Meet Anna.
Anna is a business consultant who manages a team of 9 people at her marketing agency. She helps her clients develop strong marketing strategies, from digital marketing all the way to events and promotions. She aims to provide a unique service that will help her clients by delivering results they’ve struggled to achieve otherwise. Creativity and strategy are very important for them.
Her team includes graphic and UX designers, marketing managers, and software developers. Each of the different skill sets is typically needed to support each client, which requires a lot of coordination amongst her team, especially as they grow and push the limits of the capabilities of their team.
Anna migrated her team onto the platform- novatools.org a few months ago to provide a workspace to build ideas, support their meetings and work with clients, create clear processes, and most importantly to manage their collaborative workflows. In the past, they’ve used google drive, email, and online whiteboards during meetings, but Novatools has helped create clear processes and provide an easy way to plan, work and manage their projects, consolidating their team’s workflows into one place. Since then, they’ve managed and developed all of their projects using Nova, and haven’t looked back!
Anna has built out an onboarding process for new clients where her team can simultaneously work together to gather and process information from clients in real-time. Using that as a starting point, they’ve collected and ordered all of the tasks and work sessions into a project, which they’ve been able to save as a template, and use for all new clients! It saved them quite a bit of time since they no longer have to build out their workflows for every project and plan everything from scratch. Now they have all of their #designthinking and #strategy tools on templates using some default tools as well as their own custom tools, and work completed in each session informs work to be completed in the next session. Anna’s team has really appreciated having an interactive online workspace and found it to be a big improvement from the strategies they used previously, it has enabled her team to really own the projects.
Novatools has really helped them collaborate and helped to optimize their processes — spending less time organizing and planning, and more time helping their clients.
Since she gained access to it, Anna’s favorite feature on the platform is the dependencies feature. In the project template that she made for her first client on Nova, she was able to link each task and work session together from the start of the project to the end, quote the necessary amount of time for each step to be completed, and add in dependencies. Now if she changes the deadline on an early step in the process, it will update start dates and deadlines for the entire remainder of the project.
And the icing on the cake? The dependencies are retained in project templates, which means she can create them once and never look back.
For their most recent new client where they needed to develop a marketing strategy for the client’s new energy drink, the process was quite simple. They opened a new project using our marketing strategy template and filled out their blank onboarding session template as the opening step of the project. Their client team was then invited onto Novatools as guests for a collaborative brand identity brainstorm, where they used the marketing card deck to understand some brand strategies that could align with the client. Based on the information generated in that session, Anna’s team set the expected deadline for initial drafts from their brand strategist, which automatically updated the expected start dates and deadlines for every other step in the project, from designers to developers. This enabled the entire team to plan for the project, saving Anna time that she’d normally spend updating everyone’s tasks and trying to coordinate amongst 9 people. It has provided Anna’s team members with the independence to work on their own tasks and deadlines with complete awareness of where they fit in the project, how their contribution affects others and a thorough understanding of the project roadmap.
Overall, Novatools has provided Anna with confidence that her clients will receive effective marketing strategies, after her team follows their documented best practices on the platform, and can collaborate efficiently every time.
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Created by: @NathanBattersby
