Depending on the organization, team structure, or day, DAM owners can feel like the center of the universe (in a good or not-so-good way), a bottleneck, or Lucy Ricardo manning the candy conveyer belt. But as your asset library scales, you will have to figure out how to scale too. This is not a bad problem to have - growth means more people, more assets, more importance - but can quickly require help to keep your carefully tended garden from turning into an unkempt mess that no one wants to visit anymore. You will need help.
If you are a DAM pro, chances are asking for help can be difficult for you because your values include:
You want a well-maintained DAM.
You want to do your job well.
You have been burned by ceding control before.
You have a lean (or non-existent) team.
All valid; all unhelpful in the long run. Even if you can keep those candies inspected (or shoved in your mouth) after a while, burnout is real. Let’s figure out how to get the same result - DAM excellence - without sacrificing ourselves.
First value: a well-maintained DAM. Maybe the most common value. You see the intrinsic value that comes with a well-structured digital asset management platform. The assets are named well, stored in the correct structure, and tagged for easy search. Your metadata schema is a thing of beauty - if only anyone else would use it.
First solution: share that value. Your coworkers might not know the “why” behind the requirements. If you can give concrete examples of where the DAM structure benefited your group, give them, freely and often. Time saved redoing lost work, replacing updated assets with a quick drag-and-drop, and being able to find all images containing a coworker taken out in handcuffs. These are all tangible (and real - ask a DAM manager for their battle stories next time you get together!) examples of how a well-maintained DAM brings business value. Learning these stories will encourage designers to spend the extra couple of minutes tagging assets, remind editors that naming helps SEO, and nurture future DAM specialists to collaborate when new structures need to be added.
Second value: you want to do a good job and don’t trust that others will. When your sense of worth is tied up with being needed, letting go and allowing others to help can be tough. But being a martyr or savior is not sustainable, in work or life. How can you transfer the laudable effort to spread the responsibility?
Second solution: Part of your job is to spread your knowledge to others. Document the processes, structures, taxonomy, and behind-the-scenes steps that make your DAM work. Set up training calls, record videos, and share decks. It’s an old-fashioned idea that if you are the only one with the knowledge, you become indispensable. First off, no one is irreplaceable at work. If you get hit by a bus tomorrow, you will be replaced. If you find a new role, you might leave. But even if you stay forever, by delegating responsibility to other DAM managers and users, you are establishing yourself as a leader.
Third value: it’s safer to do it yourself because delegating hasn’t worked before. Listen - we’ve all been there. You think you have documented, trained, and delivered a discrete step (or region, or asset type) in the DAM process to another person or team and they dropped the ball. Maybe they stopped reviewing new work, let mistakes slide, or were late adding content. Sometimes priorities shift or a colleague leaves their role. All you know is that the task is back on your plate and now you resent ever risking sharing in the first place.
Third solution: learn to try again. Get back out there! Maybe it didn’t work last time, but it’s worth the risk. How else are you going to make room as you scale or want to take on more responsibility elsewhere in your role? By risking delegating again, you are showing that you are brave and tenacious. Remember that you will need to do extra work during a time of transition but it will pay off (eventually!) as you remove yourself as a bottleneck.
Fourth value: You don’t want to burden your lean team. Due to either budget, organization size, or DAM maturity time, maybe there is not much bandwidth for others to take on DAM work. You enjoy autonomy and responsibility but know it isn’t sustainable.
Fourth solution: Expand what “team” means. Maybe you don’t have a DAM team, but you have 100+ DAM users. That is your team. Within the user group, you will have people who are interested in more than just sourcing assets or adding them to the pages they build or print work they create. Empower them to curate and enrich their area of assets. Cultivate relationships with people outside your user base too. For example, if one arduous task is keeping up with which people in your photos still work at your company, a colleague in HR or People could be a helpful resource by sharing monthly comings and goings. Not comfortable writing or speaking? Pair with someone on your internal communications or editorial staff to help polish the words you have to share in training documents. You will have to lead by influence, not authority since none of these people work under you. One idea is to see what would be valuable in the exchange to them as well. Maybe the DAM can be a source for executive headshots that frees up time for the internal comms team or holds a set of product hero images for the art directors to use when it comes to awards season. Find out how your DAM can help solve their problems and it will feel more equitable - because it is! By including less-obvious partners across your organization, you have enriched the DAM and broken down silos.
None of these solutions is easy or guaranteed. You may find yourself facing setbacks that discourage you and make you think it would be easier on your own. And it might be easier if the workload is low and the assets minimal. But the side-effect of a successful DAM is that it will grow, you will need to scale, and if you want to maintain the excellence you built from launch, you will need to share both the responsibility and the reward with others. As you scale, your skills of negotiation, collaboration, and delegation will need to scale too. And that will be OK, because like a DAM, you’re ready to grow.