Roots PR

I was chatting with a fellow Comms leader the other day about the difficulty with managing the many disparate job responsibilities that come with the role. Public relations, analyst relations, internal comms, executive visibility, social media – all represent different work streams with types of activities with different development stages.

It can be extremely difficult to keep track of everything without a strong operational framework. Core to that framework should be a strong operational dashboard that provides a view across all functional areas in the Corp Comm remit.

An operational dashboard shouldn’t be confused with a measurement dashboard. The goal of an operational dashboard isn’t to understand the impact of your program but to create greater efficiency in your program execution and ensure that projects are on track.

My operational dashboard is built in Smartsheet, an online collaboration tool, but there are many other ways to do this effectively including Office 365 and other online database programs. The key is to ensure everyone who will create or consume information related to your dashboard has access to your tool. What follows is an overview of how my dashboard works.

In part 1, I outlined the foundation of my dashboard which is series of activity trackers. In part 2, I’m going to share how I use those activity trackers to pull together reports that simplify our workflows and will power my operational dashboard.

When thinking about fields to build in your activity trackers, its important to think about the workflows you are required to support. If you have the right fields in place, you can quickly pull together reports for various stakeholders in the organization simply by defining criteria that you want to include.

The beauty of Smartsheet is that once I define those bits I want to pull from our activity trackers, they are automatically updated as information in the activity tracker is changed. It’s that “build once, reuse many times” aspect that makes us much more efficient.

There a couple types of reports that I create.

• Pipeline or status reports – These reports look at a single activity type and provides a snapshot of where each item is in development. To build it, I simply identify the activity tracker where the information lives, choose the activity type field and the specific item I want to report out on, and select the stages I want included. I have pipeline reports for press releases, media opportunities, analyst briefings, award submissions, speaking opportunities, contributed articles, etc. By looking at these reports, I quickly understand if certain activities are getting stuck in a single stage of development (for example, releases that are awaiting customer approval) and then work to unblock them. It also helps me to anticipate any slowdown in activity if I see fewer items entering the pipeline, for example.
• Regional reports – For my colleagues in region, I have a report that pulls out any activity marked for their region into a single report so they can see everything we are doing across all the corp comm functions in a single place. My team doesn’t have to waste time producing a report from multiple activity trackers each time it is needed. My colleagues in regional marketing are up to date all the time, have a report they can share with regional leadership and, when we do our touchbase calls, we have a ready made list of items we can discuss. I can do similar reports for executives that pull together the contributed articles, speaking opportunities or media interviews relevant to them.
• Agendas – In my activity reports, I built in the flag to superior field after I realized I was replicating work by retyping what was in our Smartsheets into an agenda for my weekly meeting with my boss.  Ticking that box allows anyone on my team to add a topic to the agenda. I created a report that pulls all these items into a list and then feeds into my dashboard. It saves me from going to each individual separately to identify issues that need my boss’ attention and I don’t have to waste time creating and emailing an agenda.  If you are working in an agile marketing environment, you should explore with the broader marketing team how you can fuel daily stand ups and biweekly sprints by pulling together reports using the date field or a similar checkbox.
• Data reports – My data report counts up items in similar stages so I have a quantitative view of our progress. For example, I count every press release in each stage of development. Since we have about 12 stages, I simplify things by summing up several of the stages into more general description. Every release in the stages “with SME” or “with CMO” gets added to a category called “In Review” while everything in stage “with CEO” or “with Customer/Third Party” gets added to “In Approvals.” This allows me to put a report in my dashboard that shows a simplified version of our release pipeline. I also count up how many activities have been completed quarter to date and year to date so I can see our progress towards KPIs.

By creating a database of activities in part 1, we allow those items to be pulled into different reports based on our workflows and the needs of stakeholders. These are powerful tools that create real time savings and start to provide key insight into my program. They start to put a structure to the day-to-day chaos of the Corp Comm departments work.

But this is still not a single dashboard. In part 3, I’ll look at how I bring all these together in a single view point that can be utilized to run the Corp Comm department.

What types of reports would you want to see that I haven’t included? Leave your ideas in the comments below.