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Ali Orlando Wert has led multiple content teams at high-growth companies that gained prominence through acquisitions. Although these teams are often composed of multiple acquired companies, they must operate as a unit.
Getting to that point too quickly can expose process flaws, Ali says. Mistakes get made and things fall through the cracks. Fingers get pointed. People make statements like, “That's not my job.” Teams lose their agility and get overwhelmed by last-minute requests.
It can feel like the marketing house is on fire.
To put out that fire, you need to create another spark, and Ali shared her experience doing just that at Content Marketing World. In her presentation, “Creating Workflow: How to Build Critical Content Operations to Scale Your Strategy,” she covers swimlanes, silos, and scalability.
Swim your lane: 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.”
According to Ali, both responses stem from a lack of understanding of the team's roles and responsibilities. The solution involves two steps. First, get organizational buy-in to the roles and responsibilities. Second, document them using projects and processes.
RACI model
Although the process only requires two steps, you will need to invest time in executing them. Ali's recommended solution is the RACI model (pronounced “racy”).
The RACI model includes four elements:
- Responsible – the person who directly works on the task and completes it
- Responsible: The person with final authority over the task to be completed.
- 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 be kept informed of progress
Ali suggests some ways to put together your company’s RACI model:
- Personal workshops
- Virtual whiteboards
- Collaborative documentation (e.g. Google Docs, Notion)
This is what a RACI model could look like in diagram form:
The top row contains column labels for project result, product manager, strategist and designer.
The left column lists the project deliverables (design sitemap, design wireframes, create style guide and code templates). Under each role, the person's responsibility in that initiative is indicated by an R, A, C or I (responsible, accountable, consulted or informed).
Team roles and responsibilities
While RACI is useful for documenting roles in processes and projects, Ali also recommends defining the roles and responsibilities of individuals at a broad level.
“When you’re a company or a team that has grown very quickly through an acquisition, it’s surprising how uncertain people can be about their own role and the roles of others,” she says.
Ali recommends bringing teams (including marketing leaders) together to discuss roles and responsibilities. These important discussions can:
- Superficial differences of opinion.
- Uncover gaps that have no owner.
- Provide insight into the work of each team.
- Align priorities across teams.
Breaking down silos: working together towards common goals
How can you tell if your company has silo issues? Check to see if anything on Ali's list applies:
- The departments are hostile towards each other.
- Too often, work is done twice.
- It happens regularly that tasks get lost.
- Accessing important information is often difficult.
- The teams seem to be working past each other.
Once you have identified the silo problems that exist, follow Ali's advice to break them down.
Content mission statement
A mission statement can bring clarity to all the silos, which is especially important after several takeovers. It should contain the following 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 work through our content mission statement and align on the audiences we want to reach, what type of content we want to provide them, and what the desired outcomes should be,” 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 you use to get there?
- How does this align with marketing objectives?
- How will you measure success?
- How will you report on 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 a one-on-one workshop on the process of running a marketing campaign. The participants were practitioners who were interested in optimizing processes and breaking down silos.
The workshop consisted of three phases:
- Before work: Collecting the challenges of all affected teams
- Workflow illustration: Detailing the campaign process using the RACI model for each step
- Campaign briefings: Create a document with all relevant details to run a campaign
After the workshop, the team converted 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 mapped all of our workflows. We created a brand new deliverable template in our project management system. We made some system change decisions,” says Ali.
“We meet for an hour a week and then work in small steps. So it doesn’t have to be a huge investment of resources.”
Scaling: Building sustainable operations
You've defined roles and responsibilities, published a mission statement for your content, and addressed the silos, but you're not done yet. You should now address team structure, consider a content council, and look at capacity planning to help scale your operations.
Team Structure
Building the right team structure is key to scaling your content efforts, says Ali.
When structuring content teams of any size, Ali says the following approaches have proven effective:
- Hiring content specialists to work on both strategy and content creation
- Assigning content specialists to product or solution areas
- Bringing together content specialists with a product marketing partner
- Address the strengths and interests of each team member
In larger teams, Ali also had success with these approaches:
- Separation of editorial and strategy managers
- A dedicated operations manager to manage projects and resource management
- Use of freelancers and agencies to supplement internal resources
- Create dedicated team leaders for different regions
Content Council
At one company, Ali created a Content Council with the help of CMI's consulting arm, 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 regarding content and standards and to share their experiences, insights and best practices.
Based on her experience leading a content council, Ali suggests:
- Select participants who are committed to the content and influential.
- Make sure that management is on board with the idea and that there is an advocate at the executive level.
- Create a council charter with clear goals, roles and responsibilities.
Capacity planning
If you're not sure how much work your team can handle, when to hire additional resources, and when to say no, you can benefit from capacity planning.
Ali recommends starting by comparing how long tasks take. Ask your team to use a free app or browser plugin to track task and project time for a few months. Now you have real data to plan accordingly.
With this real data, you can set expectations for team and individual workloads. Assign tasks to each employee based on their capacity. Then, determine how to deploy additional resources when needed.
Operationalize your strategy
I love this statement from Ali: “Operationalizing the strategy is part of the strategy.”
She quoted a quote from Simon Sinek: “Passion alone is not enough. 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 the strategy into the team's daily work. Optimizing content operations increases the value that content marketing brings to the company.
As Ali says, “We all want to be successful. And we can make ourselves even more indispensable by adding content operations to our toolbox.”
All tools mentioned in this article are suggested by the author. If you have a tool to suggest, share the article with a comment on social media.
Bring your team to Content Marketing World this October to get inspiration, ideas and actionable advice on how to develop and implement a strategy that will drive profits for your business. Group rates are available. Register today.
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Cover photo by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
