Chaotic collaboration abounds in many workplaces. It’s exciting when organizations are young, but as they grow, processes need to evolve from chaotic to organized – fast. This is essential to scale, be more efficient with your resources, improve individual and team productivity and morale and most importantly, have predictable outcomes.
To add structure and automation to your organization’s processes, you will need tools. If you don’t, your people will end up using the tools they have – which often time means a fall back to emails, meetings, phone calls and he said / she said, and excel files galore. Not an efficient way to scale.
Wrong tools lead to wrong outcomes. To select the right tool, you need to ask yourself a few questions?
Firstly, do you have a process?
If your organization is young, you might not have defined processes yet. Chaos rules, but it is by design to keep the innovation flowing. You will need tools that foster free-flowing collaboration. Chat based collaboration tools like Slack, shared folders like Dropbox and Kanban boards like Trello may be best suited for this phase of your organization until you have locked down processes.
If you do have a process, is it repeatable?
The nature of some businesses may rule out repeatable processes. For example, you undertake custom development projects. No two projects have the same task break-downs or goals. Cloud-based task and/or project management tools like Basecamp and data collection tools like Airtable may be best suited to set up and monitor individual projects.
If you do have a repeatable process, is it differentiated?
As you scale up, many functions within your organization will converge on repeatable processes – like in HR, finance/payroll, etc. For generic processes, many workflow tools already exist in the market. For example, there are workflow tools or modules like Asana, Zoho available for HR management, payroll processing, expenses management, etc.
But some core processes within your organization will be unique to you – and are your crown jewels – the reason you will eventually leapfrog your competition. Off-the-shelf tools will not do justice to your processes, and you wouldn’t want to change what has worked for you to fit it within the bounds of generic tools. You need a tool that is customized to your process, your organizational hierarchy, your culture – and you need it fast! Welcome to Zvolv.
Zvolv – the workflow automation platform to build applications to drive your organization’s unique repeatable processes.
Whether launching hundreds of new retail outlets a year or developing dozens of new products every quarter or running regular audit and compliance processes, Zvolv can be the difference between a well-oiled machine that churns out consistent outcomes and wasted productivity due to inefficient resource and time utilization. Get in touch with us at hello@zestl.com and let us help you stay ahead of your competition.
