The news company I was working for had many shows within it, from morning shows to radio to the nightly news. Each of those had their own staff and workflows and priorities. When a major story broke, such as a sudden tornado, many of these shows would be working to cover the story on their own. They wanted to find the best video and interviews and create excellent content. Sharing content across the company was not a priority.

There were several personas that were taken into account.

Associate Producers were junior team members who gathered video from across sources.

Producers write the script for the story.

Senior Producers manage the entire story and its editorial tone.

Executive Producers manage the line-up of stories in the show.

There was no incentive for shows to share information, even as they were doing the same work in their silos. Some even were possessive over their interviewees and content. People saw themselves as employees of their show, not the larger news organization.

However, the company as a whole would produce better content if there was clear access to information and better collaboration. New leadership especially wanted to encourage this culture change.

There was an old body of research from when an executive had asked a team to look into the company's "email problem." This initial research led to the conclusion that it was not an email problem but rather a workflow problem.

Interviews were conducted across the user groups. Because we had a defined user base, we were able to have high access to people. Most of these were scripted interviews.

The personas outlined above were determined and expanded upon. I also mapped the full process and the pain points across it, which you can see below.

This was an artifact that I used across the lifespan of this project. Juxtaposing these two slides was a fantastic tool for helping stakeholders deeply enmeshed in the company culture take a step back and see the larger picture and obstacles. It also was key to helping new hires and contractors get a quick picture of the project.

This kind of culturally embedded workflow issue needed immediate fixes and a long-term solution.

It was important to the team and me to get an MVP out there as soon as possible to build on the work that was already being done. I used Zapier to create an automation that would create a daily folder with story templates in the shared company OneDrive. The Assignment Desk, where stories typically start, would then create a document for each story. There was space in the documents for every show or unit to input who was covering the story. Then a second automation would notify the biggest email distribution lists when new stories were created so that everyone could look at who was working on them.

Unfortunately, we quickly had to iterate past this concept. All of this information was already shared within the shows. People were resistant to having to go into a different system to share it again. Culturally, there was a strong resistance to "one more place to look."

Slack was already being heavily used by certain departments (and fully disdained by others). One group, the Regional Desk, had worked to build their own Slack workflow in the last year and delivered meaningful value to other groups. They reached out to our project team to see if we could combine efforts.

I took the work we had done in OneDrive to create similar automations in Slack. There were channels created for each major story topic, such as domestic news or politics. For each story under those topics, the Regional Desk created a thread that anyone in the company could reply to. There was one central channel that was updated daily with links to the day's big story. There were several advantages to this approach:

Consistency: The organization by topics mirrored the way the current email system was set-up.

Balance: To allow open conversation while maintaining organization, the channels were fully controlled by a few admins, but the threads were free for anyone to contribute.

Flexibility: All of the personas engaged with incoming news in different ways. An Associate Producer might read every update coming in while and Executive Producer only needs to see the most important updates. The Slack model allowed for people to follow and mute channels and threads as they needed.

There was very inconsistent levels of comfort with technology and familiarity with Slack in the company. As such, I organized a big training push, including creating documentation, running trainings, and offering support from the Slack customer success team.

I formed a stakeholder group, wrote a stakeholder engagement plan, and found project sponsors in leadership to help combat the reluctance of many users to try a new system. We had the greatest success with a grassroots adoption approach; the youngest team members were quick to adopt Slack and explain the system to their managers.

We also used a rolling adoption approach. The different show teams were all very siloed and operated in their own ways. That meant that each had to be pitched and brought on separately because leadership would not make adoption a mandate. We targeted the teams who were most amenable to the change first. Through them, we were able to get testimonials and use cases to convince the more resistant teams.

The adoption of Slack and the story organization process was successful. Over 1000 employees joined the Slack and hundreds were active in the story channels every month. It caused a major uptick in information sharing and was credited by major correspondents for helping them see vital information in urgent situations, such as a hurricane.

This project laid the essential foundation for future projects as well by laying the groundwork for collaboration and familiarity with technology.