How Kaiser Permanente accelerated COVID-19 communications

Jackie Sackstein, a Creative Operations Analyst at Kaiser Permanente, saw an opportunity for her team to become more efficient in their day-to-day work. She wanted her team to work smarter—not harder—by simplifying some of the more time-consuming project management tasks.

One area of improvement that the team identified was the approvals process. After completing a creative asset, the team might wait on a manager’s feedback for days. That required several follow-up emails from the team and time spent eyeing the project’s status.

Additionally, the creative team wanted to better organize its projects. Its project management system, Wrike, automatically generated a nine-digit number with the creation of each new project, but this didn’t allow the team to organize projects by line of business, nor easily track annual projects.

While seemingly small tasks, the time involved in sending reminder emails to managers or manually entering project numbers added up. As the team’s workload increased, Jackie began to look for a solution.

A consulting partner that had helped the team transition from its old project management platform to Wrike recommended that they look into automation platforms. Specifically, they advised a low-code/no-code approach, which would allow Jackie to manage the platform herself.

The automation world was new to Jackie. As such, she wanted a true partner in the automation journey, and looked for a team that would help brainstorm, build, and test recipes.

Jackie implemented recipes that solved both project management challenges. First, she created a recipe that would automatically send out a reminder email to managers for approval. Second, she developed a recipe that relies upon a schema to create unique project numbers.

Jackie’s hard work has paid off. First, the team learned that many managers had been approving projects; they just hadn’t been following proper protocols within Wrike. With stricter protocols, plus automated email reminders, the team is now seeing faster approvals.

The team was especially grateful for automation during the pandemic since the speed at which they needed to communicate with Kaiser members accelerated. Information around COVID-19 was prioritized above all else, and the creative team played a huge role in keeping everyone informed and safe.

In 2022 and beyond, as Kaiser Permanente recalibrates its goals to include membership growth as a key focus, the creative team will have increased confidence in meeting marketing asset deadlines that directly contribute to that goal.

Finally, with automatically-generated project numbers, the creative team can more easily search for, organize, and keep record of yearly projects, which has saved the team a lot of manual organization and number crunching work.

Jackie is thrilled at the progress that the team has made, but knows that there is huge potential ahead. She is actively looking for new ways to involve automation in more of her team’s daily work.