You may find that, despite having a team of experienced and capable professionals, your projects seem to fall apart. Unexpected but predictable delays, breakdowns in communication, and disagreements threaten to run your projects into the ground. What’s happening is that your information management needs a serious makeover.
This is a pain point for any company, but it’s especially debilitating for cross functional teams that may not speak the same language or have the same priorities. Your marketing team operates in a world of ROI and cost per lead, whereas your tech team is focused on system uptime and code efficiency. You need proper information management to get them to understand each other’s point of view, and to smoothly collaborate on projects.
So whether you’re in leadership, ops, product management, or you’re just in the trenches trying to fix the problem, here’s everything you need to know about information management.
Communication Challenges for Cross Functional Teams
Each team has its own quirks, which are second nature to those inside of it but look like a foreign language to others. Identifying these common points of confusion is the first step:
- Data - Not all data tools are user friendly, and not everyone in your company is a data expert. Your Data Analyst might look at a dashboard and think the insights are completely obvious, but that may not be the case.
- Software Development - Tech might be the most mysterious to outsiders, as it involves a lot of hard skills that have little crossover with other teams.
- Marketing - CRM, ROI, CPC…just because marketing isn’t as ‘technical’ doesn’t mean it’s free of jargon that other teams might struggle to understand!
- Leadership - As owners of the Big Picture, it’s common for leaders to make the mistake of assuming everyone else sees it. It’s easy to forget that people have their blinders on when focusing on their own work, and might miss the context of what they’re being asked for.
Some people are better at cross functional communication than others, but if you’re tackling the challenge of improving information management, start looking out for common complaints. How often do you all seem to be onboard in the kickoff meeting, only to find that teams go off to interpret the takeaways in different ways?
5 Tips for Managing Information
Once you’ve identified the main problem areas you can start breaking down silos, improving communication, and paving the way to better projects. Here are 5 simple steps:
#1: Evaluate team structure
If your teams are divided into silos, don’t be surprised when they work in them! Assuming that teams instinctively know how to communicate with each other is mistake #1.
If you’re in leadership, or are in a position to make hiring decisions, consider including cross functional roles like Product Managers, Ops Managers, or Project Managers to keep things running smoothly. Where that’s not an option, consider experimenting with temporary structures, like squads for particular projects or initiatives, including teammates from each department involved. Use the Spotify Model as inspiration.
#2: Run better meetings
First things first, make sure every meeting is necessary and everyone in it needs to be there. With so many great asynchronous communication tools out there, there’s no excuse for wasting time in Zoom rooms.
Once you’ve trimmed down your calendar, you need to learn how to run effective meetings, and this comes in three parts:
- Start with a proper meeting agenda, shared with the team ahead of time to get aligned.
- With Bash, keep a record with automated meeting minutes that are automatically summarized and turned into a solid action plan. Say goodbye to misalignment!
- Once you’ve turned your minutes into documentation, send a meeting follow up email to both attendees and related stakeholders. Alternatively share the followup as a Bash topic, where you can watch and listen to the meeting recording, read the minutes, and ask questions all in the same place.
#3: Maintain a Single Source of Truth (SSOT)
Another critical mistake in information management is not maintaining a single source of truth. This could mean having three data sources with very different results, copies of project documentation owned and edited by different people, and un-updated Jira tickets with old deadlines.
Your source(s) of truth should be:
- Easy to navigate
- Automatically updated
- Cloud-based
- User friendly
Keep your sources clean by having clear rules on who gets to update what. Key documents should have a single owner. The roadmap is owned by the Product Manager, the marketing plan is owned by the Marketing Manager, etc.
Keep everything easy to find. There’s little more frustrating than spending half an hour looking for a document you know exists, but you can’t remember exactly what it’s called. If you’re using the meeting notes you created in Step 2 as a reference, link to the documents mentioned. For example, if you talked about ‘prioritizing bug fixes based on results of the survey’, link to the survey results.
#4: ‘Translate’ documentation
Never assume that everyone knows what you’re talking about, as we’ve already seen that not everyone speaks the same language. When you’re creating documentation, consider your audience. If it’s full of jargon, try to clarify where possible. If there are acronyms that aren’t commonly known outside of your team, make sure they’re spelled out at least once. Marketing professionals know that UGC is user generated content, but would you expect your back end developer to know that?
Summarize long documents, which can be done at the click of a button with Bash. No one is going to read a full 30 page document, they’re going to skim read it to look for the information they want, with a strong bias towards what they want to read. By summarizing, you make sure that everyone gets the same key takeaways. Make sure your summary is jargon-free and simple to understand.
💡If you’re looking at documents in Bash, use the AI chatbot to break down jargon in seconds:
#5: Choose the right tools
When choosing tools for teams, there’s a lot to take into account like budget and scalability. If you’re evaluating your stack from an information management perspective, you need look at three things:
- User friendliness: It’s not wrong to give your data team the most powerful data tool possible, but you risk limiting the number of people who can access it. If various cross functional teams need to directly access your data, consider choosing something more usable for people who don’t know SQL.
- Automatic updates: If something must be manually updated, at some point you can guarantee that it won’t be. Someone will go on holiday, or get sick, or forget, and before you know it your information isn’t accurate! Make sure your tech ecosystem works with you, not against you.
- Impact on breaking down silos: Information management is time consuming, so invest in tools that do most of the work for you. AI is constantly improving, and it can save you a significant amount of time.
Most companies have already successfully adopted asynchronous communication tools like Slack/Microsoft Teams and project management tools like Rock or Asana. Bash goes the extra step by transcribing every meeting and turning them into action plans that anyone can understand. With smart templates for creating all kinds of project documentation, you can take your information management to the next level, and save hours doing it!
Measuring Success
Over time, look at the reduction of delays in projects, improved data-driven decision making, and overall positive team feedback. You’ll find that people may still be arguing over how a project should be executed, but you can rest easy knowing it’s not because they don’t have the information they need!
Start out small by implementing one positive change at a time - something as simple as proper meeting minutes. Try out our simple meeting minutes template, and start smashing silos today.
