Marketing is, like other shared services within a typical organisation, facing the realisation that everyone thinks their project requests are the most important thing happening and deserve priority treatment – even if they aren’t or don’t. What’s worse, people often go directly to individual team members to get their work done first – chewing up time that should be spent on priority projects.
This distracts team members from their primary roles, and they struggle to manage priorities. Squeaky wheels in organisations will take teams in the wrong direction and not only frustrate marketing leaders but team members at all levels.
Ironically, the approach that provides marketing leaders with reliable information, for informing decisions and managing workload, also engages team members and creates an environment, where individuals contribute at a higher level and take ownership of their tasks and responsibilities:
It works the way people naturally work – enabling stakeholders to request work, suggest deadlines, collaborate and negotiate. For some teams this might mean incorporating a more social feel to how work is requested or enabling dialogue and negotiation (which usually transpires when work is assigned). Forcing people to work within a “process” that doesn’t feel natural will never be really effective.
Is tailored to all types of workers – providing value to everyone on the team. For example, if the only value the creative team sees in a new solution is a better way for management to “watch what’s going on”, it won’t work. However if everyone can see some value, management will be able to seamlessly collect the project information they want – at the source.
It portrays work in context – because projects aren’t the only work creative teams deal with every day. If teams don’t have visibility into everything that’s going on and how it interrelates, it’s an incomplete picture. What’s more, information about tasks, projects and goals should be captured in a way that provides context. Although I don’t advocate implementing Twitter or Facebook into the process, a Twitter-like approach that attaches conversations to tasks and initiatives is incredibly valuable to leaders trying to make sense out of all the data collected with project-based work.
Creating this type of environment ultimately gives marketing leaders the information they need to maximise the value of every member of the team on every initiative.
Ty Kiisel is manager of social outreach at AtTask
