WHAT ARE THE TOOLS IN THE MARKET?
Firstly, there are many tools for online phoning in the market - from Skype for Business to Zoom and more professional conferences, teleconferences with rich functionality.
There are all kinds of systems that allow you to register business processes.
However, all systems for organizing labor, i.e. ERP systems, have several main disadvantages.
1. The first major con is that they are complicated, that is the transition to full usage of these systems requires from three months to six months.
2. The second con - these systems are not designed for flexible task management. They require more serious and long-term planning. Most of these systems are not suitable for Agile. And in a crisis, long-term planning is inefficient.
Currently all companies urgently need to become flexible as fast as possible to survive in the market- because all companies have suddenly turned into startups.
Here is an example with real estate. All real estate is built on the fact that apartments were bought and rented out, on AirB & B, for instance, and then the tourist market sharply collapsed.
So, now we urgently need to sell apartments but nobody buys them, the demand is low because there is a crisis; either the customers have to pay a mortgage for these apartments or something else that they hadn't.
Then the entrepreneur will either come up with a new solution or not .
None of these actions have an extensive planning involved. In the new market conditions you need to:
• Qualitatively test hypotheses
• aim to hold anti-crisis planning meetings daily
• Try to quickly and cheaply test additional entrepreneurial moves in your business
Programs like Success factor, Jira and Trello will not help companies in this areas because they are focused on long-term project activities and on linear management of operational activities. However, most modern companies require tools for organizing in a high flexibility and change environment. The good news is, there are already few such tools, and most of these tools have disadvantages.
That is, the market has a huge number of tools for planning activities - they allow flexible management, these are scrum boards, flexible trackers. But here is the problem. It just happened so that before the crisis, they were used by small startups and small departments - well, because it was their market. It was not that medium or large business had to be abruptly flexible - it calmly earned his money.
And so most of these tools were tailored to the audience of a small team that did not have complex resource problems and organizational structure. And basically, these were digital and product teams and marketing, but by no means an operational business, such as purchases, retail, security, etc. There were no trackers there and no start-ups were used, because they already worked without any digitalization.
Eventually:
• There is a solution for large business on the market, but it is heavy and not suitable for crisis management and does not give the opportunity to manage flexibly.
• The tools that are available on the market for flexible management are not suitable for large and medium-sized businesses, because they were never aimed at this segment - because this segment was never interested in crisis management in such a massive mode as it is now.
It just so happened it's fortunate that we have a tool that allows, on the one hand, to solve the problem of planning, coordination of activities, and organizational structure, and business efficiency, productivity in crisis management, flexible management. But on the other hand, we were previously focused on large and medium-sized businesses.
That is, we took the issue of large budgets, complex organizational structures, complex departments and large numbers. We just got lucky. This is our time.