A CMO’s Guide To Mastering Marketing Workflow Management (Part 2 of a 3-Part Series)
Guy Nadivi, PMP
Senior Marketing Executive, Driving Excellence Through Best Practices, Great Storytelling, & Effective Demand Generation
In Part I of this series, I advocated for a deliverable-centric approach to managing Marketing’s production processes.? In Part II, I’ll explain how to begin implementing this paradigm.
Our goal at this stage is to populate our project management tool with marketing processes and their constituent tasks.? The purpose of doing this is so that the PM tool can be used to help us govern and report on the status of all process activities related to all content deliverables in production for all stakeholders.
DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU GOT (TILL IT’S INVENTORIED)
As a first step, we have to inventory the processes associated with every deliverable Marketing creates.? What qualifies as a deliverable?? Ultimately, that’s up to you. Generally though it includes any physical or digital object Marketing produces for a stakeholder.??
Here’s an example list of deliverables a typical marketing department might produce:
Every one of these deliverables usually has a unique production process, but one or more items may share some redundant production steps between them.? For instance, there’s often a lot of overlap between the production processes for Ebooks & White Papers.
Our next step is to iterate through each one of these deliverables, and document their production process with something called a RACI Matrix.
RACI MATRIX: RED PILL OR BLUE PILL?
No, not that kind of matrix (sorry, Neo).??
A RACI matrix is a popular project management tool which Wikipedia defines as “...a model that describes the participation by various roles in completing tasks or deliverables for a project or business process.”? That’s a bit of a mouthful, so I’ll try rephrasing what that boils down to.
We use a RACI matrix to break down each step of a process, as well as map out each step’s stakeholders.? We typically do this in a spreadsheet, one process step per line.
The acronym RACI represents the different roles stakeholders fulfill for any given step.? RACI stands for:
Responsible: The participant(s) who do the actual work of a given process step. There must be at least one participant designated as Responsible for each process step.? However, any process step can have more than one Responsible participant.
Accountable: Each process step sequenced in a RACI matrix must have one (and ONLY one) participant designated as Accountable.? This is where the buck stops.? Whoever is Accountable for a given process step is ultimately the one on the hook for getting it completed correctly and delivered on time.? Participants designated as Responsible often must answer to the one designated as Accountable.
Consulted: Before completing a given process step, is there someone whose advice would be solicited?? Perhaps a subject matter expert?? If so, then that participant would be designated as Consulted.
Informed: These are the FYI participants.? Stakeholders who need a status update about the progress of a given process step are designated as Informed. The original requestor might be one example.
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AN EXAMPLE RACI MATRIX
The RACI Matrix format I like to use includes the following spreadsheet columns:
In the first article of this series, I outlined one possible workflow sequence related to the marketing process for producing a case study.? Let’s use that outline as the basis for a RACI Matrix documenting the steps & stakeholders for creating a case study deliverable.
Our stakeholders in producing a case study include:
Our Case Study RACI Matrix juxtaposes the process steps with stakeholders to clearly display who is responsible, accountable, consulted, and/or informed for each step.
Note the Duration (days) column includes decimal values.? That reflects the fact that some of the process steps can be done very quickly.? For the purposes of this example, 0.125 represents 1 hour (1 hour = 12.5% of an 8-hour day).
The RACI Matrix for the Case Study production process now becomes the basis for a template we’ll create in our project management tool.? The template will include all these steps, durations, and stakeholders mapped into the PM tool.? Going forward, every time a new case study production process is kicked off, the PM tool will instantiate it from this template.
DON’T JUST ANALYZE - MODERNIZE
There’s a saying out there that “The biggest room in the world is the room for improvement.”? Documenting your deliverable’s process isn’t just an exercise in standardizing its sequence of steps.? It’s also an opportunity for process improvement by adding, changing, or deleting steps that enforce best practices, and can take advantage of the PM tool’s workflow capabilities.
One example might be that instead of receiving requests informally via email, Slack, or during ZOOM calls, all requests to Marketing must now be formally submitted via online form.? The form itself can, at the time of submission, capture ALL the information that Marketing needs to process the request, mitigating the need for back-and-forth clarifications.
This is a good opportunity to mention something which shouldn’t be overlooked. Streamlining & modernizing these processes is a transformation that can be jarring for some Marketing staff, and in extreme cases, might even trigger resistance.? The key then to gaining buy-in and acceptance is to make sure that the staff members most closely involved with a given process are just as involved in documenting the RACI Matrix for it.? Furthermore, you should encourage their input on suggestions for improvement, and incorporate the ones which make the most sense.? As any good Marketing executive knows, instilling a sense of personal ownership should help inspire a personal desire to see this transformation succeed.
In the next (and final) article of this series, I’ll do a high-level walk-through of what a deliverable-centric architecture looks like for a project management tool focused on marketing processes.? Until then, I’d be curious to hear from you about any of the challenges you’ve experienced in standardizing processes for your marketing department’s deliverables production.