How to improve organizational performance for marketers: Project execution, efficiency, and agility
For marketing professionals, using traditional tools like email and spreadsheets to track projects, status, and collaboration on documents is becoming more of a pain than an efficient way to conduct business. In my 18 years in the technology space, I’ve had many product roles and have personally witnessed the chaos that using email and spreadsheets can bring to marketing-led projects like product launches and industry tradeshows. Often, there are just too many people involved across too many channels and time zones. Imagine trying to organize a product launch when your entire team is in Romania. It isn’t pretty having to filter through emails trying to decipher project status or searching through multiple versions of a contract trying to figure out which is the latest one. I’ve talked to many people in the industry who are experiencing these same frustrations and are avidly seeking to adopt practices that allow for their teams to maintain their high volume of work and ultimately work smarter.
There is an answer for marketing teams who deal with these same technology pitfalls, and it’s project collaboration. I’ve used it for many projects and it has changed the way organizations conduct business and communicate with teams – including our own marketing team at Planview. It combines agile practices, such as Kanban, and has proven to help marketing teams get organized, improve project delivery and efficiency, and to become more flexible in adjusting to the inevitable changes that arise around priorities and resources.
Consider these two of four Marketing Use Case Scenarios summarized:
- Scenario #1: Product launch planning – Avoid the usual pitfalls of long meetings and round-robin phone calls. Using a project collaboration solution can provide one common launch plan and communication platform. Internal and external team members can save documents and images to cards on Kanban boards. Relevant members are then prompted to review, edit, and approve new content quickly, speeding approvals and eliminating email chains and version control issues. The result: team members feel engaged and included, the launch date is on target, and management has new confidence in marketing.
- Scenario #2: Event planning – Contain the chaos by using a project collaboration solution to connect stakeholders to execute and track milestones – from hotel reservations to speaker line-ups. By leveraging a platform for planning, real-time sharing, tracking, and visualization, everyone can stay organized on all logistics and third-party contributors. The result: everyone knows what they need to work on and deliver or they can easily negotiate and course correct.
If your marketing team can relate to any of these scenarios, I recommend downloading our Project Collaboration: Use Cases for Marketing and reading the remaining scenarios: #3: Website development and launch plan and #4: Collateral and content development.
I’d like to hear from you, is your marketing organization feeling the pain of email and spreadsheets to manage projects? Share your experiences by leaving a comment below.
