What’s your plan for managing your enterprise content creation strategy? If it’s “attempt to keep track of everything in a spreadsheet,” you’re going to have some problems — trust me, I’ve tried!
It’s a given that large enterprise organizations produce and maintain a large library of assets, but implementing and maintaining a system to keep the process of creating and managing it can be a major challenge. About a year ago, we determined we needed to better handle our content management woes. With an expanding marketing team and an even faster growing global company, we were really struggling to maintain a system that could track all open content projects, new project requests, and project statuses that were searchable and viewable by anyone across the organization.
Before embarking on a full-fledged search for a solution, we created a list of must-have functions and features. We started by looking at our current system — a very manual process dependent on Google Docs — and noted the struggles and missing capabilities that we would need to addressed in our future solution. Some of these needs included the ability to:
- Manage items in several different asset types, including blogs, product pages, and ebooks.
- Handle requests from any source, including our product and sales teams, any individual within the global organization, or externally from partners and customers.
- Ensure that items are created on schedule and meet deadlines.
- Use automation as much as possible to reduce menial tasks and send updates regarding any item’s status automatically and on request.
- Be transparent, to ourselves and to our internal customers.
We considered many options — from third party platforms and Drupal plugins like Workbench, to even overhauling our current Google Docs-based process to see if we could make it more efficient and effective. When none of those options seemed to be exactly what we were looking for, we looked at other tools already in use at Acquia and realized that Atlassian JIRA might be a possibility. As someone entirely unfamiliar with JIRA, I was resistant at first. It seemed to me to be a tool for developers and more technical practitioners. But our internal JIRA champion gave us a walkthrough, and after much back and forth, we decided to give it a try.
Why use JIRA for content marketing project management?
For our organization, JIRA primarily made sense because every Acquia employee has access to it, and we had an internal JIRA champion who could help onboard us and customize the system to meet our needs.
(We also determined that by using JIRA in marketing, we could be more collaborative with our engineering department, since they already used JIRA on a daily basis, giving us more credibility and another avenue for collaboration with them.)