A workflow analysis should be an important part of every organization’s growth strategy. It involves regularly examining and analyzing current workflows to keep processes efficient and up to date.
A successful workflow analysis can help marketing teams save money and time by illustrating what areas they need to update and improve, especially internal practices. Let’s take a look at how you can perform a workflow analysis with your marketing team.
Track the Time of Your Team
The first step in conducting a successful workflow analysis with your marketing team is to track the time of all your team members.
There are plenty of time-tracking tools out there you can use. Two of the best are
Toggl and
Clockify. Install one of these tools across your team and monitor how each person is spending their time on both internal and client work for a specific period, such as one week or one month.
Tracking how each person spends his or her time can help with the next step: identifying areas for improvement.
Identify Areas for Improvement
Now that you know how everyone spends their time during the day, aggregate the data and look at the various areas that might need improvement within your team. Team members might not be wasting time per se, but they may be focusing their time on tasks that are not as important as tasks they should be completing. For example, they also might be over-servicing a certain client, which means you need to cut back on their work or reexamine the contract.
You could very well discover that there are two members of the marketing team completing the same tasks as well. When analyzing the team’s workflow you need to ask the following hard-hitting questions:
- What is the purpose of our team’s workflow?
- Who is served by each person’s workflow?
- Are errors being eliminated or created by our workflows?
- Is the overall workflow process delaying delivery of a service to a client?
Investigate Your Personal Workflow
The next step in the workflow analysis is to conduct a thorough investigation into your personal workflow. Even though you are the team leader, it does not mean your personal workflow is immune to problems.
Take a long, hard look at how you perform different processes throughout the day. Track your own time, identify areas of improvement, and include this data in any reports the next time your team meets. Your workflow is just as important as the other members of the team.
Seek Feedback of the Team
Your team needs to be involved in any workflow analysis you conduct. If everyone on the team is not included, then the analysis will not be as effective. By including everyone on the team, you can get their feedback on the process, understand what they think is working well, and evaluate which processes could use some updating to improve the flow of your projects.
Just keep in mind, feedback from the team should not be the only way you conduct a workflow analysis. The analysis needs to be combined with another method, such as time tracking, in order for the analysis to be effective.
Activate the Workflow Changes
Once the steps mentioned above have been taken, you can activate the proposed changes to your team’s workflow. All the stakeholders should be made aware of the changes, and be understanding if the changes will create any lag in completing projects until everyone is comfortable with the new process.
If training is necessary to implement these changes, make sure all members of your team take part. Training is important not only for new hires but also for the continued improvement of your current team. All changes to the workflow should be provided in writing or via a visual presentation if possible.
Benefits of a Workflow Analysis
Performing a workflow analysis helps your team determine if a specific business practice or process is working or not. Your team can then pinpoint areas of a process that are supporting your marketing firm’s growth so that you can replicate them with other workflows and projects.
Have you performed a workflow analysis with your marketing team yet? If not, consider doing so in order to improve the output of your team.
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