Hello, happy people! Welcome to today’s article. We’ll be discussing processes and how you might look at them to figure out a better and faster way to get your team’s daily tasks organized. There won’t be a ton of gabbing up here, so grab a cozy blanket, and get to scrolling!
It’s highly likely you have a rather massive number of tasks to assign to your team members over the course of a week or month, and it’s also probable you need one person to complete an item before someone else can complete another item.
This is a recipe for a headache if there isn’t a way for everyone to see what everyone else has done and know what still needs to be completed. It also has the potential to generate hundreds of confusing emails, and nobody has time for that.
So, let’s look at a couple of potential test cases and go through how you might align it so everyone can do their part without running around like a crazy person or coming up against a deadline there’s suddenly no way they can hit. Or worse, a deadline no one saw the potential failure in. If you can’t see it coming, you can’t stop it. Since we’re a marketing department, all test cases will be relevant to that topic. Thanks for understanding.
TEST CASE 1 – Social Media Postings – Jobs
Team members needed: 3
- Graphics Creator
- Content Writer/Proofreader
- Scheduling Person
Needs:
- Graphics with verbiage and attractive visuals to attract potential candidates.
- Content written for sharing and proofreading of verbiage on graphics to assure alignment.
- Posts scheduled for social media platforms where the graphics and content align.
As you can clearly see, the graphics will need to be created first, and they’ll need to have a nomenclature that’s easy to follow when the content writer is indicating which image goes with which text and which edits need to be done on the visual verbiage. To accomplish this, you’ll need to set it up so the graphics are created, then they pass to the writer and proofreader, and then they pass to the scheduler.
To streamline this process:
- Decide upon a date when things will be started each month and have everyone involved add it to their calendars.
- Create a new shared folder each month for everyone involved to use.
- Clearly identify to the graphics creator that each graphic should have a unique file name and what the due date is.
- Clearly state to the writer/proofreader that a document within the folder should be created, each image file name added, and the text to accompany the graphic should be easy to find and associate. Also let them know the due date—it should fall after the image-creation date.
- Graphics creator should go in and edit anything that needs to be edited within a day or two.
- Once graphics and text are complete, the scheduling person should know when to go in and expect to find material for shares.
- Graphics are uploaded to aggregate, text is copied and pasted, and shares are scheduled.
- Repeat.
It becomes easier when people are aware of what they need to do and when they need to do it by. To offset any potential issues like one person or another being out of the office, either set it up so people can work well ahead, or have more than one person who knows how to do something. You should never have one person doing everything because two sets of eyes are always better than one.
TEST CASE 2 – Blog Posts
Team members needed: 4 to 10
- Content Writers
- Proofreader/Editor/Share Copy Creator
- Publisher
- SEO Expert
- Graphics Creator
- Scheduling Person
Needs:
- Ideas for articles.
- Articles written within said ideas.
- Keywords for those articles.
- Eye-catching graphics.
- Articles edited for clarity and text created for sharing on social media.
- Publishing of said articles and implementation of the SEO on the posts.
- Posts scheduled to share on social media.
To streamline this process:
- Examine what your blog is lacking that fits within your company’s scope of work.
- Brainstorm topics and have all peripherals (keywords, hashtags, SEO, etc.) ready to go.
- Set up a large document outlining who’s responsible for what and when it’s due. This document should also allow for updates as often as needed so folks know when things are complete.
- Create shared folders everyone can access so they know exactly where to go to find what they need to do their jobs.
- Work backward from publishing to creation, noting where there might be a hole that needs to be filled.
- Be sure and plan for unexpected circumstances and have extra articles available to fill any holes due to illness or sudden changes in schedules/life.
Our blog tends to have articles written several weeks in advance, and everything goes up when it’s supposed to. We’ve fallen into a rhythm with it, and it only took us a few months to get to this place where we don’t really have to think about what it is we need to do. It’s there, we know we need to do it, and it gets done. In order to achieve this level of efficiency, we had to figure out what we needed to do to think ahead, and our content writers had to learn to work in tandem with one another. What you need to consider is potential pitfalls and how to avoid them. We have a “Posts for Missing Days” folder that contains articles we can fall back on if something happens to be missing. This has come in handy several times.
If we can do it, you can do it.
All processes are the same. You need to consider what it is you need to accomplish, who can perform certain tasks, and how to make it easy to know what needs to be done before it’s due. If you write it out like the above, you’ll never make another misstep. Yeah, there will be follow up and stumbles along the way, but after a while, it all flows into a smooth cadence, and everyone finds a way to fall in step.
Thanks so much for reading! We hope you found this article useful, and we also hope you stick around to read some of our other stuff. CloudQ strives to bring you useful, interesting content that isn’t all around one topic so you can have a little variety in your visual consumption. Until next time!
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