Your marketing services group is getting fat.
Your movements are slower and come with a twinge of discomfort that wasn’t there before. Stuff that used to fit is now snug, or even un-buttonable. And then there’s that unignorable heavy feeling that you are somehow weaker than you used to be.
No, I’m not talking about that layer of insulation you built up over the holidays. I’m referring to the poor practices that are weighing down your team’s effectiveness.
In its race to keep up with your organization’s ever-growing demands, your marketing services group has let bad habits, snap decisions, and false assumptions transform its once-nimble operations into a slow-moving behemoth that can’t seem to complete a single project on time. If you don’t find a way to shed the excess pounds, your morale, reputation, and results will wither and die.
Luckily, the culprits of this weight gain are easier to identify than you might think. Then it’s up to you to send those extra pounds packing:
1. Meeting fat pants
Having a bunch of people in a room for a chat feels like something is getting done. Unfortunately, like that pair of oversized sweatpants you keep in your drawer, meetings are giving you a false sense of security. According to studies, workers spend between 25 and 80 percent of their time in meetings. When you add up total hours spent in meetings every year, costs can surpass $100 million for mid-sized tech firms. In short, meetings are pretty expensive for a time when people aren’t actually accomplishing their work.
How to drop the weight: Take a minute to figure out what you’re trying to accomplish with your meeting. If you just need to convey information, an email or other medium might work just as well. If a decision needs to be made, consider a quick informal talk in a cubicle or at the watercooler with only those people who will have a stake in the decision. If the meetings are for extra status updates, keep updates in a work management tool instead. Whenever possible, cut out meetings and free your team to get back to their real jobs.
2. Approval glut
Multiple layers of approval are often stakeholders’ way of hedging their bets. The more people you have approving your creative, the better it must be, right? Not really. While two approvers can help to ensure quality, requiring three, four, or more approvals (“approval by committee”) has a tendency to prevent marketing services groups from getting their creative out to the market on time. And in your competitive market, crossing the finishing line weeks or months after your competitors can be fatal.
How to drop the weight: You need to balance the need for control that approvals satisfy and the need for speed and trust. Ask yourself why each approver has been included in the process. If the reason is simply political, you might need to convince the organization that said approver might need to step out of the process. Any approver left in the process should be invested in it enough to give feedback in a timely manner, with plenty of time for each project to meet its respective deadline.
3. Tool tummy ache
Your team needs an easier way to track projects, so you go out and buy some marketing project management software. To communicate faster, you purchase IM software. You buy a few more tools to fill in the gaps. But then you need to make sense of all the data and communication flying around between these tools, so you spend 25 percent of your time putting together Excel spreadsheets. At the end of all this hubbub, you’re still missing basic pieces of information, like project completion dates and resource workloads. If you don’t change something, you’re going to be so weighed down gathering data that you don’t have time to do your actual work.
How to drop the weight: Minimize the number of tools you use, thus minimizing the hiding places for your team’s work info. With a little research, you can find one or two work tools that cover most or all of your project lifecycle from request to final evaluation.
4. Revision reflux
Similar to approvals, feedback has its place. But this practice has the tendency to turn into a morass of multiple versions and confusion about which version is most current. No one is accountable for feedback, which is usually spread out in various document versions, emails, and sticky notes. Your designers and copywriters end up spending more time trying to figure out what’s going on than they spend on their creative tasks. This means work gets done slower and your team gets unnecessarily frustrated. Projects that could’ve been done in days stretch out over weeks and months and endless rounds of revisions.
How to drop the weight: With as small a number of reviewers as possible, collect all feedback through a single channel. Designate one person to create revised versions of the creative. Finally, nail down and stand by a drop-dead cutoff date for all feedback and revisions.
5. Spreadsheet saddlebags
Creatives—those talented designers, copywriters, videographers, and photographers who you wooed to your team for their stunning creative work—don’t do well in Excel. Every minute you force your creatives to muddle through spreadsheets is a minute that they are being misused. It’s also a minute that they’re wondering if they might be happier at another workplace.
How to drop the weight: Make reporting for your creatives as unintrusive as possible. If at all possible, keep them out of spreadsheets altogether. Often, teams will hire traffic managers to do this, but a more sustainable strategy is to find automated tools that let creatives report their progress quickly on the fly and then fire their updates out to stakeholders. This way, creatives are spending as much time as possible being creative, while still keeping the rest of the team informed on their progress.
6. Process paunch
Marketing services groups are eager to please. In this rush, however, they tend to let their processes get flabby. And this opens up all sorts of cans of worms that make their lives miserable. Designers start jobs without complete requirements, only to find out two days into it that the client actually wanted something totally different. Priorities are made based on politics, fear, or the squeakiest wheel, rather than value or strategy. Tracking workloads is nearly impossible, so managers continue heaping work on their inundated team members, leaving 66 percent of your resources saying they don’t have enough time to get all of their work done, begging for mercy.
How to drop the weight: Set up streamlined processes that control your request inflows and give your team members the numbers to know when they’re swamped. Single solutions that capture all work tracking, updates, and workload data are highly recommended. Initially, your team might resist your process, especially your creatives, but hold on long enough for them to feel the weight on their shoulders lift and they’ll come around.
Now that you’ve identified the usual suspects for your marketing service group’s slothful state, you’re equipped to them back on the straight and narrow. Ignore this advice and you might not like what you see on the proverbial bathroom scale a few months down the road.
via Business 2 Community http://www.business2community.com/marketing/6-problem-areas-marketing-team-drop-pounds-0703982?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=6-problem-areas-marketing-team-drop-pounds
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