Getting enough sleep, drinking enough water, exercising, developing a skin care routine, eating vegetables – these are daily habits that make people healthier and happier. And as a society, we celebrate them. We see individuals who maintain these routines as inspiring, even glamorous – not because the actions themselves are glamorous, but because the result is impressive.
If we can apply this logic to our personal lives, why not apply it to our professional lives as well? For every team that wins a game, every company that goes public, every company that announces a new technology, there’s a process that got them there. Process is the middle between an idea and a performance. Its components are often overlooked: meetings, timeline shifts, presentations, budget changes, and staffing adjustments. They are all important.
To be successful, creating and maintaining competitive processes is a business imperative, both at an individual and enterprise level. Uber, the Special Olympics and Under Armor all used collaborative work management (CWM) software to perfect these workflows and achieve goals.
Eliminate unnecessary delays: Uber
Few companies are more synonymous with disruption than Uber, the cab driver that has evolved over the past decade into an hourly delivery system for medicines, groceries and meals. As it grew, Uber’s performance marketing struggled with unexpected delays and miscommunication that frustrated team members and prevented scaling. Processes were slow and manual, relying on email and spreadsheets to piece together fragmented communications and data images.
“Each team essentially managed planning, execution and reporting using their own processes and tools,” said Bhavik Joshi, Uber’s director of program management, performance marketing. “This resulted in implementation delays, communication issues, inaccuracies, stress and inefficiencies across the board. I could see this was not the way we could scale.”
Realizing the need to consolidate and automate workflows, Uber turned to a CWM platform to reinvent and amplify its legacy processes. The technology provided automation capabilities that saved time by eliminating unnecessary work and prioritizing tasks. It also included templates that allowed the performance marketing team to create automated campaign overviews and inform the right stakeholders at the right time, populating planning sheets and dashboards with relevant data.
The results were mesmerizing: a 45% reduction in time to create a global customer lifecycle, productivity doubled, and a 199% reduction in time to roadmap visualization. Bhavik celebrates the importance of good process and that his team is now “helping different teams across our organization simplify, standardize and eliminate unnecessary processes.”
Work together to achieve goals: Special Olympics
Special Olympics International (SOI) is more than providing opportunities to athletes with intellectual and physical disabilities. The organization is central to its community and provides leadership training and health initiatives opportunities.
But SOI struggled to coordinate its global teams, sometimes leading to limited visibility on projects, duplication of effort, and insights and solutions that may not be shared. The organization needed to make work more efficient at every opportunity, give its employees the freedom to think creatively and focus on strategic work by using transparent collaboration programs and tools to eliminate duplication of processes and effort.
SOI implemented a CWM that provides clear collaboration between teams, eliminates silos, and quickly spreads ideas and processes with intuitive, real-time dashboards, rather than bottling knowledge into practices that innovate it. In one case, three dispersed teams used the CWM to share tips and solutions for a single project, saving each team more than 45 staff hours per month.
Managing content with a purpose: Under Armour
Despite its image of offering the latest and most immersive digital fitness experiences, Under Armor’s Connected Fitness communications team got lost in the digital weeds, disconnected from the resources it needed to get its product to market. To access a product image, the team can spend hours sifting through isolated sources and broken lines of communication.
When it came time to launch a new offering, HealthBox, the team implemented a CWM to replace the traditional media kit with a real-time digital home where resources were always accessible to designers, marketers, and publicists. By taking on the CWM, HealthBox received more than 20 awards at that year’s Consumer Electronics Show and was able to share its assets with 35 media sources to generate 1.5 billion on-brand impressions.
Greatness starts with a process
Impressive performance is the result of refined processes and some of the biggest brands in the world use CWM software to make that possible.
Whether your organization wants to automate its workflows, scale its collaboration, manage its content, or all of the above, choosing the right CWM can help you align your mission, serve and grow your customers, and lead in your industry.
Discover how Smartsheet can strengthen your processes and help your organization maximize its potential.
This post The competitive advantage in better collaboration processes was original published at “https://hbr.org/sponsored/2022/03/the-competitive-edge-in-better-collaborative-processes”