How Digital War Rooms Help Your Business Thrive
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A successful business operates like a well-oiled machine. Its operations run smoothly and efficiently, able to adapt to unexpected challenges and make the right moves to achieve success. However, this level of agility and flexibility must extend beyond the employees themselves.
Whether it’s planning for a new product launch, managing a crisis, or negotiating deals, all business decisions require a high level of collaboration and strategic planning. To achieve this, businesses can benefit greatly from a virtual war room.
By implementing a digital war room, businesses gain flexibility, scalability, and adaptability. Key players, decisions, and information can be kept in one centralized location, ensuring that the business is always ready to make the right moves, regardless of what challenges may arise.
War rooms are often associated with a crisis or solving a high-priority problem, but modern war rooms are breaking away from the negative focus and making their way into all facets of business operations.
The Toronto Raptors are a real-world example of an organization taking the concept of a war room to new heights. When they built a new practice facility in 2016, the team went all-in, creating a state-of-the-art data-centric war room. The team uses the dedicated space as a centralized hub for decision-making - especially during the NBA draft - that supports key decision-makers by surrounding them with all the data and tools they might need to make the best decisions for the organization. By taking a similar approach, businesses can ensure that their teams are always on the same page and ready to tackle any obstacle that comes their way.
The difference is, your organization doesn’t need a 68,000 square foot facility or a partnership with tech giants to implement a successful war room.
What Is a Digital War Room?
You're likely already familiar with the concept of a war room. It's a space dedicated to troubleshooting and dealing with specific projects, whether that be crisis management, product launches, campaign planning and execution, or anything else requiring a big push outside your team's day-to-day.
As more and more companies tackle digital transformation, it’s vital that this key business function isn’t left in the analog dust. A virtual war room is an online space where all stakeholders in a project, and all related documents, can come together in one place. There’s (infinite) space to brainstorm and troubleshoot without getting bogged down by sticky notes, whiteboards, and other physical clutter - without the need for physical proximity and travel.
Digital war rooms streamline your planning process by providing a centralized hub for all the resources you need to make decisions and move forward. You can quickly access all relevant data from anywhere, on any device, providing your team with the flexibility to adjust to any new information or changes.
A strong virtual war room will include:
Collaborative Tools - The solution to a crisis can come from anywhere, so it's important to make sure your team has the tools to not only communicate with each other but to also collaborate on ideas.
Data Management - Keeping all of your data in one place helps your team retain knowledge and insights, and allows everyone to thrive with data-driven decision-making.
Secure Access - By their very nature, war rooms require security, so an ideal digital war room will be even harder than a physical room for bad actors to access.
Analytics & Reporting - You can't measure success without tracking your progress. The data collected from your digital war room should be analyzed and used to inform decisions and strategies.
With all of these pieces in place, a digital war room can help you plan, strategize, and execute campaigns and initiatives faster and more efficiently.
How Digital War Rooms Help Your Business
Digitization can be time-consuming and challenging, but ultimately it can help streamline your workflow and give you a competitive edge. This is especially true when it comes to crisis management, where having constant access and a secure platform can make all the difference.
Remote Flexibility
With over 50% of people having the option to work from home, chances are not everyone you need in your war room will be available in person. Having the option to enter a digital war room ensures that everyone can be present, no matter where they are in the world.
When it comes to brainstorming solutions to issues, this digitization brings even more benefits. Gone are the days of holding on to breakthroughs and shower epiphanies until the next morning rolls around. You can get ideas from your brain onto the screen at any time.
Endless Scalability
Progress (and crisis) waits for no one. Just because you’re currently using your war room for a product launch or a major campaign doesn’t mean you won’t have any emergencies to deal with. A physical war room runs into countless issues as soon as you have more than one team utilizing the space.
Digital war rooms, however, are infinitely scalable. As long as you have access to the right tools such as Stormboard, you can easily add more members to the team or bring in outside help. You can also easily jump from one Storm to another, letting your team jump from crisis to project and back again without the fear of someone erasing your whiteboard or moving an important sticky note.
Real-Time Updates
The best part about digital war rooms is the ability to get real-time updates. Make sure everyone is on the same page with seamless integration across platforms.
No more having to wait for updates or for the project manager to manually email out changes and progress. Everyone can stay on the same page and be informed of the latest developments in real time.
Data Visualization
Clarity is key, and data visualization gives you just that. When it comes to complex projects or processes, having a visual representation of the data can help your team understand what’s going on at a glance.
Whether it’s a Gantt chart or a simple bar graph, a digital war room allows for data to be organized in an easily digestible format. This helps ensure that everyone is on the same page without having to wade through pages of spreadsheets or complicated documents.
Building a Digital War Room
Unlike the sprawling board rooms and underground bunkers seen in the movies, a digital war room is incredibly easy to construct. There are three major sections to consider, and each will be different depending on your team and what projects you intend to tackle.
Software and Hardware Requirements
The walls of your digital war room will be held up by your team’s software and hardware. When choosing what software to base your collaboration around, you'll need to consider a few things.
Security - Your platform should take data security as seriously as you do. If you don’t want to invest in on-site data storage, make sure that data is being stored properly.
Ease of Use - Teaching your team how to use a complicated system on top of moving them to a digital platform during a crisis is going to cause more harm than good. An intuitive UI can be the difference between jumping right in and spending half your time figuring out how everything works.
Integration - The right platform will integrate with the other software and hardware you already use.
A software that checks all these boxes and provides your team with a constant stream of data is Stormboard. We are the only data-first collaboration platform that focus on analytics and data-driven collaboration.
Team Responsibilities
From the moment your digital war room is launched, your team will need to be ready to take on the new responsibilities that come with it. Collaboration can be challenging within a traditional leadership structure.
You need to ensure that everyone knows what their roles are, as well as stress the importance of democratic innovation in the face of challenges.
A Stream Of Data
Digitization requires a level of data literacy and access within your entire team. In order to have the most impact within your digital war room, you need to make sure there is up-to-date data for everyone to use.
Some types of data you will want to include are:
Competitor and Market Data
Financials
Customer Feedback
Analytics
This is a major benefit to going virtual, as any updates can be seen as soon as they happen.
What’s even better is that when your meetings are finished, you don’t need to take photos of a white board or cross-reference notes to make sure everything was recorded. The right digital war room will instantly collect that data and make it understandable for all stakeholders.
The Bottom Line
War rooms will never become obsolete, but their physical manifestations are on their way out. Moving your war room to the digital world can provide the infrastructure and resources necessary to tackle changes as they come, with less overhead, no scheduling conflicts, and a more secure environment.
Ready to build your team’s digital war room? The experts at Stormboard can get you started today with a quick, no-obligation call to understand your needs and help you digitize the most important strategic tool in your arsenal.
About the author:
A programmer by trade, Nick Saraev is a freelance writer and entrepreneur with a penchant for helping people excel in their careers. He's been featured on Popular Mechanics & Apple News, and has founded several successful companies in e-commerce, marketing, and artificial intelligence. When he's not working on his latest project, you can find him hiking or painting.
