Auditing a marketing team's tools and onboarding at the Polynesian Cultural Center
My first term at the Polynesian Cultural Center was spent working out why a marketing team had too many tools and a slow onboarding process, and what a simpler setup would look like.
The problem
Too many tools, and no one sure who owned what
When I joined the marketing department, the team was working across several platforms with overlapping functions. New team members had no consistent way to get up to speed, and it was not always clear who was responsible for what.
The result was familiar to anyone who has worked on a busy team: slower workflows, confusion between groups, and software being paid for without being fully used.
Tool overload
Multiple platforms doing the same jobs, so work and information were scattered.
Slow onboarding
New teammates learned the stack informally, which meant a long ramp-up and repeated questions.
Unclear roles
Little visibility into who owned which task, project or system.
What I did
A cost-benefit analysis and a workflow audit
Spoke with people across the marketing team to understand how work actually moved, where it stalled, and which tools they relied on.
Documented the existing workflows and found the bottlenecks, especially in how new team members were onboarded.
Evaluated the platforms in use (project management, communication and onboarding tools including Trello, Notion and Ninety.io) and measured how much of each was really being used.
Turned the findings into a short list of actions and presented them to the team’s leadership.
How I judged a tool: not by its feature list, but by whether the team used it, whether another tool already covered the job, and what it cost. That is what separates a useful platform from a redundant one.
What I recommended
Fewer tools, written-down onboarding, visible roles
| Area | Finding | Recommendation |
|---|---|---|
| Tools | Redundant and underused platforms with overlapping jobs | Centralize information into fewer tools and retire the overlap, which also reduces software spend |
| Onboarding | Informal, person-dependent, slow to ramp | Document the onboarding process so a new teammate can follow it without a guide |
| Roles | Little visibility into ownership | Make role and task ownership explicit and easy to see |
| Cost | Licenses paid for and not fully used | Use utilization data to decide what to keep, with a consolidation roadmap |
Outcome
Clarity first, savings second
The audit gave the team a clearer picture of its own processes, surfaced concrete opportunities to reduce software costs, and gave leadership a set of actions they could act on rather than a general observation. I have not put a dollar figure on the savings.
The takeaway I keep: operational inefficiency is usually caused by a lack of system clarity, not a lack of tools. Adding another platform tends to make it worse.
I returned to the Polynesian Cultural Center for a second term this fall, and moved from operations to the website. See what I am working on now →
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