Intelligent strategy software – Welcome to Waymaker
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Originally Posted On: Intelligent strategy software – Welcome to Waymaker. – Waymaker.io
Waymaker is intelligent strategy software that helps you dynamically manage business growth and goals in the 21st century.
Like a smart watch listens, diagnoses, tracks and empowers a user to set goals for a healthy life; Waymaker listens, diagnoses, tracks and empowers users to set goals for dynamic business growth.
Why Waymaker – Intelligent strategy software?
We set out to help leaders and their teams spend less time planning and more time doing the right things.
The problem is when it comes to business planning and strategy; 3 things typically go wrong.
- Owners and managers spend too much time planning too far ahead, it doesn’t work, in futility they revert to making up their strategy as they go.
- Owners (managers) don’t listen to the broad team around them.
- Owners (managers) think doing lots of things quickly is the path to growth.
Problem 1: Planning & strategy doesn’t seem to work, strategy is made up along the way
After writing a plan with a team, everyone is excited to make it happen. Two weeks later something happens which derails the plan. The plan goes out the window, everyone’s too busy to write a new one, so owners and managers make up their strategy as they go along their business journey.
Sadly, the strategy is then at best unclear, at worst not documented. This results in the organisation more often reacting to things that go bad, then proactively driving initiatives for the good.
Many organisations end being either lucky – it just sort works itself out. (Most often at great real or opportunity cost such as burn out, staff turnover). Or, they end up being wrong. They simply got things wrong and now it’s going to cost a lot to make things right.
In our research, most plans take too long to write, are then too hard to follow and so they end up making up their strategy as they go.
Problem 2: Leaders often fail to listen
Often, owners and managers don’t listen to the broader team around them (and wonder why things fail!)
The late great father of management thinking, Peter Drucker famously wrote,”Culture eats strategy for breakfast…”.
Many organisations set plans and write goals without deeply listening to the people who are executing the plan, their teams.
When these new plans are brought to the table to be delivered, teams often get frustrated as these plans are below par or miss the mark with the customer and had they been consulted, perhaps a more effective plan might be in place.
Disillusionment often sets in and new ideas stall, get blocked or replaced with business as usual.
Problem 3: Leaders believe busy = growth
Usually, owners and managers think doing lots of things quickly is the path to growth.
Grow, grow, grow – that’s the mantra of the modern executive.
Then the lie creeps in.
If you’re not ‘busy, busy, busy’ then you’re not growing.
Yet, all the data seems to point out being busy is not effective.
Nothing gets done well. Not much gets measured objectively. Worse still, very little is aligned to long term strategic goals.
Do you feel like you fit into one or all of the above problems?
You are not alone. Strategy is hard.
If you are reading this thinking;
Yeah…, I never really write a plan.
Or hmmm…., even if I did write one, did I really involve my people…?
And, yes, even if we did write one, we never really stick to the plan, we’re just doing loads of stuff that’s reactive and not very much that’s strategic, measured and delivered.
You are not alone.
PWC published their report, “The Strategy Crisis” at the end of 2019 which reveals:
- 70% of executives believe their strategy is not clear enough
- 68% of executives believe their strategy is held back by their organisation’s culture
- 74% of executives believe their strategy requires them to work on too many priorities
Too often, owners & managers are stuck in their business, frustrated their teams can’t own the business goals & growth.
When this has happened, three things have typically gone wrong;
- Owners and managers no longer believe in the traditional planning process, default to making up their strategy as they go
- Owners (managers) don’t listen to the broad team around them and fail to build or create alignment
- Owners (managers) think doing lots of things quickly is the path to growth and if everyone just gets busy, the cash will come in.
There is a better way.
That’s why we made Waymaker.
The Waymaker platform is intelligent strategy software
Waymaker is a platform of 5 apps that help business leaders and their teams diagnose, plan and deliver on their business strategy.
Like a smart watch listens, diagnoses, tracks and empowers a user to set goals for a healthy life; Waymaker listens, diagnoses, tracks and empowers users to set goals for dynamic business growth.
We help leaders;
- Diagnose skills, systems and maturity using our propriety Experiences Curves in the Diagnostic app
- Plan and prioritise short, mid and long term goals in the Roadmap app.
- Deliver goals in the OKR app with up to the minute updates and empower everyone to stay on track with the work that matters most
- Report on progress automatically with the Dashboard app which informs everyone on the goal’s status and team members progress, and
- Collaborate with your team with the Channels app which empowers automated notifications of progress and text based collaboration with team members.
The Waymaker diagnostic app
Waymaker helps you listen to your team, gathering insights from more than 250 data points across 6 core functions.
This data comes back instantly, the moment one of your team members provides answers to a question.
Within minutes, you can have intelligent insights into what areas of the organisation that if improved could add value.
Waymaker’s intelligent algorithm presents this data to business users in simple, powerful charts and dashboards.
The diagnostic looks at 6 key areas of the organisation;
- Vision
- Market
- Strategy
- Business model
- Customer experience – here we go further and bring insight across sales, marketing and service
- Employee experience
The diagnostic reveals both;
a) maturity of best practice skills
b) maturity of best practice systems
We’ll help you understand where there is maturity and strength or a lack of maturity or a weakness.
We do this by showing you the best practice activities for that function on our management framework, The Experience Curve.
Each activity is either a skill, or a system. Each activity is colour coded to red, orange, yellow or green or according to low maturity (red) to mature (green).
An organisation will have an aggregate score on the score based on the level of maturity overall. This creates a benchmark on on the curve, we call that an XScore.
What doesn’t get measured, doesn’t get improved, right??!
So, now we have a way to benchmark and measure progress on the core skills, systems and functions of the organisation.
The simple premise is this;
Organisations are systems, no one part is ever completely isolated from another. To grow a healthy, sustainable organisation we need to grow all parts (including each parts skills and systems) in an aligned and coordinated manner with a focus of continuous improvement.
A bit like a human being. If one part of the body is unhealthy, then other parts will suffer. Well, organisations are similar, if, for example, the business model is unclear and not optimised for customer value (unhealthy) then sales, marketing, employees and customers will suffer. If, for example, the business model is powerful, the business has a great product but marketing is weak then sales, service and employees will suffer.
The Waymaker Experience Curve diagnostic is like having a powerful management consultant in your team, working away distilling which parts of the business should be improved and what to do about them – here’s the good news – this diagnostic doesn’t take 6 weeks, tens of thousands of dollars and require 100 power point slides.
If you haven’t experienced the power of insights from the Waymaker’s Experience Curve, you can just by signing up for a free trial.
The Waymaker roadmap app
The Waymaker Roadmap app helps leaders and teams see their way to success.
If you can visualise what winning looks like, you begin to work towards doing it.
The Roadmap app using a simple but powerful gantt chart with a kanban to organise the roadmap.
Here’s how it works in a nutshell;
Users can view the insights from the diagnostic app and from where they are (or anywhere on the Waymaker platform) raise an objective that if delivered, could improve the organisation. Anytime a new objective is raised, our strategy automation engine adds it to the Roadmap app in the ‘Backlog’ swim lane.
Here, in the Roadmap app on the prioritise page, users can vote up what they believe the most valuable objectives could be. Now it’s easy to engage teams anywhere on what the key priorities should be for a business, team or business unit.
When leaders agree to commit an objective to a quarter or year, the objective will move into the ‘Committed’ swim lane, awaiting the commencement date (quarter) of when that objective will be in play. Objectives that are being executed are in the swim lane, ‘In progress’. And, as soon as the quarter where that objective is due for completion, ends, then the objective moves to the ‘Complete’ swim lane.
As you build your long term goals (multi quarter objectives) you can then align mid and short term goals to the next step of the journey, ultimately continuously improving your way to your long term goal, whilst continuously improving all the functions, skills and systems of the organisation.
Anyone can see where the organisation is going, where it’s at and what are the short term priorities to move the needle.
Wow… a strategic plan that’s useful. Now that’s a way to make a plan come together.
The Waymaker OKR app
OKRs are one of the best methods of planning, setting and delivering goals. Whilst they are not the only good method, it is the method we adopted as they are deeply rooted in the idea of continous improvement.
If you are new to OKRs, that’s ok, within a few minutes you can get your head around their simiplicity and power as a goal setting methodology.
O stands for ‘objective’. The goal that we want to achieve.
KR stands for ‘key result’. The specific measures used to track the achievement of that goal or the how we are going to get there.
OKRs are deeply rooted in the idea of management by objectives.
OKRs are fair, practical, easily communicable and fast becoming the common goal setting methodology of the modern organisation.
The OKR app within the platform is where everything gets practical in the day to day. Every OKR created is on the strategic plan, nested under a parent objective, which in turn is nested under a parent objective.
The OKR app empowers team members to focus their work on the small number of actions that matter most.
Every user on Waymaker gets to contribute the organisations vision and strategy not just in idea, but in practically day to day work.
Now that’s powerful alignment.
The Waymaker dashboard app
Now that you diagnose, plan and deliver a powerful strategy every user will want to share their progress to their managers, leaders, boards and stakeholders.
Our intelligent algorithms present your progress data automatically in beautiful, easy to understand dashboards.
Why spend countless hours chasing people on slack, teams or email to get the latest report, chart from a complicated CRM or spreadsheet??!
At any moment in time, anyone can see the exact progress being made towards the goal.
If you’re climbing the mountain, you really want to know where you are and where you need to go next.
The Waymaker dashboard app presents quarterly and annual dashboards for business level goals and user level goals.
Additionally, we make it easy to see a leaderboard of progress on team members so you can help those struggling and reward those winning.
The Waymaker channels app
Communication is the key to collaboration.
The Waymaker Channels app empowers everyone to communicate, collaborate and complete their work.
The Waymaker strategy automation engine creates a channel for every diagnostic and objective.
Every user can create their own channels for teams, groups or any reason to bring a group of people together.
A good example is a sales team. Create a channel for a sales team, add your sales team members, track each persons OKRs in each sales meeting, update progress automatically, only focus on the work that matters … save time, save hassle, release team members into success, avoid time wasting conversations, unblock team members.
Yes, never waste another meeting spending time on things that are not relevant.
Here’s the cool thing about an OKR channel. Every time an objective or key result is updated, that update is automatically posted to the OKR channel so if you’ve on the channel, you’re getting the updates on progress.
Save time, save brain power and create laser focus on the work that matters.
Waymaker is intelligent strategy software.
For leaders and managers, we remove roadblocks, bring clarity to planning and enable everyone to deliver on the work that matters.
Welcome to the journey to make business improvement, business as usual.
Get started now with Waymaker’s intelligent strategy software
It’s easy to get start, just start a free trial.
Every feature is available free for 14 days.
You can onboard as many team members as you like, then after 14 days simply purchase a monthly subscription (pricing here) and we’ll help you on your way to strategic success.