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Published November 15, 2017 at 11:30 AM

Lack of Visibility - You Can't Solve What You Can't See

3 min read
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Picture of Jessica Wishart

Jessica Wishart
Senior Product Manager at Rhythm Systems

Imagine this - you set out a quarterly plan with your team. Your top priority is to launch a new product. Lack of Visibility - You can't solve what you can't seeEveryone is excited! You want to set the teams up for success by providing an end date and clear expectations for what success looks like at the product launch. You talk about which department is going to do what by then. You’ve got a solid plan in place. AND - break!  

Fast forward to the end of the quarter, and the product isn’t launched… not even close. Apparently, R&D had been waiting on specifications from the IT team that never arrived. What’s worse, the marketing team had already launched the new website to promote the product, and sales had started selling it. Now, client services is having to go back to try to smooth things over and convince new clients to wait it out a little longer until the new product is ready. Clients are leaving, and leaving mad. Yikes! 

What went wrong? You can have the best plan in the world, but without visibility into the execution of the plan, and collaboration between the people and teams working on the plan, you can still be blindsided by missed results. Many companies tackle this challenge by having frequent status meetings on important projects. Sure, that might have uncovered the miscommunication between IT and R&D that delayed your product launch… but it also would have wasted a lot of valuable time for your key players to be sitting in meetings where the only thing you talk about is the status of this project. 

There’s a better way. Using the Rhythm system, you can manage your most important company initiatives with a visual dashboard that gives you an early warning sign when things are off track. Going through those first steps to create a solid plan with SMART priorities and Red-Yellow-Green success criteria will set you up for success. Have each person and each team contributing to the project determine their own priorities and connect them to your master project plan. And, from there, your team members can status each week, and you can quickly see as soon as something goes from Green to Yellow or Red. 

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You can make a comment in the software, start a conversation about what needs to happen to get things back on track, and record Actions to keep the team accountable to making those adjustments. If you get stuck, you can call an adjustment meeting (rather than a status meeting) to brainstorm solutions together.  

If you know about problems early enough in the quarter, you still have time to turn things around. But, if you don’t know about the problems until it is too late, then there’s nothing you can do. Don’t leave your company’s most important initiatives vulnerable - implement a dashboard so you can have visibility into the work being done and have the confidence that your plan is on track.

5 Minute Rhythm-Blindspots

Photo Credit: iStock by Getty Images