Organisation: Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA)
Role: Content Operations Manager (fixed-term contract, September 2025 to April 2026)
Platform implemented: Monday.com
Scope: five departments, 24 colleagues

The problem

When I joined RIBA in September 2025, content planning was distributed and largely informal. Departments — such as Communications and Marketing, the riba.org web team, RIBA Journal, Books, and Learning Content — were each managing their content in different ways, with limited visibility across teams and no shared system for planning, prioritisation, or sign-off. The result was duplicated efforts, last-minute requests, unclear ownership, and an inconsistent content output that didn’t always reflect RIBA’s strategic priorities.

The brief was to design and implement an organisation-wide content planning system that would bring these teams onto a shared platform, establish clear workflows and governance, and create sustainable ways of working that would outlast the contract.

The approach

I broke the project into four phases:

1. Discovery
2. Design and pilot
3. Integration
4. Review

Discovery was deliberately unhurried; storied institutions like RIBA (founded in 1834) are often intricate and take time to understand. To ensure I understood the problems I was seeking to solve, I met with key stakeholders across these departments to:

• Understand existing workflows
• Surface pain points
• Understand how to get from the status quo to more effective content planning

I took this research and translated it into several outputs, from reports to slide decks, to communicate my findings, indicate where approval chains were lacking or creating bottlenecks, and make suggestions to de-risk content operations. 

Design involved two parallel workstreams:

1. Selecting and configuring the right software solution.
2. Designing governance frameworks to ensure the long-term viability of the planning system.

For point one, I recommended Monday.com – a highly customisable project-management platform that can create a shared database across departments, as well as a long tail of powerful automations that leave scope for future efficiencies and continuous workflow improvement. It’s perfectly suited to creating a content calendar, the creation of which was one of the main aims of the project. Crucially, ease of use is a major benefit of Monday.com, which would help to keep adoption rates high and minimise disruption.

To achieve sign-off, I performed desk research and interviewed stakeholders to assess which tools were currently within RIBA’s stable and what we needed the software solution to achieve. I presented this gap analysis to the decision-makers, knowing that securing sign-off quickly in an organisation of RIBA’s complexity required building a clear internal case.

For point two, I knew I had to design a governance model at pace, given the short length of my contract. I could put the software solution in place, train colleagues, and set new processes, but without a framework to support the initiative in the long term, it was likely to fall apart once I left.

I used various tools, including a review of inter-departmental touchpoints, RACI charts to ensure ownership lay with teams rather than individuals, and a comms plan that meant everyone had the information they needed to engage with the project. Relatedly, I worked with the Director of Publishing and Learning Content to deliver a RIBA-wide workshop on image and video permissions and reducing the risk to the organisation, having flagged this as a gap to bridge. We built permissions management and sign-off directly into the workflows we mapped onto Monday.com, ensuring synergy. 

The pilot was staged to enable an iterative approach that evolved with feedback and snowballed as we touched more departments. Structured onboarding and training sessions were designed to frame the platform as a solution to problems people had already identified (referring back to what we uncovered during discovery), positively impacting change management and ensuring buy-in. Training was smooth, and teams felt energised by the possibilities Monday.com offered after seeing it in action. 

Review involved comparing where we were at the start of the contract with the new status quo, passing the baton onto permanent colleagues and setting the teams up for success with their new approach and software. Crucially, the regular cross-departmental content strategy meetings were reframed to be more action-oriented rather than presentation-based, using the shared database of Monday.com as a reference to support strategic pivots.

By the end of the contract, colleagues were onboarded onto the same content planning system, with their data streams feeding into a pan-organisational overview that enables better decisions as RIBA’s content functions continue to evolve. 

What I learned

A few things proved more important than I expected going in.

Stakeholder involvement in the design phase – not just consultation, but genuine co-design – was the single biggest driver of adoption. People who had shaped the system felt ownership of it.

Framing matters. Presenting the new system as a way to reduce the friction people were already experiencing – last-minute requests, unclear priorities, siloing and duplicated efforts – was more effective than presenting it as a top-down governance initiative. Both were true. Both benefits existed, but the former was easier to get excited about for those executing the strategy. 

Training is not a one-off event. The workshops I ran during the rollout were effective, but the ongoing support and iteration after launch were what moved adoption from nominal to genuine.

The outcome

RIBA now has a single organisation-wide content planning system, replacing the fragmented spreadsheets and ad hoc processes that preceded it. Workflows, permissions, and governance standards are documented and embedded in the platform. The system was designed explicitly to be maintainable and extensible – built to outlast the contract rather than depending on it.