Getting enough sleep, drinking enough water, working out, developing a skin care routine, eating vegetables—these are everyday habits that make people healthier and happier. And as a society, we celebrate them. We see individuals who maintain these routines as inspirational, even glamorous—not because the actions themselves are glamorous, but because the result is impressive.
If we can apply this logic in our personal lives, why not apply it to our professional ones as well? For every team winning a game, every business going public, every company announcing a new technology, a process got them there. Process is the middle ground between an idea and an accomplishment. Its components are often overlooked: meetings, timeline shifts, presentations, budget changes, and staffing adjustments. They’re all important.
To be successful, creating and maintaining competitive processes are business imperatives, both at individual and enterprise levels. Uber, the Special Olympics, and Under Armour all turned to collaborative work management (CWM) software to perfect these workflows and achieve goals.
Eliminate Unnecessary Delays: Uber
Few companies are more synonymous with disruption than Uber, the ride-hailing juggernaut that’s expanded over the past decade into a next-hour delivery system for medicine, groceries, and meals. However, as it grew, Uber’s performance marketing struggled with unexpected delays and miscommunication that frustrated team members and prevented scaling. Processes were slow and manual, leaning on email and spreadsheets to piece together fragmented communications and data pictures.
“Each team was essentially managing the planning, execution, and reporting, using their own processes and tools,” said Bhavik Joshi, Uber’s director of program management, performance marketing. “This resulted in delays in execution, communication issues, things falling through the cracks, stress, and inefficiencies across the board. I could see that this was not the way we could scale.”
Recognizing a need to consolidate and automate workflows, Uber turned to a CWM platform to reimagine and empower its outdated processes. The technology provided automation capabilities that saved time by eliminating unnecessary work and prioritizing tasks. It also included templates that allowed the performance marketing team to build automated campaign briefs and notify the right stakeholders at the right time, populating planning sheets and dashboards with relevant data.
The results were glamorous: a 45% reduction in the time to create a global customer lifecycle, doubled productivity, and a 199% reduction in time to roadmap visualization. Bhavik celebrates the importance of a good process and that his team now “helps various teams within our org simplify, standardize, and eliminate unnecessary processes.”
Work Together to Achieve Goals: Special Olympics
There’s more to Special Olympics International (SOI) than providing opportunities for athletes with intellectual and physical disabilities. The organization is central to its community, providing leadership training opportunities and health initiatives.
But SOI struggled to coordinate its global teams, which sometimes meant limited visibility across projects, duplicated efforts, and insights and solutions that might go unshared. The organization needed to make work more efficient at every opportunity, freeing its employees to think creatively and focus on strategic work by using transparent collaboration programs and tools to eliminate duplicative processes and efforts.
SOI implemented a CWM that offers clear collaboration across teams, eliminating silos and allowing ideas and processes to spread quickly with intuitive, real-time dashboards, rather than bottling knowledge within practices that innovate it. In one case, three dispersed teams used the CWM to share tips and solutions for a single project, saving each team more than 45 staff hours a month.
Manage Content with a Purpose: Under Armour
Despite its image for offering the latest and most immersive digital fitness experiences, Under Armour’s Connected Fitness communications team got lost in the digital weeds, disconnected from the assets it needed to bring its product to market. To access a product image, the team might spend hours digging through siloed sources and broken communication lines.
When it came time to launch a new offering, HealthBox, the team implemented a CWM to replace its traditional media kit with a real-time digital home base where assets were always accessible to designers, marketers, and publicists. Adopting the CWM helped HealthBox receive more than 20 awards at that year’s Consumer Electronics Show and allowed the company to share its assets with 35 media sources to generate 1.5 billion on-brand impressions.
Greatness Starts with a Process
Impressive achievements are the result of refined processes, and some of the largest brands in the world are using CWM software to make that happen.
Whether your organization is looking to automate its workflows, scale its collaboration, manage its content, or all of the above, choosing the right CWM can help you align on your mission, serve your customers, and grow and lead in your sector.
Learn how Smartsheet can power your processes and help your organization maximize its potential.