5 WAYS TO TRANSFORM PROJECT COLLABORATION IN MARKETING Real-World Projectplace Use Cases Accidental Project Manager | 1 PLAN, COLLABORATE, AND DELIVER EFFICIENTLY As time-to-market becomes the benchmark for companies everywhere, the need to deliver customer value rapidly has never been more important. To meet this imperative, marketing teams need tighter collaboration and greater efficiency – all Bring teams together to get work done while working against the challenges of global teams and shorter with Projectplace deadlines. It’s critical for marketers to plan and execute work with a bevy of stakeholders – from sales to senior leadership – if they Easy to use want to deliver successfully. Enter Planview Projectplace™, the collaborative work management solution that brings teams Great for virtual and distributed teams together to manage projects, improve their efficiency, and get work done. Cloud-based for anywhere access This eBook features Projectplace use cases told by marketers Provides effective collaboration and organization who use the solution every day. Read how they are easily planning team projects, scheduling tasks, collaborating on Manage all work and gain status reporting documents, and tracking their group’s progress using integrated Kanban boards, Gantt charts, and communication tools. Achieve visibility for teams and stakeholders Featured Use Cases: 1. Streamlining Content Development 2. Managing Project and Task Intake 3. Enabling Project Management and Collaboration 4. Advancing Campaign Planning and Delivery 5. Improving Cross-Functional Communication 5 Ways to Transform Project Collaboration in Marketing | 2 Streamlining the End-to-End Content Management Process By: Sarah, Director, Content Marketing CREATIVITY IS KEY We’ve all heard that one before, particularly those of us in marketing. For us marketers, developing content can be an arduous process when it involves numerous people, often spread out across different departments. Without a proper collaboration tool, marketing project management can quickly become overwhelming. As the leader of the content marketing teams, I understand this challenge all too well. Seeing a content idea from conception to publication requires the work of writers, subject matter experts, reviewers, a primary proofreader, and also SEO experts, graphic designers, and developers, depending on the type and length of the content. Overseeing this process means managing all of these people, ensuring each person completes his or her part by a set deadline, and remaining flexible if adjustments must be made. Relying on email and spreadsheets in the past made it challenging for our teams to keep track of numerous content pieces in the works. Once an idea was submitted to a writer, we were left in the dark as to their progress and had to set reminders to follow up when deadlines were approaching. We had to be hyper organized, and it created a lot of additional busy work. This all changed with Projectplace. To explain the benefits, I’ll walk you through the creation process (we leverage the Kanban boards in Projectplace to establish this workflow). Content Marketing | 5 Ways to Transform Project Collaboration in Marketing | 3 PROJECTPLACE BENEFITS CONTENT MANAGEMENT EACH STEP OF THE WAY 1. Idea generation – With Kanban boards, it’s 3. Editing and review process – Instead of simple for anyone to create a new card under “new continuously sending drafts to reviewers via email, content request,” then assign it to whomever has documents can be uploaded to their specific cards the bandwidth to write it. We can filter the board by and edited all in one place. No more losing track of assignee, enabling us to view everyone’s workload, and the most-recent draft. This has been an amazing time delegate accordingly. saver! With the use of Projectplace, each aspect of blog management is streamlined and made more 2. Writing – Once a card is assigned to a writer or 4. Meeting deadlines – Each card can have a specific efficient. The cards and Kanban board eliminate the subject matter expert, it is moved to “in progress,” deadline, and we can easily view any that may be need for email and spreadsheets entirely, and trust and all communication regarding the content is kept lagging or adjust due dates. me, they are not missed. within the card. This way, all relevant information is kept together, rather than spread out in various emails 5. Publishing – The final draft with all edits is easily and spreadsheets. available when a new piece of content is ready to be published. The card can then be archived, to keep track of past communications regarding the content. It’s amazing how much easier marketing project management has become, particularly when establishing content development processes and workflow. Content Marketing | 5 Ways to Transform Project Collaboration in Marketing | 4 Managing Project and Task Intake to Excel with Agile Digital Marketing By: Michael, Director, Digital Marketing Digital marketing project management can be challenging because we constantly have an ongoing, lengthy to-do list. We add to the list within our own department, but we also receive website update requests from other departments. Our to-do list grows daily and is difficult to manage, with priorities constantly shifting and schedules having to be rearranged. In the past, we lacked visibility. There wasn’t a single point person who received and organized requests; the expectation was that anything sent to the department would get done immediately, which resulted in chaos. Before getting organized with Projectplace, we used tools that were a lot more complex and not intuitive. It was easy to make mistakes, and it was difficult to track multiple users collaborating on a project. Now, we use Projectplace daily. Mainly, we use the Plan feature for each sprint. We plan out different subtasks beneath each larger task, so we have something to tie the cards to. Before each sprint starts, the digital marketing managers and I will go through the request board for our department and see what projects we can include in the next sprint. We also look at requests received from other departments and try to fit those in when we can. Digital Marketing | 5 Ways to Transform Project Collaboration in Marketing | 5 Projectplace keeps us organized and on schedule. The main tip that helped me in getting started In My Overview, each of us can see real-time status was to make an outline and use the Plan or updates without having to go to each board. We can Roadmaps feature to plan your project. Then you see everything coming up and past due at a high can have a productive kickoff meeting to ensure level. We frequently use the @reference feature to your team is on the same page. After that, it alert staff to updates and information as well as ask should be (relatively) smooth sailing! questions. This cuts out hundreds of emails and lets us communicate more efficiently with each other. I especially love the Dependencies feature. It’s often the case that the progress of one card will depend on completion of another, and Dependencies makes it simple to keep track of each individual card and how it’s moving along its timeline. Projectplace keeps us organized and on schedule. Digital Marketing | 5 Ways to Transform Project Collaboration in Marketing | 6 Enabling Project Management and Collaboration in Product Marketing By: Cassidy, Product Marketing Manager Our goal in product marketing is to empower our internal teams with knowledge they need about our organization’s solutions and products. This includes helping them understand the market, competition, and external forces that affect the way we conduct business. When you think of sales and project management software commonly used in an organization, you have your usual suspects: a CRM system, email, spreadsheets, and maybe document storage owned by a single person or gatekeeper. We had that same challenge in our sales enablement process: using a variety of tools that were fragmented and disparate. As a result, we had no clue if our team members were accessing and using the right resources to get their jobs done. In product marketing, we have to be organized, and Projectplace has helped us qualify our sales team with materials and market research to give them an edge over the competition. Projectplace’s Documents feature is our go-to place to organize and keep our internal collateral. Even though my title is “solutions marketing specialist,” I act as our department’s project manager – I often coordinate content updates for sales and marketing materials. I’ll collaborate with a team of subject matter experts using my favorite feature – documents with version management. Product Marketing | 5 Ways to Transform Project Collaboration in Marketing | 7 Before, it was difficult to keep track of who had the latest edits on documents that Another favorite Projectplace feature of mine is the ability to work on tasks, see we were working on. I’d send a version out for review, it would go back and forth in a project status, and collaborate on multiple devices. Our field team can be on the long trail of emails, and sometimes those edits would get lost and forgotten among road visiting customers, and if they need a particular file, they can quickly pull it up the shuffle. Now I can request a subject matter expert to review and edit a draft, I’ll and reference it on the fly within the Projectplace mobile app. The app interface is set a deadline, and Projectplace puts it through a process flow, notifying the editor so user-friendly, too. Imagine the impact that makes! to get it done. I don’t have to hover over anyone that I’ve assigned tasks to – all edit requests are done in one place, finalized, and ready to share. All is good with the At the end of the day, I really enjoy seeing it all come together when the field world of collaboration! team posts in Projectplace’s Conversations about their wins in real-time, and we can celebrate together as a global company.