Meet Thoughtworks

Thoughtworks is a global software consultancy with roots in building custom systems. As one of the original pioneers of agile software delivery the company has developed techniques that harness the power of global teams to deliver software excellence at scale.

The challenge

In 2016, ThoughtWorks introduced the Center of Excellence (CoE) to help scale their marketing operations successfully. Since then, the CoE has provided marketing experts, from designers to automation specialists, to support regional marketing campaigns around the globe.

For a long time, whenever a regional office planned to do a marketing campaign, they would request support from the CoE teams via email. These requests would go directly to Samyuktha Shivakumar, Operations Lead for Global Marketing, who would then have to find and assign the right people for each campaign.

Hundreds of these request emails would flood the Marketing inbox which would then turn into endless threads, international conference calls, numerous chat messages, and in-person meetings. Keeping track of who requested what and where, which requests were filled or still pending, and who was available or already assigned to a campaign, was both overwhelming and time-consuming.

“There was no one place where we were recording this. Everything was managed through email. A request would be sent to one generic email address that would go to everyone’s inbox. People on the CoE team would then reply if they were available or I’d have to ask around. It wasn’t clear who was available and what the timelines were.”

The solution

Why monday.com?

monday.com stood out to Samyuktha as an ideal solution during a period of extensive research relying on Forrester and Gartner reports, and recommendations from colleagues. Together, it all pointed to monday.com’s ease of use and intuitive interface which were important factors in the team decision.

Samyuktha said, “Everyone working with the CoE teams took so well to monday.com that they wanted it for their teams. We had to bump up our license within the first few months and now the entire marketing team is on the platform.”

Centralized communication

With the entire marketing team now using monday.com, all communication happens inside the platform. monday.com has eliminated the challenges associated with being a globally distributed team with everyone having one central place to get work done.

“We maintain communication on the boards so we have the history and data in one place,” says Samyuktha. The teams no longer have to struggle to schedule meetings between multiple time zones to get on the same page because everything happens inside monday.com. Progress and updates can be accessed anytime, and anywhere, regardless of the time zone.‍

Increase efficiency

monday.com has completely simplified the entire CoE workflow with one-click automations, that automate repetitive processes. It has allowed the teams to operate at the highest efficiency, reducing time spent on the manual work involved in completing simple recurring tasks.

“We have at least 2-3 automations on our boards, whether it’s notifications or moving tasks when they’re completed, we take care of it with automations. It’s my absolute favorite.”

Total visibility‍

With visibility into who is working on what and when, it’s so much easier for the team leads to manage and allocate resources for each campaign. The team leads can instantly see what tasks each team member is working on to determine who has the capacity to take on more work and what the timelines are for each campaign.

Now that they can see everything in one place, they are able to budget and plan better for the future.

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