Strategies

Given one to three business priorities, each team lead sets up strategies focused on each priority.

For example, a customer care team can impact customer loyalty through responsiveness and courtesy, through timely and relevant solutions, and even through proactive solutions. However, a development team can impact customer loyalty through software quality, user-friendly design, and features that meet customer needs.

Once each team has a set of one or two strategies for each priority, these form a matrix of strategies that keep all teams focused on the business priorities.

Goals

Given a set of team strategies for each priority, each team member can begin setting personal goals to work toward those strategies.

This will keep team members focused on activities that will ultimately meet the business priorities.

Journal

With a hierarchy of business priorities, team strategies, and individual goals in place, each team member works to accomplish their goals, and logs journal entries for the progress they've made.

As work is done and journal entries are made toward each goal, all team members can now see the progress being made. Further, notes of risks and issues can be seen by the entire business. These journal entries provide a record of work done for each goal which is aligned with a strategy and a priority. This log will provide valuable reporting (see Reports and Reviews).

Comments

As journal entries are made, other team members may have solutions to issues noted, and so they can comment on journal entries.

In addition, comment threads with nested replies provide an effective way for the team to collaborate.

@Mentions

Journal entries as well as comments can include @mentions which will notify other team members.

Mentions can be configured by team members to notify by text message, by email, or in-app. In addition, mentions will show up on the dashboard for easy access.

Follow

Anyone in the business can Follow activity toward a priority, a strategy, or a goal, allowing them to be notified of all journal entries logged toward the followed entity.

In addition, anyone can follow specific #hashtags, allowing their activity stream to show any journal entry with that #hashtag.

Follows can be configured by team members to notify by text message, by email, or in-app. In addition, follows will show up as an activity stream on the dashboard for easy access.

#Hashtags

Journal entries can be tagged using #hashtags which will facilitate Follow as well as Reports.

#Hashtags can be used for noting important updates, like #completed or #risk. Or they can be used to denote the project being worked like #mercury.

Reports

Once your teams are journaling progress toward their goals, now comes the fun part! Reporting!

The first thing you'll want to do is filter by the date of the journal entries.

Then, you can limit the report to one or more priorities, or one or more strategies, or you can select one or more goals. By default, you'll see activities for all priorities.

In addition, you can limit to one or more team member or one or more teams. By default, you'll see activities logged by all members.

As with the Follow feature, you can also limit a report to one or more #hashtags.

You have the ability to group the logged progress by priority, by strategy, by goal, by team, or by team member. And you can even group by more than one of these entities.

Once you've set up the report you want, you can save it, and optionally add the report to your dashboard. Once saved, you can also set up periodic exports, where the report will be emailed to you at specific times, for example, at 8:30AM on Monday morning in preparation for a 9AM staff meeting.

This feature gives you the ability to automate weekly or monthly reports. In fact, you can use this as a way to automate a SCRUM-like daily or weekly virtual stand-up meeting. Or you could use this as a starting point for your stand-up meetings, saving the time listening to each team member say, "Yesterday, I did X, Y, and Z."

Performance Reviews

Most companies have annual performance reviews, but most of us have trouble remembering all the great work that's been done in the last year.

A specialized report for all the work done by an individual, organized by the goals, strategies, and priorities, provides a useful tool to show how much or how little was contributed.

More important than a raw listing of journal entries is the opportunity to adjust plans and expectations for the future, all based on actual data rather than intuition.

Integrations

Several integrations with popular tools are planned beginning with:

• Slack
• Zapier

Open API

An Open API (REST API) is planned, and will provide ability to list, read, and write the following data entities (subject to user role permissions):

• priorities
• strategies
• goals
• journal entries
• comments
• mentions
• follows
• hashtags

Webhooks

Webhooks are planned for create, update, delete of the following entities:

• account user
• priorities
• strategies
• goals
• journal entries
• comments
• mentions
• follows
• hashtags