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How to unite roles and teams and scale your content operations

Ali Orlando Wert has led multiple content teams at high-growth, acquisition-driven companies. Although these teams are often cobbled together from multiple acquired companies, they must function as one.

Reaching that point quickly could expose flaws in the process, Ali said. Balls will fall and things will fall through the cracks. Start blaming each other. People will say “This is not my job”. Teams lose flexibility and are inundated with last-minute requests.

It felt like the marketing room was on fire.

To put out a fire, you need to create a different kind of spark, and Ali shares her experience of doing just that content marketing world. In her talk, “Building Workflows: How to Build Critical Content Operations to Scale Your Strategy,” she introduces swimlanes, silos, and scalability.

Swim in your own lane: define roles and responsibilities

When roles are unclear, you’ll often hear one of the following statements:

  • “Please do your job.”
  • “Please stop doing my job.”

Ali said both reactions stemmed from a lack of understanding Team roles and responsibilities. The solution involves two steps. First, gain organizational buy-in of roles and responsibilities. Second, document them against projects and processes.

RACI model

Although the process only requires two steps, you must invest the time to perform them. The solution recommended by Ali is the RACI (pronounced “racy”) model.

The RACI model contains four elements: Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed.

The RACI model consists of four elements:

  • Responsible person – the person who directly performs and completes the task
  • Responsible person – the person who has ultimate authority over the tasks being performed
  • consultee – a person who must be consulted during the performance of a task
  • Informed – People who are not directly involved in the task but need to know the progress

Ali suggests several ways to integrate an organization’s RACI model:

  • face-to-face seminar
  • virtual whiteboard
  • Collaboration documents (e.g. Google Docs, concept)

Here is the RACI model in graphical form:

RACI model in graphical form.

The top row includes column labels for project deliverables, product managers, strategists, and designers.

The left column lists project deliverables (design sitemap, design wireframes, create fashion guideand code templates). Under each role, R, A, C, or I (responsible, accountable, consult, or inform) determines the person’s responsibilities within the program.

Team roles and responsibilities

Although RACI is useful for documenting roles processes and projectsAli also recommends defining individual roles and responsibilities at a broad level.

“If your company or team is growing very quickly through acquisitions, it’s surprising how unclear people can be about their own work and what other people are doing,” she says.

Ali recommends gathering the team, including marketing leaders, to discuss roles and responsibilities. These important discussions can:

  • Surface areas of disagreement.
  • Found a gap without an owner.
  • Provide visibility into each team’s work.
  • Align priorities across teams.

Breaking down silos: working together to achieve common goals

How do you know if your organization is experiencing a silo problem? See if anything on Ali’s list is true:

  • Departments are at odds with each other.
  • There is too much duplication of work.
  • Tasks are often overlooked.
  • Obtaining important information is often difficult.
  • Teams seem to be working for different purposes.

Once you identify the silos that exist, follow Ali’s advice to resolve them.

Content mission statement

A Content mission statement This brings clarity to all silos, which is especially important after multiple acquisitions. It should contain the following elements:

  • audience —Who are you aiming to help?
  • what do you offer — The type of information you provide
  • result or benefit — What your audience can do as a result of your content

“As a team, we work through a content mission statement and alignment with the audience we are trying to serve, What kind of content do we want to provide? For them, and what the outcome is that we want,” Ali said.

In addition to the written mission statement, Alibaba also proposed cooperation answer these questions:

  • Who are you targeting?
  • What does success look like?
  • What strategies can help you achieve this goal?
  • How does this align with marketing goals?
  • How will you measure success?
  • How will you report progress?
  • What do you think you can achieve?
  • How much budget do you need?

craft workshop

At Appfire, where Ali currently works, several people from different marketing teams met for a marketing campaign process workshop. Participants are practitioners who care about optimizing processes and breaking down silos.

The seminar is divided into three stages:

  • preliminary work: Gather challenges faced by affected teams
  • Workflow mapping: Use the RACI model to detail each step of the activity process
  • Activity introduction: Create a document containing all relevant details for performing activities

After the workshop, the team transformed event briefings and workflows into templates in project and document management systems.

Results and templates

The team’s efforts to break down silos bore immediate results. “We have developed all the workflows. We have established a new deliverable template in the project management system. We have made some decisions to change the system,” Ali said.

“We meet for an hour a week and we just keep doing little things. So we don’t have to invest a lot of resources.

Extension: Building sustainable operations

You’ve defined roles and responsibilities, published a content mission statement, and addressed silos, but you’re still not done. You should now address team structure issues, consider forming a content committee, and address capacity planning issues to support scaling operations.

Team structure

Ali said establishing the right team structure is key to scaling content operations.

When building a content team of any size, Ali says she has found the following to be effective:

  • Hire content experts for strategy and content creation
  • Align content experts with product or solution areas
  • Pair content experts with product marketing partners
  • Gain insights into team members’ strengths and areas of interest

In larger teams, Alibaba has also achieved success through the following methods:

  • Distinguish between editorial managers and policy managers
  • Have a dedicated operations department to manage projects and resources
  • Rely on freelance workers and agencies to supplement internal resources
  • Create dedicated team leaders for different regions

content committee

At one company, Alibaba established a content committee with the help of The Content Advisory, the consulting arm of CMI. The committee brings together cross-functional team members responsible for content from different parts of the organization.

Board members meet to agree on a common philosophy of content, standards, and share their experiences, insights, and best practices.

Based on her experience managing content committees, Ali offers the following advice:

capacity planning

If you don’t know how much work your team can perform, when to hire more resources, and when to say no, you’ll benefit from capacity planning.

Ali recommends first benchmarking the time a task takes. Ask your team to use a free app or browser plug-in for a few months to log their tasks and project time. Now you have actual data to plan accordingly.

With this real-world data, you can set expectations for team and individual workloads. Assign tasks based on individual abilities. Then, construct the case additional resources if needed.

Implement your strategy

I like this quote from Ali: “Implementing strategies yes part of the strategy.

She quotes Simon Sinek: “Passion alone will not solve a problem. In order for passion to survive, it needs structure. Knowing only the ‘why’ without the ‘how’, success is possible Sex is minimal.

In other words, content leaders should increase the importance of translating strategies into daily practice for their teams. Optimizing content operations can increase the value content marketing brings to the enterprise.

As Ali says, “We all want to succeed. One way we can make ourselves more indispensable is by adding content operations to our toolkit.

All tools mentioned in this article are recommended by the author. If you would like to recommend a tool, please share this article on social media and leave a comment.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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