It always feels like a minor victory when I am able to take something learned in this program and apply it to an issue that I am facing at my job. Systems thinking and process thinking were two things that I really struggled with when first introduced to them at the outset of this program due to the fact that I never had experience in looking at things in those ways. However, something clicked recently and I am starting to look at almost everything I do in a much different way.

Once of the biggest time drains in my current job is working with multiple parties to get our social media posts approved. Since my company operates in a regulated industry there are lot of do’s and don’ts as well as a lot of gray areas that our legal and compliance teams need to watch out for. We push the envelope as much as possible to not push out boring-but-legal-friendly content which means a lot of back and forth and circling back. Plus, we are one of many groups competing for legal and compliance’s time which means this process sometimes takes close to two weeks from start to finish.

The process looks something like this:

The caveat that goes along with the image above is that it assumes that every went smoothly from start to finish. That is rarely the case as there is almost always some back and forth about the wording of a proposed Facebook post or the percentage breakdown of gender and ethnicity that is represented in the imagery associated with the posts. It’s pretty frustrating to get pretty far down the path only to have to double back to discuss something.

In deciding to take this head on and create a more streamlined process I decided to use a variation of the 5 Whys method to find the root cause of the problem at hand. So, why does it take so long to get our social media posts approved?

It’s important to note that there are other answers to that question, chiefly that the mortgage industry is highly regulated so we are not free to come up with posts as organically as other companies can. I could use the 5 Whys method to explore that path (Why? Because it’s highly regulated. Why? In part because of the subprime mortgage crisis. Etc.) but it would not help me when it comes to attempting to put a more effective approval process in place.

Still, asking why and really thinking about the issue at hand brought me to the conclusion that we have a tool in place that is not being used to its full potential. By taking advantage of Hootsuite’s compliance capabilities I could potentially cut out a lot of lost time waiting for e-mails from the agency or legal and compliance. Our agency would be able to create the content directly inside of Hootsuite and have it blessed or marked for edits right there in the app.

The new and improved process that I will be proposing looks something like this:

This eliminates the unnecessary legal to marketing back to legal steps late in the process and streamlines it by taking advantage of all the functionality that Hootsuite has to offer. This would save me time keeping track of which version of the social matrix is with which participant in the process and it would cut down on the work that both the agency and our compliance and legal teams need to do to get social media posts approved.

Not bad for simply asking, “Why?”