Project Collaboration: Use Cases for Marketing How can marketers leverage project collaboration to elevate organizational performance? Collaborate to succeed Examining the impact of cloud project collaboration technology Today’s marketing organization projectplace.com Collaborate to succeed The ability to collaborate effectively has never been more critical for Marketing. As the world becomes increasingly more connected, it behooves today’s marketer to collaborate on a variety of projects and tasks – to communicate openly with others outside of regular email and spreadsheets. What’s needed is a tool that enables and secures such collaboration, so that teams and individuals can focus on getting their work done. No longer is there time for meetings and phone calls to take place, track progress and document development; too many are involved, and across too much distance and time zones for this to be a realistic option. The answer lies in technology. Solutions are available that let marketing organizations uplift their collaboration – both internal to themselves and beyond corporate walls. This has a domino effect on overall performance as individuals and projects benefit from the entire group’s knowledge base and improved interaction. Marketers know this. The question is: how to choose the right solution? Examining the impact of cloud project collaboration technology in four scenarios Scenario #1: Product launch planning Managing a product launch can quickly become very complicated. For a product that launches globally, many dependencies must be considered and addressed; many team members and stakeholders must work in concert. And all processes must be transparent and easily called up at a moment’s notice in case plans change – as they often do. Technology solution A launch manager uses a cloud-based project collaboration solution that enables communication across all functions and teams to coordinate the global launch. Internal and external team members can save documents and images to cards on kanban boards. They can prompt relevant members to review, edit, and approve new content quickly, speeding approvals while eliminating siloed email chains and version control issues. The launch manager has a brand new transparency into the initiative – she can see, with a click, who is working on what, the status of any given task, and overall project health. It’s the kind of information that once took long meetings and round-robin phone calls to achieve. Outcome The result is one common launch plan and communication platform for all participants. This includes items like the social media plan, direct marketing mechanisms, Web plans including translated pages, and every other dependency managed by the marketing organization. Team members feel engaged and included, the launch manager is certain of meeting the launch target, and management has new confidence in marketing. Scenario #2: Event planning Planning conferences, as marketers know, can take on a life of their own. From managing hotel accommodations, conference space, communications, promotions and sponsors to finding the right speaker and sponsorships, it seems that nothing else has as many moving parts and planning as a live conference. So much can go wrong. Technology solution The event manager uses a project collaboration solution, connects stakeholders to execute and track milestones in the project plan and assign and track tasks/deliverables using task cards. Team members can invite stakeholders both inside and outside the organization to collaborate, get organized as well as share documents securely. Outcome By leveraging a platform for planning, real-time sharing, tracking, and visualization, the team can easily see the status of work of each member and execute the many conference deliverables and stay organized on all logistics and third party contributors. This collaboration helps to ensure everyone knows what they need to work on and deliver it on time or easily negotiate and course correct when things change. Scenario #3: Website development and launch plan Marketing is revamping the company website and needs to communicate what is happening both internally to the team, so that it gets done, and externally within the company, so that everyone knows about the launch. The project lead must create and vet a plan that will lead to launch; content must be refreshed, graphics must be developed, pages must be searchoptimized, all must be translated into various languages and quite a bit more. And of course, everything must be done while regular business is taken care of. Technology solution Leveraging the cloud-based project collaboration solution, the project lead creates a timeline on a Gantt chart that tracks milestones to the desired launch date. This lets all team members in any location see at an instant where a task they’re working on stands in relation to launch. Using kanban boards, team members can keep their tasks up to date, so all can easily understand who is doing what, and the current status of work items in the project. Some solutions enable the tying back of kanban boards to Gantt charts, which connects tasks to plans. This is preferable, as it gives team members a more visual and complete understanding of project scope, status, milestones, and issues. Outcome Using the collaboration solution, internal and external resources stay on track and work together to deliver the executables for launch to the marketing organization. The project lead easily stays on top of the various contributors, can see when bottlenecks begin to form via various kanban boards, and can alert management when other priorities begin to make a worrisome impact on his team’s ability to work on the website project. Finally, both internal and external parties know exactly when to expect the new site to launch, and marketing can feel confident about its timelines. Scenario #4: Collateral and content development The company is gearing up for a major rebranding that will affect all the company’s previous product collateral. The content manager begins assigning the work. Some of the content development will be handled by his team, but he determines that additional help will be needed to create new content and update the old. He reaches out to several trusted content developers; two are available. He also loops in several integral product managers who agree to serve as subject matter experts. Technology solution Using the organization’s cloud-based project collaboration solution, the marketing manager enables everyone on his content development team to collaborate easily and in real time. Document sharing capabilities let team members share documents by attaching relevant files quickly from their computers. This company chose a solution that allows sharing from smartphones and tablets, and also from repositories like Dropbox™ and Google Drive™. The solution provides real-time updates and version control keeps the most recent version in front of team members, but gives access to document history and changes if needed. Outcome Those developing content enjoy the easy back-and-forth collaboration with each other, discussing word choice and items such as the impact of the competitive landscape, individual product benefits, and so forth. The content manager benefits from the transparent overview into the entire project: one glance tells him who is doing what (and who isn’t) so he can keep this project on course to timely completion. The list goes on: Branding, vendor management, social media, public relations management, and more. Project collaboration technology can help marketers execute the myriad of projects to get work done while maximizing the potential of resources. Today’s marketing organization – working together, working better with Projectplace Collaboration solutions can help marketing organizations operate at a level not possible before. Those who choose wisely get a cost-effective solution that helps their teams get up and running in minutes and adapt to changes swiftly. The right solution builds up a responsive marketing organization by enabling speed, efficiency, and agility. Most importantly, organizations should look for indicators that the solution they select will empower their people to work together – to collaborate – across the hall, across time zones, across continents. For organizations ready to enhance their collaboration, both internal and external, and improve their overall performance, Projectplace is a proven platform that offers: • Seamless communication • Transparent project and task management • Secure document sharing For more information, visit Projectplace.com © 2015 Planview, Inc., All Rights Reserved.
