As marketing teams become increasingly dispersed across departments, geography and time zones, collaboration becomes equally challenging. Brainstorming sessions, during which everyone sat together in one room, are now rare, replaced mostly by email and web conferences.
But, despite increasing reliance on these technologies, the reality is these tools are not designed to support the type of real-time, interactive collaboration that high-performance marketing teams require. In fact, they’re extremely inefficient and lack the functionality to effectively manage the evolution of creative ideation. This void often causes teams to backtrack, rework, and waste time looking for the information and input they need to get work done.
Moving away from these ad hoc tools and replacing them with a comprehensive purpose-built social collaboration and work management platform can transform team-wide connections, encourage idea sharing, and spur innovation and space barriers. In the process, these collaboration platforms can tear down silos, dramatically improving efficiency and making the entire team more innovative and productive.
What makes collaboration platforms the key to fueling innovation?
1. Automation of standard processes.
“Process” tends to have a negative connotation in the creative world, with the assumption that implementing a process will undermine agility, flexibility, and creative freedoms. However, creating structure for admin work like work requests, proofing, and approval processes can save a tremendous amount of time and effort, eliminate this burden, and free up more time for creative work. These processes can all be automated within a work management software application, which includes alerts delivered to the right people at the right time, request templates that enable information sharing (such as creative briefs) and other protocols that eliminate most of the back-and-forth of trying to get work done.
2. Increased visibility.
With a collaboration platform, everyone on the team can access the same information and have visibility of colleagues comments, ideas and progress on key tasks, removing the silos of project information being stored, shared, and sent in multiple formats (such as email, phone calls and other mediums). This keeps everyone on the same page, up to speed with what’s going on, and eliminates the need to track down information, status updates, and input.
3. A single hub of knowledge.
Storing all documents, project notes, feedback and other materials in a single, centralised location ensures consistency and prevents work from being duplicated or instructions and ideas from being repeated. This keeps projects at companies like, for example, Lexis-Nexis moving much more smoothly through the pipeline. “When we build a website, there are certain milestones in the process,” says Director of Web Services Frank Grippo. “We have reports today that can tell us how many new orders are coming in each day or month. We can see the average age of a website that’s still in progress. And then, we can go down one level further when projects are getting slowed down eliminating those bottlenecks.”
4. Improved efficiency.
Using a collaboration platform can remove endless status meetings, updating spreadsheets, tracking down updates, and chasing down reviewers for feedback and approval. This time saving gives the creative team more time for what they do best: create and innovate. This process improvement has increased project capacity by hundreds of percent for various companies. It also reduces the amount of time spent in staff meetings significantly, cutting that time by 60 percent at Tampa General Hospital and reducing the number of status meetings from three per week to just one a month at Trek Bicycle Corporation.
5. 24/7 global reach.
With an online collaboration platform, time and geographic barriers simply disappear. Participants can share feedback, generate new ideas, innovate, and work on their own time schedule, creating a 24/7 innovation hub and virtual sandbox that enables global collaboration.
In today’s global business environment, getting everyone together in the same room to innovate and share ideas is nearly impossible. Fortunately, collaboration platforms that connect teams across time and distance, and put everything they need all in one place, can fill the gap by providing a centralised work management system that automates administrative processes. Critically, by implementing an effective, purpose-built solution, we can help tear down barriers to innovation and unlock powerful efficiencies that give teams more time and energy to do what they do best—be creative.
By Joe Staples, CMO at Workfront.
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