How we keep innovation thriving in the hybrid era
We combine leading entertainment brands with a wide Dating & Video as well as Commerce & Ventures portfolio under one roof. Offering the latest in entertainment on any device, ProSiebenSat.1 is the company behind some of the most exciting TV broadcasts in German-speaking countries, using its TV reach and advertising power to build up consumer brands. Furthermore, ParshipMeet Group, a leading global player in the dating segment, is part of ProSiebenSat.1. Because of strict lockdowns and remote work guidelines throughout the pandemic, we had to find new ways to keep our 8,000 employees engaged. When transitioning to hybrid work began, teams were facing barriers to connection and collaboration. At first we relied heavily on PowerPoint and Excel and quickly realized the need for an alternative to physical whiteboards and sticky notes. This “analog style” of work driven by personal interaction had to be substituted for something new.
That’s why teams at ProSiebenSat.1 turned to Miro.
Though agile coaches and scrum masters were the first to adopt Miro, it quickly became a way for the ProSiebenSat.1 Tech Solutions team — as well as the company at large — to connect, collaborate, and get work done together. The ability to embed multimedia content into boards, create interactive experiences, and collaborate seamlessly on the go added up to a game-changer for teams at ProSiebenSat.1, now 2,500-users strong with over 2,000 boards created.
Here’s how Miro is helping us to take our ideas and collaboration to the next level.
Upgrading from PowerPoint to Miro
Even before the pandemic made collaboration more complicated, our teams had exhausted the limits of the capabilities offered by Microsoft tools such as MS Whiteboard and PowerPoint. While MS Whiteboard was fine for quick sketches, everyone agreed it was simply not intended for collaboration. The tools made sharing content difficult, and it wasn’t possible to seamlessly embed the multimedia assets that our teams were discussing every day.
“I love that you can grab all the relevant content and put it in your board so everyone can see. That helps us get feedback, and visual boards are so fun to work with.” — Christoph Kloth, Vice President Project & Portfolio Management at ProSiebenSat.1 Tech Solutions
Teams across our organization began using Miro for everything from process engineering to OKR planning, from agile ceremonies to TV production brainstorming. As a company rooted in creativity, it’s vital that teams can incorporate multimedia assets into the tools they use to run meetings. Some even switched from PowerPoint to Miro, where they’re able to seamlessly add photos, video clips, and other assets into the board to build context and communicate the big picture and to track timelines and meetings via the template library.
It’s great to see Miro being used as a presentation tool. I never would have imagined it as a substitute for PowerPoint. As Director of IT Demand and Portfolio Management, it’s my job to ensure the company is adopting tools that are aligned with their IT strategy. Miro is a critical tool that has already helped the company transition to hybrid work more smoothly.
Running cross-functional workshops at scale
As a digital and creative company, workshops are a huge part of how work gets done at ProSiebenSat.1. The flexibility of the whiteboard combined with the structure of templates makes it easy to spin up a quick brainstorming session, plan out strategies, map OKRs, and facilitate design thinking.
While it used to take Christoph’s team about two days to prepare a workshop, now it just takes half a day. Plus, everything is documented on the board, so the team can refer back to the outcomes and iterate on them for the future.
The best benefit coming out of the pandemic is that we are now giving everyone an immediate way to interact. Miro has diversified and extended how team members can contribute.
Here are some of the diverse workshops ProSiebenSat.1 is enhancing with Miro:
- Hybrid IT workshops: The ProSiebenSat.1 Tech Solutions team has a high-stakes job. We collaborate across the company to create software that can help the production teams find video content, create stories, and plan out what they aim to broadcast on TV channels. Now the team does many of those things in Miro: from designing IT processes, to agile ceremonies and running workshops. Crucially, Miro gives the Tech Solutions team a sustainable tech environment from which they can foster innovation by supporting the teams who are creating new business models. It also allows teams to come together, map out processes, ask questions about if and how they work, pinpoint hurdles or deviations, and determine whether the process should be automated. This includes solving all kinds of organizational problems from assigning new laptops to creating a knowledge base for document storage.
- OKR and strategy workshops: To execute OKR planning and map out strategy, the Tech Solutions team uses Miro to discuss and plan their goals for the future — everything from the next quarter to the next year — with 30 or more leaders at a time.
“We use Miro capabilities to show dependencies, make work visible, and discuss needs for alignment. I think Miro has improved alignment across our divisions and our company.” — Christoph Kloth, Vice President Project & Portfolio Management at ProSiebenSat.1 Tech Solutions
- Agile and moderation workshops for design thinking: Given the complexity of these workshops, running them remotely seemed untenable. Now, though, they can’t imagine going back to in-person only. Teams value how remote and hybrid workshops keep everyone engaged and allow the output to live on in a Miro board for future reference (with no additional work transcribing paper sticky notes). Using Miro’s intuitive tools, facilitators teach agile principles so teams can communicate more effectively, better engage in design thinking, and even facilitate workshops of their own. As a matter of fact, Miro has enabled ProSiebenSat.1 to promote design thinking throughout the company as a whole. The digital world is fast-paced, and to stay agile, Christoph and his teams are actively working to learn about different methods for using templates to quickly spin up a workshop and share outcomes.
“When you use physical materials you have to decide what to use and whether there’s enough space for your notes. In Miro, the next workshop is on the same page as the previous one. The work can just continue.” — Christoph Kloth, Vice President Project & Portfolio Management at ProSiebenSat.1 Tech Solutions
Building the foundation for the hybrid future of work
Some digital media companies are unsure which solutions they need to enable hybrid models. And it’s true that roles like camera work and production will always be on site. Nevertheless, digital infrastructure must facilitate remote collaboration.
We have creatives and designers who want to be together and some who are creative at home. Let’s take the best learnings from both scenarios and combine them somehow.
At ProSiebenSat.1 we were using Miro for hybrid workshops pre-pandemic. Now we plan to continue using the platform to support this new future of work, in which teammates continue to collaborate and create across locations. We’re especially excited to use Miro Smart Meetings, which leverage a central hub where meeting organizers design, manage, and run meetings through a guided experience. It has every essential tool for running a meeting, allowing participants to add interactive content or launch activities like voting and breakouts. For Christoph, it is important for teams to continue iterating on the hybrid experience in a way that just isn’t possible for on-site-only work. For example, to manage complex projects, he and his teams have started kicking things off with a short, in-person workshop to meet collaborators and get to know them, and then running the rest of the work remotely.
Scaling collaboration across the organization
For any enterprise software, security and scalability are paramount which is why we use the Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) integration to manage access. This makes it easy for the IT and security team to automatically provision users, and it removes risks around employees who leave the team, since the system automatically deactivates the account once someone departs.
ProSiebenSat.1 uses its own Service Platform to process requests. After a successful request, users are automatically transferred to the respective Active Directory and given access to Miro. To scale usage, we are enrolled in the Flexible Licensing Program. This allows us to add new users easily, in real-time, at no cost, helping to easily drive collaboration across teams and business units.
This article was first published here on January 31, 2022.
