For the first five years of KeepSolid’s life we’d use conventional project management tools, e.g. Gantt chart for resource planning, task management, and performance tracking. Eventually, we got really good at detailed task planning and resource management, but in the long run this wasn’t terribly helpful. We would still miss project deadlines and fail to achieve our market goals.
...employees losing the bigger picture of why they’re doing what they’re doing, mindlessly ticking off tasks just because they were appointed to those
Worse still, our company had a lot of different products in the making simultaneously. This led to employees being overwhelmed on a daily basis by the amount of tasks and products. They had to oversee multiple projects on different stages of development and constantly switch between their assignments. This would result in employees losing the bigger picture of why they’re doing what they’re doing, mindlessly ticking off tasks just because they were appointed to those.
Now it’s clear to us that merely tightening the grip over task setting and performance does not boost the efficiency of teamwork on its own. By year five, the situation became critical. Our bottom line plummeted in half, we could no longer sustain all of our projects, employees started quitting...
This made us sit down and rethink our approach. We have analyzed the company’s state and decided to drop our project management tools and many of our task management principles. We’ve switched over to what should be the core of any business’ activity - goal-oriented company management.
Now, instead of focusing on task setting and tracking employees’ work, we concentrate on defining our strategic goals, understanding how to reach them, and team collaboration around them. One could say that, instead of getting all over the place in regards to tools, we picked the two that are the most important - goals and communication.
Interestingly enough, by the time when this was happening, we already had our own project planner app in development. It allowed to craft strategic plans and define goals, but it lacked some vital features like setting goals, assigning their parts to team members, and tracking their achievement. It was then that we decided to create a new solution - Goals by KeepSolid. The name checks in, as we wanted to emphasize its focus on meeting goals.
At first, some employees found it difficult to cross over to the new system. They were already used to having a list of tasks to follow without thought. But a few weeks later they “kicked in”. They started to engage in task discussions, suggest their own ideas on completing tasks, criticize habitual ways of working. Now we can say for sure that this tool has changed KeepSolid’s fate. Thanks to it, our revenue has surged, and we’ve laid a new course towards business growth.
