• Enterprise level companies are using project management tools (Jira/Confluence/Asana) to centralise documentation and processes and act as a Single Source of Truth.
• Enterprise level companies use a SSOT for repeatable employee Ops and process documentation.
• The main challenges faced by enterprises is connecting disparate product teams and alignment on goals. This leads to missed opportunities and deadlines, meeting cycles, and a lack of visibility.
• There is a shift from static documentation to ‘living’ documentation hosted in project management tools (Jira/Confluence/Asana).

Understanding the problem

Product and UX Design processes are often a pinball machine for global organisations, with the output often compared to a gumball machine’s prize; not quite what we wanted.

Given the rise of global teams and remote working, it is increasingly difficult to keep teams connected. Common business challenges experienced by SME/Enterprise organisations are centred around productivity; who cite that a lack of visibility of processes leads to constant meeting cycles across departments, and that an inability to track processes leads to missed deadlines.

It’s easy to identify misalignment and you may recognise these frustrations within your own company. Within this study we acknowledged multiple ways of disconnected working, ops and company structures that promote red tape, siloes and black boxes.

This was demonstrated within a case study by Figma, where their own designers are aware that they are part of at least two company cultures; their ‘design team’ (horizontal) and their ‘product team’ (vertical). Each comes with their own version of stand ups, off-sites and activities thrown into the mix.

For this study we collected individual experiences to measure the effectiveness of internal processes at an enterprise organisation. We used interviews to gather key insights about processes, to understand how teams work together, how they get their work done and how the team’s work creates impact and delivers value.

Research was intended to understand Legal or Regulatory risks, Business and Brand risks, Operational Risks and Organisational risks that threaten project feasibility, lower revenues, increased business costs and spur conflicts among team members. Interviews are a way of introducing the team and understanding stakeholders.

What good looks like

Building one central, unified platform where diverse departments can collaborate, track their performance and optimise their workflows is one of the main successes identified through competitor analysis. When done well, it became “the foundation of people’s workday”, removing digital friction by uniting third-party systems into one intuitive digital experience and improving the visibility of compliance, finance and process documentation.

For example, at Flo, the leading women’s health app, Legal and Compliance turns to Jira Service Management for guidance on what tasks need to be completed any time an employee joins the company, leaves, or assumes a new role.

One opportunity that a central platform addresses is the ability to improve the visibility of tasks and processes. Commonly, leadership wants high level visibility into project status, while teams on the ground want to track details of a project’s tactical execution. Project Management softwares gives teams the ability to track tasks across multiple projects, and ensure different teams aren’t duplicating work.

By standardising documentation, processes and workshops, teams can speed up workflow and reduce waste. This is done well by enterprises, such as Xero, who use Asana to manage both project execution and high-level goal setting.

“As a large, global company, it’s a challenge to make strategy real for everyone and help them see how their execution fits into the big picture,”

Standardised documentation embedded within a living Project Management Tool gives the team the ability to track tasks across multiple projects to ensure different teams aren’t duplicating work, which has improved go-to market efficiencies. Xero is shipping features faster now, due to “improved collaboration and insights from cross-functional stakeholders”.

The employee experience

Building an organisation with strong values, and putting people at the heart of what companies do is also a strength of enterprises. By harnessing collaborative equity and flat hierarchies within meetings, everyone has the ability to contribute within workshops and meetings.

One of the biggest opportunities companies have to improve company culture and create internal champions is to build on the employee experience. As a ‘people’ company, FedEx strives to continuously improve its performance management processes to drive individual, team, and organisational performance. To achieve this, FedEx assumes a holistic approach towards performance management and employee experience. 71% of FedEX employees call their work environment positive. They believe that if they take proper care of their employees, they would provide efficient service to their customers. This in turn would benefit the company by generating more profits. Looking after people drives success.

Company culture needs to be human centric. Centralised onboarding reduced employee onboarding time by 80% at Sony Music, because their production processes are accessible and standardised. Whereas Xero runs a 3-month onboarding program to train new partners, they coordinate everything from materials to trainers in Asana, to keep an organised, holistic track of moving parts.

Enterprises connect high-level company goals to individual work through global and regional OKR tracking through Project Management Tools, with clearer goal setting being a facilitator for growth.

This relates to one of the main opportunities identified for Enterprises; exhibiting the organisational strategy of the business. Showcasing the business objectives helps teams collaborate more effectively so they can focus their time and energy on strategy and creative direction instead of tracking down important information.

Out with the old

Other opportunities that companies have to improve their organisational strategy are to remove any legacy ways of working. Existing document management systems and traditional project management tools are inflexible, and don’t allow people to work on documents together in a shared manner. This has proven to be a financial risk, as it is impossible to relate costs by service/application. Unilever was able to recover almost €15 million because Apptio provides exact details of what it costs to provide various mobile services. Apptio enabled Unilever to quickly right-scale IT costs, cut the number of services it supports by half, and align spending more closely with industry benchmarks.

Focusing on a growth mindset is also seen to help gain continuous improvement, expansion strategies, scale creative production processes and sync with changing market trends.

For example, Sony have identified that they were unable to ‘leverage insights and learnings from previous campaigns to improve execution and creative production processes’ and Flo, “couldn’t see how their efforts advanced company OKRs; people forgot about company-wide goals, which were tracked in static spreadsheets that weren’t front and centre.”

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Project Management Tools and Softwares, such as Jira and Asana are great for getting everything out on the table, however they are not the silver bullet that promises to slay all of our demons. They simply set the table, with rules and the right cutlery for us all to sit comfortably. Table manners and conversation comes from the guests and users.

Company Culture, Rhythms and Habits and Ways of Working are intrinsic to the body of employees and leadership that shows the way. Project Management Software is a tool to ease the experience of working together through collaborative equity and asynchronous communication — the right tools for the job.