Society for Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions (SCAI)

SCAI is the professional association for the cardiovascular procedure field, running publications, education programs, events, webinars, governance, and government and industry relations with a staff of a few dozen. The association had been on Teamwork since 2018, used most heavily by marketing and communications for tasks and requests. The staff had recently drafted a fuller set of workflows, with templates and processes for larger projects that touched the governing board, the VP of marketing, and teams across the association, but the templates had gaps, automation options had been overlooked, and interdepartmental handoffs were a known weak point. What they asked for was not generic software training. They wanted a consultation that reviewed their actual processes, and a training program built on those processes, ready in December for full deployment at an early January staff retreat.

This was a Teamwork consultation and training engagement, on one of the work management platforms we spent years implementing.

Discovery ran as sessions with each department from the fall of 2024 into January 2025, covering governance, publications, education, the events team, science programs, government relations, industry relations, and webinars. From those sessions came a pain point analysis, workflow maps of the current process against the ideal one, and per-department meeting summaries the teams could check for accuracy. A template builder workbook turned each department's process into task templates in Teamwork, and the recurring governance processes (committee and council appointments, leadership nominations) were written up as standard operating procedures.

The plan was phased, starting with data gathering and template creation, then template rollout with a company-wide training session, then optimization using automation, custom fields, and integrations to cut manual work. The training design had three layers. The first was all-staff fundamentals covering projects, tasks, budgets, and milestones. The second was in-depth training for a champion in each department who would serve as the local Teamwork expert. The third was a system orientation on navigation and terminology so new users would not break the process by accident. Materials were designed to live on as recorded video, PDF guides, and modules for the association's own LMS, so the same content could onboard future hires. We also advised on Teamwork's Outlook and SharePoint integration options within the license tier they already paid for.

Each department's real process got documented, reviewed by the people who run it, and turned into templates in the tool instead of living in individual heads. The governance team's recurring appointment and nomination cycles became written SOPs. The association got a phased path from templates to training to automation, with the training material built to double as onboarding for new staff. The engagement ran from October 2024 into early 2025, with department sessions continuing through January.

Given the same problem now, we would build SCAI a system of their own that holds committee and governance cycles, the publications pipeline, event production, and program requests in one client-owned database, with the SOPs enforced by the workflow rather than documented beside it, and no per-seat licensing for staff, volunteer leadership, or the outside contributors who touch a project. The Teamwork work was about making a general-purpose tool carry association-specific processes. A custom build starts from those processes instead.