Winning Hand for Process Improvement
If you play poker, you’ll know that a Royal Flush is the ultimate winning hand. Catching 5 perfect cards happens about once in every 649,740 draws, a probability of 0.000154%. More often in game strategy, you’ll win based on betting vs. getting perfect cards. At Indie, we take great pride in the exploration process of finding the best bets for our clients (and ourselves) especially when time, investment, and resources are involved. We're sharing some of our favorite (free) tools for Process Improvement.
Anisa Balagam - Marketing Operations Maven loves Trello
Why do you love it? It's an adaptable tool that can be used for organizing and managing thoughts, ideas, workflows and projects
How does it impact process improvement? Provides an organized and centralized place to keep track of information and ensure that progress is being made on all projects, goals and workflows and allows for seamless project status tracking by any relevant stakeholders/team members
Pros:
Simple and intuitive user interface that easily integrates with various other project management and workflow software
Great organization tool! Can keep all workflows and ideas in one place so things don't get lost in various emails, spreadsheets, etc
Designed for collaboration - allows for simple onboarding or project transition from one person to another
Cons:
Not the best tool for management of very complex projects
Limited power ups if you use the free version
When creating card templates, not all desired customizations are possible
"Trello helps teams move work forward.Collaborate, manage projects, and reach new productivity peaks. From high rises to the home office, the way your team works is unique—accomplish it all with Trello."
Kat Baker - Social Media Brand Builder Extraordinaire loves Canva
Why do you love it? Easy and fun to use to create customized content templates for social media, website, etc for free
How does it impact process improvement? Saves all templates to allow for easy/quick editing of graphics while offering freedom of color choices, fonts, other design aspects
Pros:
Easy to create/duplicate/edit graphics
Easy to create a team in order to share projects
Wide variety of creative tools
Cons:
Some creative aspects cost money
Not as much functionality as Photoshop
Assets can only be edited online
"Canva. Design for everyone. Create with custom templates and design with a team. Share designs anywhere and get it professionally printed anytime."
Molly Baker - Founder & CEO loves Google Slides
Why do you love it? Easy to make iterations on existing decks, collaborate with others, search for them on the drive, and merge old & new versions.
How does it impact process improvement? Saves time when developing new decks and allows for a single, centralized location for all materials, easily accessible to all.
Pros:
Single location
Easy to import slides
Easy to collaborate with others
Cons:
Difficult to edit everything graphically “online” vs in a desktop version of PowerPoint
Charts and forms are limited
Not all clients use google slides
"With Google Slides, you can create, edit, collaborate, and present wherever you are. For free."
Hilary Fan - Growth Marketing Expert loves: Miro
Why do you love it? Miro is a visual collaboration tool that lets you create, collaborate, and centralize communication across teams. Miro is a great tool for when you cannot meet every person on the team in person. It's especially helpful with workshops and brainstorming sessions, where everyone can share a digital white board, jot down thoughts in real time and have it saved for later use.
How does it impact process improvement? Miro helps save effort (no more recording 8 hour long workshops to reference back to, or taking blurry images of white board), it makes remote collaboration accessible and increases team efficiency.
Pros:
It includes remote work tips & resources, deep integrations with other digital tools like Sketch, Dropbox, slack etc
Easy to onboard & use it with new clients / teams
Cons:
N/A (She really loves it!)
"The online collaborative whiteboard platform to bring teams together, anytime, anywhere."
Kennon Krieger - Mastermind Marketing Strategist loves Klaviyo
Why do you love it? Integrated with almost all site platforms, easy to use, can create custom audiences throughout the funnel, and make beautiful/functional email marketing plans even when you don't have a lot of content.
How does it impact process improvement? Can create different comm flows that are automated and relevant, tailored to the right audiences. Stores all site level data within it's system. Has a ton of email templates that are clean and customizable, which eliminates build time tremendously.
Pros:
Ability to integrate into sites seamlessly, can build, time, deploy, and analyze all in the same spot
Easy to use and customize
You can also compare performance on the industry level as well to create benchmarks for your brand
Cons:
Costs more money the larger your audience gets
Needs more checks and balances to determine if you linked out to everything appropriately, depending on site theme, some sign up widgets could look weird (unless you are a developer lol)
"Get more out of email and text marketing Harness unlimited data, build your ideal customer experience, and prove your ROI with the platform designed to take you further."
Parks Middleton - Brand Communications Virtuoso loves Boomerang
Why do you love it? Given that our days can be filled up with meetings, sometimes we aren’t able to get around to some emails until later in the evening. To ensure that your email being composed later in the day doesn’t get lost in your recipient’s inbox from the previous day, the tool allows you to schedule emails to be sent at more ideal times for your clients (i.e., first thing the next morning, when they’re back from PTO, etc.).
How does it impact process improvement?: Boomerang provides reminders to “follow up” on emails when you have asked a question or requested something in an email that went out a few days before, but haven’t received a response. It also allows you to schedule “reminders'' to follow up on certain emails, if necessarily. Essentially, it adds another checkpoint to ensure that projects/tasks are moving along.
Pros:
Ability to schedule emails
Reminders to follow up
Works across multiple email clients (Gmail, Outlook)
Cons:
Not necessarily a con, but I always double check to make sure my emails went out. Because it is not owned by Google, there is always a chance that there could be issues!
" Schedule an email to be sent later. Easy email reminders. Boomerang for Gmail lets you take control of when you send and receive email messages."
Honorable mention (and still tinkering with), Mindmeister app, supports online mind mapping, idea visualization, flow-charting, value-stream mapping, brainstorming or workflow management (on any device).
“Facilitate Employee-Driven Innovation. MindMeister enables you to build a sustainable culture of innovation by engaging the people who know the most about your business: your front-line employees, partners and customers. With online mind maps, you capture and manage their ideas with ease.”
In aggregate, these free tools generate quality outputs, provide training resources for newbies, and can connect you to communities tackling similar issues. If you have a marketers’ tool, tip or trick that you want to share on the topic of Process Improvement or Building Process Improvement Roadmaps, we'd love to hear from you. And, if you'd like to learn more about Adaptive Ways of Working from our in-house experts contact us
(link: https://www.indie-consulting.com/indie-consulting-contact)
