Building an enterprise marketing operating model

Annual planning, budget allocation, campaign intake, delivery workflows, and leadership reporting had evolved through separate processes and tools. Teams could see their own work, but leaders lacked a consistent enterprise view of priorities, dependencies, capacity, investment decisions, and execution risk. The opportunity was larger than implementing a project-management platform. The organization needed a shared operating model.

I led 36 discovery sessions involving 15 teams to understand how work entered the organization, how priorities were established, where decisions were made, how teams planned and executed campaigns, and where information was lost between functions. The findings revealed recurring challenges involving inconsistent intake, disconnected planning cycles, unclear decision rights, fragmented reporting, competing priorities, and limited visibility into enterprise capacity.

Integrated planning Designed the organization’s first formal integrated planning process, connecting enterprise priorities, market needs, strategic initiatives, budgets, and delivery capacity. Portfolio governance Established common campaign structures, identifiers, templates, intake standards, and reporting practices. Technology enablement Configured Asana to support the operating model rather than forcing the organization to adapt to a generic tool structure. Budget and resource visibility Connected campaign plans with budget allocation, pacing, resource requirements, and leadership decisions. Operating cadence Developed recurring leadership reviews and reporting to surface risks, trade-offs, dependencies, and decisions.

The resulting portfolio included more than 300 campaigns and 700 tactics across markets and shared-service teams. Leaders gained a more consistent view of what the organization had committed to deliver, where investments were being made, and where competing priorities required a decision. Teams gained a shared language for planning and execution, while templates and governance reduced the need to recreate processes for each initiative.

I led discovery, operating-model design, portfolio architecture, governance development, planning facilitation, tool configuration, adoption support, and executive reporting. I worked across marketing leadership, finance, analytics, digital, creative, media, strategy, market teams, and enterprise operations.

Technology does not create alignment by itself. Successful portfolio transformation requires shared definitions, clear decision rights, realistic capacity conversations, leadership participation, and enough flexibility to reflect how different teams actually work.