Lucid is a visual collaboration suite for enterprise and hybrid teams of all sizes. Bring your teams together, see all your ideas in one space, and build upon each others input to bring your concepts to life. Lucid has multiple products including a virtual whiteboard, intelligent diagramming, and cloud visualization, so your team can innovate faster. In this post we are focusing on Lucids intelligent diagramming product, Lucidchart.

Lucidchart is an intelligent diagramming solution to help teams turn complexity into clarity. A cloud-based platform and intuitive interface that makes it simple to start diagramming, no matter what device, browser, or operating system.

Here at Heinz Marketing, Lucidchart helps us organize workflows for campaigns, visualize sales and buyers’ journeys internally, and for clients. We are able to better communicate and visually display complex mapping to clearly identify next steps and goals. Being able to map out complex systems allows us to see each area clearly and identify any gaps that may lead to deficiencies and decreases in optimization.

With Lucidchart, improve how your teams work together with real-time co-authoring, in-editor chat, shape-specific comments, and collaborative cursors.

• Optimize business processes
• Visualize technical systems
• Brainstorm with remote teams
• Design a superior user experience
• Plan and deploy new features faster

Clarify complexity, Align insights, Build plans and ideas faster

Individuals and teams can easily and quickly map out where they are, what’s missing, and what is next. Quickly visualize your team’s processes, systems, and organizational structure. Lucidcharts’ diagramming provides you with a clearer picture to improve communication and allow for deeper collaboration. Get better aligned in the same space with a common visual to guide complex layouts.

Even the best ideas need help to become real. Check out Lucid and their different products to see what works best for your team’s needs. See a previous App of the Week post on Lucidspark for additional details.

The post Carly’s App of the Week: Lucidchart appeared first on Heinz Marketing.

Are you looking for an online whiteboard to bring your brilliant ideas to the surface? Do you need a space where your team can visually brainstorm and collaborate in real time to get creative juices flowing?

Lucidspark is a virtual whiteboard that helps you and your team collaborate to bring the best ideas to light. A product suite under the brand Lucid, it allows you to display dynamic brainstorming sessions on an intuitive canvas. For individual or team use, be able to collect ideas, organize thoughts, and pick the best course of action with real time collaboration to keep projects moving forward.

Capture team insights with sticky notes, freehand drawing, and color-coded cursors, shapes, and lines for each collaborator. There is also the option to separate into Breakout Boards and swap feedback in the chat box.
Once all your ideas are on the board, vote for your favorites, group insights by themes and trends, and develop workflows to display next steps.

Manage the creative chaos

Lucidspark gives you the space to think expressive and freely with the tools to focus.

Breakout Boards

Use Breakout Broads to improve collaboration sessions by splitting up into smaller groups.
When your collaboration session is done, present your work to the larger group and automatically sync it all back to the main board.

Timer

Drive attention and laser focus by incorporating time sensitive activities. The built-in timer option displays the countdown on everyone’s screens to keep proactivity and creative juices moving.

Call others to me

A simple way to get everyone to the same spot on your board. No more finagling if the team is lost on the page.

Voting

Easily tally votes on ideas, visualize the results, and group ideas together by number of votes. Pinpoint the ideas with the most potential to establish points of action to keep moving forward.

Gather and Sort

Work together to tag ideas by priority, potential, or lift. From there, automatically organize everyone’s idea with Gather and Sort features to make sense of it all.

Template Options

If everything above is feeling a little overwhelming, no worries. Lucidspark includes templates as a simple way to dive right in and get to work. Their library has a variety of frameworks for everything, from user journey mapping to sprint planning. Teaming up with industry experts to make sure you have what you need to succeed.

Integrations

Boost productivity by connecting your innovation canvas to Slack, MS Teams, Jira, Lucid’s other product suite Lucidchart, and more.

Zoom

Be able to hold dynamic working sessions with your team through Zoom with the Lucidspark app. Create and share boards, work in Zoom breakout rooms, and organize your brainstorm session into actionable next steps.

Slack

Share ideas, collaborate in real time, and move from insights to action with Lucidspark’s Slack integration. Slack is a great platform for team and company conversations. Watercooler Slack chats can also be a great place to produce some of your team’s best ideas, but those ideas deserve their own space. So, for those moments, when a brilliant idea occurs, simply start a new Lucidspark board directly from your Slack channel to keep those creative juices flowing and put your ideas to paper, so to speak.

Azure DevOps

Merge Agile planning wit visual collaboration using Lucidspark Cards for Azure DevOps Cloud. Convert brainstorming sessions into Azure DevOps work items and visualize your roadmap in a flexible visual workspace that make is easy to keep teams aligned. Be able to transform task lists into roadmaps and customer journey maps to visualize the work ahead. Import work items, organize cars on your board, better visualize data points and plan out next steps.

Other integrations

• MS Teams
• Smartsheet
• Google Drive
• Jira Software
• Confluence
• Lucidchart

Once you have brainstormed your ideas and devised your plan and next steps as a team, or for yourself, it’s time to formulize those plans, implement, and track progress with Lucid’s other product suite, Lucidchart. Export your Lucidspark boards into Lucidchart to create more polished documentation that teams can reference and widely share.

The post Carly’s App of the Week: Lucidspark appeared first on Heinz Marketing.

Change is undeniable. Consider the fate of business mammoths like Kodak that tried and failed to ignore it, and you’ll understand why you must master change management. Whether it’s an operational improvement or organizational-level change – like pivoting from lead-based to account-based marketing – success comes from knowing when and how to adapt.

According to Gartner, the average organization underwent five significant changes in just the past three years. What’s even more shocking though, is that only 34% of changes were an apparent success. That means roughly two-thirds of all changes either fail or don’t make much of a difference – wasting valuable resources in the process.

We have to ask, “is there a missing piece to change management?” Arguably, in many cases, yes. So here, we look at how you can create a process that increases the chance of meaningful change.

Establish a Process for Change

Change management planning has two stages – a readiness assessment and an implementation strategy. To find success, you need to tackle both with diligence.

Change Assessment

Change management looks different depending on the organization. Some organizations thrive on change and actively seek it out. Other organizations resist until change cannot be avoided – like in the recent demand for an increased online presence.

At this juncture, you’ve already decided something isn’t working. Now, you’ll need to identify what changes. Where are you currently? and where do you want to go? What steps are between points A and B?

A readiness assessment helps you identify potential challenges you’ll encounter and how to overcome them. You can use a change management model, such as the McKinsey 7s, to better understand the internal elements to consider when you build your implementation strategy.

Change Management Strategy

A change management strategy outlines the critical components – the leader, technology, timeline, training requirements, and target KPIs. The changes that find the greatest success start with a well-laid plan and clearly defined stretch targets.

To boost buy-in, leadership needs to rally the team around the decision. The person leading the charge doesn’t have to be an executive, but they need to influence the teams involved. For more minor changes, a manager might be a good choice, but a higher position like a department head is the better option for organizational-level changes.

It’s crucial to engage all team members impacted by the change from the planning phase. That way, you can address concerns promptly. Once a negative perception of the change takes hold, it’s challenging to reverse, so you want to identify concerns early.

Similarly to engagement, communication should happen early and often. Leadership should provide resources and periodic updates targeted to each impacted team so your team isn’t left with more questions than answers.

More than that, change leaders need to reinforce why the change is necessary. People are naturally resistant to change, so when hiccups occur, confidence is what pulls them through. Keep in mind the rule of seven when it comes to change communication – people need to hear a message at least seven times to stick.

Finally, your change management plan needs to include ample training. Training readies your team for the day-to-day switch.

For example, if you’re introducing a new CRM, the impacted teams should have weeks to test the software before the changeover. You want to share knowledge bases, demo videos, and facilitate hands-on training. Training participation lets you see where your team is and spot knowledge gaps you need to fill.

After establishing a change management process, you need to nail down how you’ll measure success.

Define Success Metrics

Change is an investment, and to track your investment, you need data. Therefore, you’ll want to define quantitative and qualitative metrics that help you measure the impact of your change and map your next steps.

Quantitative Metrics of Change Management

The most accessible metrics are generally quantitative. This is because quantitative metrics are easy to interpret, and if the change wasn’t effective, it’s immediately evident. A few of the main quantitative metrics you’ll want to focus on are:

• Project KPIs – It’s time to find out if you have reached your predetermined KPIs. Maybe the goal was to increase sales leads by 20% – a quantitative metric tells you whether that occurred, and if not, how much you missed the mark.
• Timeline adherence – Unforeseen roadblocks can throw off your timeline by a few days or months. If the change took six months instead of four, you need to figure out where it went off course to improve your process next time.
• Speed of adoption – A fast adoption indicates well-executed communication and training. On the other hand, a slow adoption might mean your team needs additional guidance.
• Support requests – In instances where the change involves a shift in technology – which is common – you want to record support requests. You know your team needs more preparation if you see a metric like 2x the support requests after the change.

Ultimately, the pinnacle for change success is often return on investment. The more complex the change, the more difficult it is to calculate a clear ROI. That’s why it’s essential to establish the metrics for success from the beginning – even if it isn’t the highest return.

Qualitative Metrics of Change Management

Quantitative metrics let you track concrete data from the change, but qualitative measures provide insight into how managers and employees adjusted. How the team perceives the change has lasting effects ranging from a temporary shift in morale to employee turnover rates.

The qualitative data can also tell you what’s happening behind the scenes if you’re not seeing the metrics you’d hoped so you can troubleshoot and navigate path corrections.

You’ll want to employ multiple methods of tracking qualitative data. Some of the most popular methods include:

• Team satisfaction surveys – Ongoing surveys let you gather continuous input from all impacted teams in the change process. You should monitor the surveys to look for shifting satisfaction.
• Behavioral observations – Sometimes, what’s said might not match what’s happening. Behavioral observations allow managers to gauge how people acclimated to the change based on actions. You’ll want to look for signs of change fatigue. For example, has absenteeism been rising after a new process implementation?
• 1:1 follow-up feedback – Follow-up feedback lets leadership gain in-depth insights to build on responses and data from other measures, including quantitative metrics. You should use this feedback strategically to boost support and influence change culture in your organization.

Whether your change is a success or not largely depends on how well it was managed. Trying to force a change without a plan or buy-in from your team is like adding gas to a fire – it could blow up in your face.

The post How Change Management Shapes Your Success… or Failure appeared first on Heinz Marketing.