboration across departments.
The Head of Creative at the University of Leicester recognized the growing need for a more efficient way of managing the rising volume of marketing support requests. This led to a business case for a new project management solution that could meet the university’s need for streamlined workflows, increased productivity, and improved work management.
The university’s Marketing and Content Traffic Officer identified the implementation of a new workflow software as an opportunity to enhance collaboration between creative teams and wider departments across the organization. With support from Bluprintx, the university selected a preferred vendor that suited its people, platforms and processes. From this base, Bluprintx introduced a single enquiry form that auto-customizes based on project parameters, ensuring that creative teams receive accurate and complete project requests. The implementation, driven by Bluprintx, was tailored to tackle the unique challenges and objectives of the university’s creative team – addressing root causes and process inefficiencies to accelerate outcomes.
“Our new Work Management solution allows us to centralize our work and manage projects more efficiently with limited resources,” said a member of the university team. “75% of requests now come in with all the specifications and content files we need to get started, allowing us to deliver content faster.”
This digital transformation has proven particularly valuable for university events, where a single project can require up to one hundred digital, print, and large format assets. With the new solution in place, teams can now easily review capacity, balance workloads, and provide transparent project timelines and updates. Asset approvers can leave comments directly on the platform, speeding up approvals processes and reducing the need for multiple revisions.
Now armed with over a years’ worth of data, the University of Leicester is able to plan more strategically for upcoming and future projects. A spokesperson explained: “We can now align resources based on historical project data, hours, and investments. This helps us plan more proactively for cyclical work such as admissions and graduation events, ensuring we are always focused on the university’s top priorities.”
Having worked with Bluprintx to deploy its new Work Management solution, the University of Leicester’s in-house creatives are now able to demonstrate their value more clearly to senior leadership teams. A member of the team elaborates: “We knew we were busy, but now we have the numbers to show the growing volume of work we manage and the time it takes. For the first time, we can demonstrate our efficiency and the value our small team brings.”
