Working within and with a marketing team typically means working with always changing stakeholders (every project is different), a lot of young and eager people, a lot of overloaded decision makers, continuously changing market demands,… All the things that make business life lively. You have to love it, but this also means that quite some time is spend on aligning people, on planning, follow up, sharing information, status meetings,… This all seems like typical project management stuff and there is quite some research on that: what works and what doesn’t. However, in a typical project resources are committed to one scope, where’s in business reality today, you tend to be more in a web of different ‘projects’. Question there is: How to bring in the knowledge from project management without bringing in the heavy methodology and tools that might work in a large project setting, but nog in various day to day interactions?
Doing some investigations on how multidisciplinary teams can work more efficient together when not being in one great project, I learned some things.

• things need to be able to shift/transfer quickly trough the organisation without loosing it’s point of origin
• forget about one solution for the whole company if you are more than 100 people
• extreme choice (as in: whatever solution you choose, push it hard and force yourself to put as much in it as possibel) has some advantages (don’t use multiple ways of communication).
• one exception: face 2 face can (and should) always complement the communication method/tool you use.
• as always, people and their belief in the process & the use of the tools define the outcome.

I am now experimenting a lot with Trello combined with some sort of weekly (and in some periods daily) kind of stand-up meeting to get all our campaigns, strategic work, projects,… done.
What works well for you and your team?