Ann Buice has spent more than a decade inside large, complex organizations where change never slows down. Today, she supports multiple lines of business at Arch Capital Group, helping teams improve processes, manage change, and get more value from the project management software they share. In this episode of Behind the Process with RoboHead, Ann joins the conversation to unpack a familiar reality for many marketing and creative operations leaders. Business needs evolve constantly, team structures shift, and the “right” process today can feel outdated six months from now. Her goal has been to build systems that flex with the organization, so teams can evolve without needing to replace their tools every time priorities change.
One of Ann’s clearest examples came from a team that had already been using RoboHead for a while. The catch was that they were barely using it. RoboHead had become a simple placeholder, a place to enter a project name, track that something existed, then close it out. That lightweight approach worked when the team was smaller and everyone had informal visibility into what others were doing. As the group grew, that model stopped holding up. The work kept coming faster, expectations increased, and “soft” due dates created confusion. Ann described the moment the team realized they needed a real operating system, with accountability, clearer timelines, and enough structure to support high-volume production work without relying on tribal knowledge.
The shift required introducing more than one new habit. The team started capturing richer information in project descriptions so they could understand repeat work, identify patterns, and measure how much of each type of work was coming through. They used tasks to represent who was responsible for what, so people could stop relying on personal prioritization alone and start working from shared expectations. They added prioritization clarity by separating urgent, time-sensitive work from evergreen work, which made reprioritizing easier when business needs shifted. This was the practical side of the change. The deeper challenge was emotional and cultural. Some team members saw the new structure as “extra work.” Others immediately recognized it as a way to make work clearer, reduce uncertainty, and “win” by executing faster with less confusion.
Ann’s approach to resistance centered on listening, alignment, and credibility. She emphasized the importance of letting people be heard, surfacing concerns openly, and creating space for dissent so it could be addressed directly. In this case, the team even brought in an outside consultant to review the proposed approach. The consultant largely reinforced what Ann and the team already believed, yet that reinforcement mattered. It helped validate the direction, lowered anxiety, and made it easier for hesitant stakeholders to trust the process. As conversations unfolded, the implementation plan evolved. The team gathered more detail than originally planned about what information was truly important for each group to do their jobs. They accepted that different roles use structure differently. Some teams thrive on granular task-level tracking. Others prefer simpler status-driven workflows. The key was flexibility, since forcing one “ideal” method across every work style reduces adoption.
That flexibility came with a cost, and Ann was candid about it. For the high-pressure team she described, the redesign took roughly six months because they could not pause day-to-day work to rebuild the system. The process included mapping collateral types, documenting how work moved through the team, identifying where hands touched each deliverable, and aligning on consistent approaches across business units and clients. Ann also highlighted a detail that experienced ops leaders recognize instantly: data integrity. Big system changes ripple into reporting. If you change fields, definitions, or structures too quickly, year-over-year reporting becomes messy and credibility takes a hit when leadership asks for trends. Her closing advice tied everything together. Success depends on pairing the right software with intentional change management. The tool matters, the process matters, and the people doing the work matter most. When those pieces fit, teams gain agility without chaos, and improvements stick.
