By Avinoam Nowogrodski, Co-Founder and CEO of Clarizen
Wayne Gretsky, the hockey great, once said, “A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.” It’s been said that Gretsky’s success came from intelligence and reading the game, rather than from his strength. Gretsky was adept at dodging checks from opposing players, could consistently anticipate where the puck was going and execute the right move at the right time.
Like Gretsky, a company doesn’t have to be the biggest or the strongest to win, but it does have to be the smartest and most responsive to truly succeed. Guiding a company through a set of strategic decisions towards a long term goal is often guesswork with some finger crossing for good luck. Identifying the right types of projects to take on, the staffing is necessary to execute and the concrete goals and timelines to expect, are just some of the questions executives face every day.
To make these decisions, management can go one of two ways. Either management can take its best guess with little to no real understanding of its own processes. Alternatively, management can spend excessive amounts of time and money digging into a plethora of reports and numbers that will most likely be out of date when they are extracted. Most organizations react too late or ineffectively, leaving room for the agile to swoop in and get to the goal first – winning and keeping the customer’s business.
In a world where bottom-up information is at your fingertips, where you have confidence that the information you look at is accurate and timely, decisions happen spontaneously and reflect the current trends your business encounters. This is the difference between the hockey player who hits the puck as it comes to him and the hockey player that can anticipate the puck and other player’s movements and then guide the puck towards the goal.
The starting point for true visibility into any organization is bottom-up information. When end-users to contribute up-to-date information about tasks as part of doing the work, organizations have a foundation of accurate and dependable information. With accurate information acting as the foundation, management gains visibility into processes and activities and can use that information to accurately affect the company’s direction.
When an organization is confronted with a mission-critical decision, such as expanding or shifting strategic direction, the need to accurately predict their ability to execute becomes critically important. The ability to accurately predict resource load, budgets, timelines and deliverables ensures that management brings on the right level of staffing at the right time of the project, that timelines and deliverables are realistic and that projects stay on budget.
Resembling Gretsky’s ability to anticipate a puck’s movement across the ice, the right software, intuitively integrated with work gives a company the tools to consistently anticipate and execute the right move at the right time.