Specialized Bicycle
Morgan Hill, CA
Team size: 12
Team description: The global marketing team includes employees in Spain, Italy, Central Europe, France, Asia, Japan, the UK and US. This team provides the marketing strategy, advertising, print and collateral guidelines, web content and product specifications to the international subsidiaries. From there, the subsidiaries handle the rollouts with their local market retailers and media outlets. There are 12 international team members who are responsible for translating materials in five languages.
Before Smartsheet.com became the team's online workspace, they would spend endless cycles trying to get a simple marketing project completed. It would take several weeks, 800 e-mails and many iterations of a translation spreadsheet which was mailed back and forth. Now, Chris Matthews, global integrations manager uses Smartsheet to coordinate activities across six international marketing subsidiaries. "Having a collaborative tool like Smartsheet adds what I call Clear Pressure," says Matthews. "Since all of the activities are transparent, no team member wants to be the one holding up the project. People are more responsive and perform in a more reliable fashion. They actually begin to cooperate in moving the whole project forward."
The process went from three weeks to two days. International team members logged on to Smartsheet and had their translations submitted almost immediately. Chris saved time because he didn't have to manage and consolidate 14 versions of the same spreadsheet. "After the team completed their first international project using Smartsheet, people proactively contacted me and told me how easy it was and how much more efficient," says Matthews. "I'm much more likely to use something if my team can adapt to it quickly."
For Specialized, Matthews described the added transparency as a transformative tool. "It transforms team projects from a potential finger-pointing process or de-motivating experience to everyone sitting down for a meal together. By having project status and results so public, individual contribution is acknowledged but more importantly, everyone is more aware of their impact and importance to the team's goals."
In addition to motivating the team and saving time, a solution like Smartsheet enables teams to double check accuracy. Because you are updating it more frequently, odds are the results will be more accurate.
We used Smartsheet.com. We started out with the free version and eventually moved to a paid package. It is much less complicated than traditional project management and has the layout of a spreadsheet so employees were immediately familiar with it.
Page Last Updated: Aug 20 3:26pm by Maria Colacurcio