Founded in 1965, Datacom Group is one of Asia Pacific’s leading information technology services companies serving various clients from government agencies to enterprise businesses. The company designs, builds, and runs IT systems and processes across operations, cybersecurity, cloud, digital platforms, payroll, and enterprise.

Datacom is a fast-growing business, and, as of August 2018, it has grown to include a marketing arm referred to as “CMD” - communication, marketing, digital team. The team is dispersed across New Zealand, Australia, and the Philippines, and everyone is currently working remotely.

David Hayward, General Manager, Marketing, and Xanthe Smit, Marketing Manager, are part of CMD and joined soon after Datacom established the department. David and Xanthe manage marketing campaigns for a wide variety of clients in Australasia and elsewhere.

David, Xanthe, and the rest of the CMD team were using inefficient tools to collaborate on projects, and it was becoming increasingly difficult as the team started to grow.

“We’ve got marketing, digital, and communications all under one umbrella. All of us have different responsibilities, but we also often overlap. The tools we were using didn’t give us the visibility we needed into what each team was working on, so as you can imagine, we were unintentionally targeting the same people at the same time,” says Xanthe.

Xanthe was determined to find a better solution, one that would allow the team to gain full visibility into all of CMD’s activities and make planning and tracking campaigns much easier and more efficient.

Why monday.com?

Datacom went through a selection process shortlisting monday.com, Trello, and Asana for the CMD team. In the end, the team decided to go with monday.com Work OS because it’s visually appealing, intuitive to work with, and effortlessly integrates with the team’s existing tools.

“One of the key selling points for me was that it could easily integrate with tools our team was already using, so it was easy to just connect everything from day one. Plus, I really liked the colors and Llama Farm which is used in a fun way to represent my work progress,” says Xanthe.

There are many teams at Datacom, and each team works differently. And within those teams, each team member has their own working style. It was important for the CMD team to find a flexible Work OS that each team member could tailor to their specific needs and preferences.

When the global pandemic hit, the team started to notice that there were gaps in their existing processes and what was working before, was no longer suitable in this new normal. There was some disconnect between what was discussed in Microsoft Teams and what was managed in monday.com.

The shift to working from home pushed the team to start looking into ways to improve what was being discussed and what was actually happening to their campaigns. It wasn’t long before monday.com came out with the Teams integration which would make their processes much more seamless.

“What’s great about having monday.com integrated into Microsoft Teams is that we can now have conversations in the context of projects directly on the monday.com boards we’ve linked to so we can work more efficiently. The other part we like about this integration is that we can manage and track our projects from one place instead of switching between tools,” says Xanthe.

The CMD team is spread across multiple territories and they all work on different lines of businesses. Xanthe understood early on that the team needed a calendar to see what campaigns were running and what was upcoming, so she set up the “CMD activity” Calendar view that is directly accessed through Microsoft Teams.

“We can see what the activities are, who owns it, what stage it's at, the campaign name, the theme, the line of business, but more importantly we can see the target audience that the campaigns we're working on is going to touch and which industries, so that way we make sure there’s no more overlap and we aren't spamming our audience,” says Xanthe.

“If one of my colleagues has got a really great campaign and market, I can easily align with it and maybe even leverage off it because now I have full visibility into my colleagues’ campaigns before I even get started,” says David.

Now, during the team’s Monday morning “WIP” (work in progress) calls, they’re able to pull up the CMD Activities view on monday.com and go through everything the team is working on in a short 15-minute call instead of an hour-long one.

Xanthe is currently building a Go-To-Market launch for four different services that Datacom is about to release for one of its business areas. She is working on all four concurrently with eight stakeholders across all of them, needing to keep track of all the moving pieces of each.

“If it weren’t for monday.com, these Go-To-Market launches would have required twice as much work and taken twice the amount of time to complete. The process is now much more seamless because if something is close to being overdue or potentially at risk, I get notified right away.

Xanthe added the workload view to Teams to give everyone at Datacom visibility into the CMD team’s capacity at any time.

“Having the monday.com Workload view in Teams is a great way to easily communicate our capacity and manage expectations across the business as well. Anyone can quickly open the view and see the red circles, which means we're at capacity or the blue circles where we can take on a bit more, and it helps to manage expectations,” says Xanthe.