Teams lost in tactics? Weekdone brings purpose and priority to your projects
September 07, 2019
Teams lost in tactics? Weekdone brings purpose and priority to your projects
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Weekdone
My globally distributed marketing department has about fifteen different teams in it. These cover everything from social, pr, web development, events, seo, brand, media/advertising, campaign planners, content writers, and creative services. Every Friday, we collectively built a recurring status report called the Marketing Reel with a shared word doc where we each write in our weekly accomplishments so that company leadership can understand what we did that week. It was a simple enough request but, as you probably expect, there were lots of issues with this approach:
- Each team report had no logical connection to the efforts of other teams. They just dumped everything they did into their section.
- As time went on, it became a competition to see which team added the most content. For example, "PR has 4 pages of accomplishments this week, why does Social only have half a page?"
- It was completely untethered from the context of the previous week. Some teams reported the same recurring responsibility every week just to have something in the Reel.
- There was no acknowledgment of the work that was planned to be done for that week.
- The accomplishments reported had no logical connection to personal goals, team/department/organizational goals, or quarterly/annual goals.
- Most of all, it was a pain in the rear to do. Everyone stopped what they were doing Friday morning and spent an hour going to their project management systems to summarize what was most important.
- It connects daily work to personal, team, department and organizational long-term goals.
- Provides leadership with visibility into the output of individuals, teams, and departments.
- Improves employee engagement with a modern approach to 360-degree staff/manager feedback, complete with emoji.
- Connects status reporting with existing systems of record (Basecamp, Asana, Trello, Teamwork, etc) to avoid redundant data entry.
- Brings the OKR discipline to an organization who needs a structure for their prioritization planning.
- The mobile app makes entry effortless. I could give weekly feedback to direct reports as I was walking between meetings on my phone.
- User setup and management and team/department creation is not a trivial effort. Requires some deliberate planning.
- The deadlines for plans don't connect to the due dates for tasks in systems of record. That can get confusing when Asana says a task is due next week but Weekdone still has a due date of tomorrow.
- I'd love to see more contextual support for sections like employee feedback. Maybe a sentence or two suggesting feedback based on the report's weekly entry. If a person had three Problems and only one Progress, Weekdone could suggest some corrective action to make it easier for the management to mitigate problems before they get ugly.
- Catching employee dissatisfaction before it grows and spreads.
- Saved time from having to manually summarize accomplishments from project management systems.
- Provided context into work planned vs work completed and added context to common blockers.
- Provide visibility into progress over time (week / quarter / annual goals) and trendlines for individuals/teams/departments/organization.
- The only negative is, some people grumble at adding yet another system to their workday.
Weekdone started as a pilot within a single team so we didn't have a formal evaluation and selection process. When the pilot was over, we had developed a skill and affinity for the tool with no clear objections, so no other tools were considered. Our process for regular evaluation of incumbent technology at renewal time asks us to consider the cost to value ratio and user adoption/satisfaction. I don't anticipate there being any reason to consider alternatives, other than the long term viability of small software companies.
Do you think Weekdone delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Weekdone's feature set?
Yes
Did Weekdone live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Weekdone go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Weekdone again?
Yes