VISUALIZATION TOOL

CHALLENGE  To introduce myself I would like to explain how challenging my situation is. I am working as a Digital  Marketing Manager in an international Beauty Company. My career has always being linked to luxury  brands and this is a fact that perfectly describe how stable but slow my work is.

I started in my position 3 years ago, when in my team was just a 9-people team in charge of every brand  in my division. Nowadays we are more than 20 in our team and we’ve been developing very well in some  digital verticals such as media, CRM, and online retail.

As a Digital Marketing Manager I am in charge of developing Digital Marketing campaigns, but also to  ensure the correct brand deployment in every single digital aspect. This is something me and my  coworkers are no longer able to do since digital is now a reality and not a future idea.   For this reason my company has taken a serious plan to develop every employee digitally to empower  them to be able to play their job whether in offline and online.

As I am one of the oldest and more communicative workers in my division I have been assigned the rol of  “Digital Advocater” and I will be in charge of expanding my digital knowledge through my “offline  colleagues” and also to stablish new workflows to help the teams achieve their goals successfully.

SELECTION  The teams have always used visualization to depict concepts, as we are part of a big Marketing company,  but they have never faced the challenge to depict a “Workflow” or to visually try to communicate and  idea.

Videos, images and songs are part of their routine but they are unable to use them in their project  scoping. They find really hard to choose and image or an icon to represent an abstract concept or idea  (Ex. They have been searching for an icon to depict “stability” for more than 5 minutes).

INSIGHT & APPROACH  As a first step it was me who was in charge of explaining the process to the Brand Managers in every  single team to let them know the problem their teams are facing, how we should tackle it, and the results  to expect in a short-term and in a long-term period.

For this purpose I used a white board and some post-its to identify the structures of every team, the  people involved and the current organigrams for every process.   This is something very interesting to point, because not every issue is tackled the same way. Product  Manager just reviews some work with Brand Marketing Managers when developing some physical asset,  but a Brand Marketing Manager ask a Digital Marketing Manger for their review when coming to a digital  asset (Brand Marketing Manager is the N+1 of the Digital Marketing Manager).

Once the scope was clear the roll out was tackled directly with every team. The Digital Marketing  Manager, Brand Manager, Product Managers, the Interns, Trade Marketing Managers and the Retailing  Managers composed those teams.

To depict every workflow we used some A3 whitepapers stappled all over the room and every employee  had their own colour pencil and colour post it, so they could insert them in the workflow as they see  them currently.  After this exercise, we reviewed every single paper for every Workflow and we then had  a debate on how this workflow should work and modified it to the ideal one.

After having every “new stablished workflow” made in common by every team I reviewed it with all Brand  Managers so they could see how their teams already created valid workflows to follow that should lead  them to excellence in work whether in offline or online jobs.

With their expertise, we applied some strategic information to this workflows and organigrams such as  Career Paths to be taken into account, Visibility issues for every single employee so they have the  opportunity to shine, and set them as the new Digital Mantra to follow in ways of working.

This action has been taken just a month ago so the results are quite a few to say the new stablished  workflows are a success. But, so far, processes are no longer stopped by a single user in the team, there is  much more communication among them and they all know the status of a project, and everyone knows  their scope of work and the flexibility they must assume at their own risk.

My main satisfaction is to see everyone involved in the project, feeling proud of how they have taken part  of their new reality, moreover taken them into account. Without visualization this couldn’t have been  developed, we work with so many information, workflows are complex and there are lots of employees  so the managers couldn’t have been able to remember and gather all this information without images  and icons.

This is definitely something we will be working on from now and on, since new services and disciplines  will always rise and appear, and visualization will be there for us to depict our abstract ideas and  concepts.

