GroundSwell's enterprise project management (“EPM”) software simultaneously improves both the strategic and tactical (day-to-day) project and task management of your organization. An integrated set of modules, workflows, functions and features helps organizations, teams, and individuals work more efficiently and effectively, collaborate better and achieve superior results.
GroundSwell ONESM is user-friendly and easy to use, even for teams with little or no software experience, particularly compared to complicated enterprise software.
We’ve reviewed and assessed over a hundred top strategic planning, enterprise resource planning, portfolio project management and project management software offerings and haven’t found one that effectively cascades and integrates high level strategic initiatives with your day-to-day tasks.
In case you’re interested, click on the respective links from G2 and Capterra (two of the leading online software review sites) below for a definition of each, a competitive map of the major players and list of vendors in each category to see for yourself. We also have a spreadsheet we can share with you regarding our findings.
1. Strategic Visual Thinking & Tactical Cascading:
GroundSwell ONE’s differentiated features include the following:
Based on our proprietary six-step strategic planning process, GroundSwell ONESM facilitates the visualization of your Business FoundationSM with online sketches and then assists in translating your sketches into clear and succinct one to three sentence definitions answering the three fundamental questions of an organization’s Business FoundationSM
a) Who are you? We call that your core concept.
b) Where are you going? We call that your mission, and
c) How are you different? We call that your strategy.
Business FoudationSM
GroundSwell ONESM also scores and makes recommendations to improve your Business FoundationSM definitions based on our proprietary artificial intelligence (“AI”) algorithm.
It then enables you to select from an extensive list of predetermined priority objectives and objectives for each of the six key results areas in our Fractal Flywheel of Organizational DevelopmentSM.
Based on over forty years of data and validated research, key result areas are essential areas of organizational focus and development that are essential for long-term sustainable financial success.
GroundSwell ONESM also guides you in creating your own projects, SMART goals and tasks to accomplish each of your objectives using a proprietary AI algorithm to score and improve your objectives and SMART goals.
Your high-level strategic thinking including your Business FoundationSM is then visually cascaded through your entire organization down to everyone’s daily tasks so both senior management and line level team members can visually see exactly how their individual day-to-day activities directly contributes to your organization’s long-term strategic initiatives.
Strategic Cascade
As an owner-manager you need to be able to simultaneously look out of a telescope and microscope when managing your business. So does each team member. GroundSwell ONESM does just that.
2. Strategy & Competitive Analysis:
In addition to internal organizational strategic planning, GroundSwell ONESM has a strategy (how are you different) module that utilizes our proprietary twenty variable competitive analysis checklist to assess and score your industry and organization against clearly defined and quantifiable benchmarks for each variable, ensuring your external strategy is truly different and creating value financially.
GroundSwell ONESM will alert you if your overall strategy, or how you’re different, isn’t different than your competition. And if that’s the case, it will guide you through our six step online visual thinking process to ensure your strategy is visually and strategically different from your competition. From there you can update your Business FoundationSM, key result area objectives, SMART goals and tasks for each project, team and individual so their all aligned with your Business DefinitionS:
a) Who you are.
b) Where you’re going, and
c) How you’re different.
3. Time-driven Activity-based Financial Analysis & Budgeting:
A vital part of both strategic planning (internal organizational planning) and strategy development (external organizational competitive analysis and differentiation) is dependent on your historical and projected financials. In addition to traditional revenue cost line-item analysis and budgeting, GroundSwell ONESM utilizes a user-friendly time series analysis module when assessing historical financials and projecting future revenues and expenses.
Time-driven Activity-based Costing
Given labor costs are typically one of the largest items in any organization, using employee and team time to assess and project financials is a vital part of GroundSwell ONESM. We’ve historically found organizations that utilize employee tracked and projected time in their financial budgets are accurate in their projections within 5%. We’ve also found that time driven budgeting is essential when allocating senior management time to high-level strategic initiatives. If you don’t budget time to work on high-value strategic initiatives, those initiatives typically don’t happen and/or fail.
4. Time, People & Resources Management:
With GroundSwell ONESM organizations, teams and individuals can proactively plan and track their time vs. budget as well as effectively staff teams on relevant projects based on their availability. GroundSwell ONESM allows teams and individuals to track and assess the availability of key resources they need to complete a project, SMART goal or specific task. With GroundSwell ONESM, teams can allocate resources, such as team members and equipment to specific tasks and projects. This feature ensures limited resources are used effectively and efficiently.
5. Collaboration & Communication:
GroundSwell ONESM software provides a range of communication and collaboration tools, such as team messaging and document sharing, to help teams work together and stay connected and minimize if not eliminate searching for missed emails. All communication is saved under its relevant objective, project, SMART goal and task.
6. SMART Goal Assessment & Management:
SMART goals are easy to teach and learn, but hard to execute. We’ve found that most middle managers can’t effectively create their own SMART goals, let alone review their team’s SMART goals. If that’s the case, it’s the senior manager (and often the owner) who’s really creating value and doing the real work of the respective middle manager. And at some point, no matter how smart or motivated you are, you can’t do every middle manager’s job. With that in mind, GroundSwell ONESM utilizes AI algorithms to score your organization’s SMART goals collectively, at the team level and individually. From there we can provide individual and team coaching and teaching to ensure all your team members can create SMART goals. But ultimately a manager who can’t create SMART goals is just a parrot and needs to be replaced.
7. Delegation Assessment & Management:
Based on extensive research and direct experience, much like SMART goals, delegation is easy to teach and learn yet extremely difficult to execute consistently. We’ve been focused on delegating effectively for over twenty years and still think we can improve. With that in mind, GroundSwell ONE’s delegation scoring goes together with our SMART goal scoring. Effective SMART goals and delegation are totally dependent on each other, yet you can assess and score each skill separately as well as together.
While we’ve found some individuals are good at SMART goals but not at delegating them and vice versa, typically ineffective managers lack both skills. Hence the need to assess, train and remediate both. Based on years of experience, while it’s essential to get your strategy right, executing it is totally dependent on the underlying ability of your middle management team to create and delegate SMART goals.
8. Reporting & Analytics:
GroundSwell ONESM provides a range of business intelligence reporting and analytics visualization tools that enable teams to track and visualize key metrics. You can customize the key metrics you want to track, but we’ve developed a straightforward module that prompts you to develop and track a core set of key entity wide board level financial and operational metrics, often called key performance indicators (“KPIs”) in three key categories:
a) Customer Acquisition Cost: We include all your marketing and sales costs including labor time and cost to market and sell your product or service.
b) Cost of Goods Sold: We include all your costs of goods or services sold including the labor time and cost to create your product or service, and
c) Corporate Overhead/Admin: We include all your traditional corporate overhead and admin costs including rent, utilities as well as management and administrative overhead with a focus on key
management to functional area (the people who actually do stuff) staff ratios. You’d be amazed how once you track those ratios and time spent supporting the actual doers of your organization, your management and admin team start to complain a lot less about not having enough people.
GroundSwell ONE’s reporting interface and templates leverages data from our time-driven activity-based costing, strategic planning (internal planning), strategy (competitive analysis) as well as our time and people module so you’re not paging back and forth between different applications and data sources to create and monitor your KPIs. All our reporting can be visualized in a variety of different ways including pie and bar charts, etc.
9. Intelligent Automation (“IA”):
We’ve also studied the leading workflow automation software offerings and curated their essential functions in all our modules so you don’t need to integrate third party automation software into a standalone strategic planning or basic project management offering.
10. Artificial Intelligence (“AI”):
Everyone’s talking about artificial intelligence these days, particularly ChatGPT, etc. and how it’s going to affect almost everything. Yet we’ve noticed little mention about using AI to build organizations. That’s our focus. With a solid background in financial modeling and budgeting, we like to think of AI much like the goal seek function in Excel.
In the goal seek function you set a numerical goal or outcome in Excel based on a formula that’s typically too long (too many calculations for you to calculate in your head)
and Excel works through (they call it iterate) the multi-step calculation until it finds the required multi-inputs to get to your desired output. AI does the same thing except that it can use almost any data whether it’s words (like the ChatGPT) or gene sequences (to find cures for cancer, etc.) to achieve a certain goal or outcome.
With that in mind, we built GroundSwell ONESM to effectively iterate through the apparent maze of high-level strategic steps and tactical details you need in your organization so you can “goal seek” the required steps to achieve your organizational goals efficiently and effectively with nominal risk. Like AI and Excel’s goal seek, we’ll also notify you when you’re missing a step in the iterative process or have included the wrong step.
11. Integrations:
We always cringe when we hear a software application or almost anything (like your cell phone connecting to your car) “integrates” with another application, tool, piece of equipment, you name it. Unfortunately we’ve found that the typical app may say it integrates with another but most of the time only a few basic pre-set use cases actually work. And nine times out of ten those pre-set use cases don’t work for you.
We take the opposite approach. We assume no apps integrate with others effectively and have built as much core functionality into GroundSwell ONESM, albeit from a high level strategic and meta knowledge perspective, as possible, so hopefully most if not all your high-level strategic work and day-to-day tasks can be managed in GroundSwell ONESM.
From there we have the necessary tech integration team in place to make sure GroundSwell ONESM integrates with your desired apps either leveraging connectors, often called integration platforms as a service (“iPaaS”) like Zapier or through custom application interface programs or APIs and webhooks so you don’t have either do it yourself or find someone to do it for you.
If you’re interested in learning more about GroundSwell ONESM, please schedule a video call with us here.
Along with GroundSwell ONESM, GroundSwell’s Business Ownership PlatformSM provides the essential people and tools to create more time, money, and control in your business and your life.
Visit GroundSwell.co to learn more.