Feels Like Groundhog’s Day

It’s that time of the year again… time to scramble and finish last minute projects, handle client requests, and close new business before the quarter comes to an end. If you are stressed out around this time you aren’t alone. To add more fuel to the fire, this is typically the time of year leadership at organizations likes to revisit strategy and do a performance review of initiatives, departments, strategies, and so on. Lucky you, you probably have a part to play in building these lovely PPT decks (because you didn’t have enough to deal with already).

What this process typically looks like:

Meet with team > Outline a deck > (1.5 hours)
Ask team to send over the stuff they worked on > (1 hours)
Get half of what you asked for and ask your team to provide context > (1 hours)
Ask team members if they know where that one file is > (1 hours)
Make the assets your team sent over presentable > (1.5 hours)
Format the deck so it doesn’t look like a disaster > (2 hours)
Review with team > Revision control in cloud > (2 hours)
Fill in gaps where you need more content > (2 hours)
Email it to leadership > (1 hour)
Pray leadership doesn’t ask for more context and they understand everything you sent. :(

Total time: 13 hours

While business reviews are important, the majority of the time spent creating them adds little value. It’s highly logistical, lots of recreating assets, and recalling what the heck actually happened. The result is usually a massive time suck for yourself and everyone on your team. The review itself is really a best guess built around lots of interpreting of context. Can they take less time? Can the final content be more valuable? We think so.

The Ideal QBR Workflow

Imagine your next QBR or MBR coming up. Now imagine all of your team’s most important insights and assets from the last 3 months are in one place. No hunting, no searching, just the good stuff from your quarter right there in one dashboard. All that’s required from you is picking the best insights you think will be the most impactful. Don’t even worry about formatting, because who has time for that? What you select from your team’s insights is automatically formatted and organized to be a sleek presentation for desktop or mobile. Finally, grab the link to your presentation and send it to your leadership team.

This is what that scenario looks like:

Schedule an alert and prompt for your team once > (10 minutes)
Select team insights and assets > (20 minutes)
Arrange the order > Add your own context > (20 minutes)
Send link to leadership > (5 minutes)

Total time: ~ 1 hour

This sounds like the ideal workflow, right!? How has no one built something like this for me already? Do you know how many hours I’ve wasted coordinating, collecting, and formatting!? Emailing my team over and over again for the same information!?

Take it easy, we hear you. We’ve heard from lots of you actually. So there are ways you can hack this workflow together. You can create calendar alerts on a regular schedule and add your team, add a prompt to the description, and have them email you their content. You can then export the content and drop it into a PPT or Keynote and format from there. This isn’t a bad system, but it’s certainly not ideal either.

This is why we are building a platform that models the workflow we just described. Regular requests, reminders, collection, and organization all automated in a single platform. We want you to spend your valuable time doing what you do best; strategizing, critical thinking, and problem solving. Let us handle the redundant tasks and give you a better business review at the same time.