Ali Orlando Wert has led multiple content teams at high-growth companies driven by acquisitions. Although these teams often consist of multiple acquired companies, they must operate as a unit.
Reaching this point quickly can reveal process errors, says Ali. Balls fall and things fall through the cracks. The finger pointing begins. People make statements like, “That’s not my job.” Teams lose flexibility and are overwhelmed with last-minute requests.
It can feel like the marketing house is on fire.
To extinguish this fire, another spark must be created, and Ali shared her experience in doing so Content marketing world. In her presentation, “Making Work Flow: How to Build Critical Content Operations to Scale Your Strategy,” she discusses swimlanes, silos, and scalability.
Go your own way: define roles and responsibilities
When roles are unclear, you often hear one of these statements:
- “Please just do your job.”
- “Please stop doing my job.”
Ali says both reactions stem from a lack of understanding of the team’s roles and responsibilities. The solution involves two steps. First, get organizational buy-in on roles and responsibilities. Second, document them using projects and processes.
RACI model
Although the process only requires two steps, you need to invest time in completing them. Ali’s recommended solution is the RACI (pronounced “racy”) model.
The RACI model includes four elements:
- Responsible – the person who directly works on and completes the task
- Responsible – the person who has final authority over the completed task
- Consulted – the people who need to be consulted during the execution of the task
- Informed – the people who are not directly involved in the task but need to stay informed about the progress
Ali suggests a few ways to put together your organization’s RACI model:
- Personal workshops
- Virtual whiteboards
- Collaborative documentation (e.g. Google Docs, Performance)
This is what a RACI model might look like in diagram form:
The top row contains column labels for project deliverables, product managers, strategists, and designers.
The left column lists the project deliverables (designing the sitemap, designing the wireframes, creating the style guide and code templates). Under each role, an R, A, C, or I (responsible, accountable, consulted, or informed) indicates the person’s responsibility for that initiative.
Team roles and responsibilities
While RACI is useful for documenting roles in processes and projects, Ali also recommends defining individuals’ roles and responsibilities at a broad level.
“When you’re a company or a team that’s grown very quickly through acquisitions, it’s surprising how unclear people can be about their own job and other people’s jobs,” she says.
Ali recommends gathering teams (including marketing managers) to discuss roles and responsibilities. These important discussions can:
- Surface areas of disagreement.
- Uncover gaps without owners.
- Provide visibility into each team’s work.
- Align priorities across teams.
Break down silos: work together towards common goals
How do you know if your company is experiencing silo problems? See if anything on Ali’s list applies:
- The departments are hostile to each other.
- There are too many cases of duplicate work.
- Tasks regularly fall through the cracks.
- Accessing important information is often difficult.
- The teams seem to have opposing goals.
Once you’ve identified existing silo problems, follow Ali’s advice to solve them.
Content-related mission statement
A substantive mission statement can provide clarity across all silos, which is particularly important after multiple acquisitions. It should contain these elements:
- audience – who you want to help
- What you deliver – the type of information you provide
- result or benefit – what the audience can do based on your content
“As a team, we develop our content mission based on which audiences we want to serve, what type of content we deliver to them, and what results we want to achieve,” says Ali.
In addition to a documented mission statement, Ali recommends answering these questions together:
- Who are you targeting?
- What does success look like?
- What tactics will get you there?
- How does this fit into marketing goals?
- How do you measure success?
- How will you report progress?
- What goals do you think you can achieve?
- What budget do you need?
Process workshop
At Appfire, where Ali currently works, several people from different marketing groups meet for an in-person workshop on the marketing campaign process. The participants were practitioners who cared about optimizing processes and breaking down silos.
The workshop comprised three phases:
- Preparatory work: Collecting challenges from all affected teams
- Workflow mapping: Detailing the campaign process using the RACI model for each step
- Short description of the campaign: Creating a document with all relevant details to run a campaign
After the workshop, the team transferred the campaign briefings and workflows into templates in the project and document management systems.
Results and templates
The team’s efforts to break down silos showed immediate results. “We have all our workflows planned. We have created a brand new delivery template in our project management system. We have made some decisions to change the system,” says Ali.
“We meet for an hour a week and continue to work on small pieces. So it doesn’t have to be a huge use of resources.”
Scaling: Build sustainable operations
You’ve defined roles and responsibilities, published a content mission statement, and addressed the silos, but you’re not done yet. You should now look at team structure, consider a content board, and look at capacity planning to help scale your operations.
Team structure
Building the right team structure is key to scaling your content operations, says Ali.
When structuring content teams of all sizes, Ali says there are a few approaches that have proven effective:
- Hire content specialists to work on both strategy and content creation
- Aligning content specialists with product or solution areas
- Pairing content specialists with a product marketing partner
- Getting to know the strengths and areas of interest of individual team members
Ali also had success with these approaches in larger teams:
- Separation of editorial and strategy managers
- You have a dedicated operations manager who manages projects and resources
- Use freelancers and agencies to supplement internal resources
- Creating dedicated team leaders for different regions
Content Council
At one company, Ali built a content council with the help of CMI’s advisory division, The Content Advisory. The council brought together cross-functional team members responsible for content in different parts of the organization.
Council members met to agree on a common philosophy for content and standards and to share their experiences, insights and best practices.
Based on her experience leading a content council, Ali suggests the following:
- Select participants who are content advocates and influencers.
- Make sure leadership buys into the idea and there is a leadership champion.
- Create a council charter with clear goals, roles and responsibilities.
Capacity planning
If you’re struggling to know how much work your team can accomplish, when to hire additional resources, and when to say no, you’ll benefit from capacity planning.
Ali recommends starting by benchmarking how long tasks take. Ask your team to use a free app or browser plugin to track their tasks and project time for a few months. Now you have real data that you can plan accordingly.
With this real data, you can set expectations for team and individual workloads. Assign tasks to individuals based on their capacity. Then create arguments for additional resources if necessary.
Operationalize your strategy
I love this statement from Ali: “Operationalizing strategy Is Part of the strategy.”
She quoted a quote from Simon Sinek: “Passion alone is not enough. In order for passion to survive, it needs structure. A why without a how has little chance of success.”
In other words, content leaders should emphasize the importance of implementing strategy into the team’s daily practices. Optimizing content operations increases the value that content marketing brings to the company.
As Ali says, “We all want to be successful. And one way to make us even more indispensable is to add content operations to our toolkit.”
All tools mentioned in this article were suggested by the author. If you would like to suggest a tool, share the article on social media with a comment.
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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute