A marketing department's catalog
The whole department in one table: eleven processes, who owns each one, what starts it, and how automated it is. This is what a first pass produces, and one of the rows — the social campaign — is written out in full on its own page.
the catalog
The eleven rows
This is what the department has after a first pass, which is enough to see what exists, who owns it, and where the work piles up.
| id | owner | trigger | runs | automation | status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| mkt/campaign-planning | VP Marketing | the quarter opens | 4 a year | assisted | running |
| mkt/competitor-review | Product Marketing | monthly, or a competitor announcement | ~16 a year | supervised | running |
| mkt/social-campaign | Head of Social | a campaign brief is approved | ~40 a quarter | never | running |
| mkt/email-campaign | Lifecycle Marketing | a campaign brief is approved | ~20 a quarter | never | running |
| mkt/website-update | Web Lead | a change request is filed | ~30 a quarter | supervised | running |
| mkt/lead-routing | Demand Gen | a form is submitted | ~400 a week | autonomous | running |
| mkt/claims-register | Product Marketing | a new claim is proposed | ~10 a quarter | never | running |
| mkt/brand-review | Brand Lead | twice a year, or on request | 2 a year | assisted | running |
| mkt/event | Events Lead | an event is committed to | ~6 a year | manual | documented |
| mkt/agency-brief | Head of Social | work is sent to an agency | ~8 a quarter | manual | documented |
| mkt/quarterly-readout | VP Marketing | the quarter closes | 4 a year | supervised | running |
Two rows say documented rather than running, which means
the process is written down but nobody has run it against the document yet. A catalog
that says a process is running before it has run is one people stop believing, so the
state is recorded as it stands.
the findings
What the catalog shows
Two processes have a lot of other work depending on them, and neither one runs very often. The competitor review feeds six others and runs sixteen times a year. The claims register feeds three of the four processes that write anything a customer will read, and runs ten times a quarter. If you ranked this catalog by how often each process runs, both would come near the bottom, and both are still worth automating early.
The high-volume work is somewhere else. Inbound lead routing runs four hundred times a week, more than everything else in the catalog put together, and it is already autonomous. That is what usually happens to the busiest process in a department, whether or not anyone planned it.
Two processes wait on the same person. Social and email campaigns both report
never, and in both cases it is the same legal approval done by the same
reviewer, which puts one person in the path of sixty runs a quarter. The catalog
cannot automate that away. What it does tell you is that the thing to fix here is how
that review is staffed, rather than the automation level.
The dependency view, where this department would start, and what its first pass got wrong are in the worked example in the repo.