Building the Next-Generation Enterprise platform
Have you ever questioned yourself ‘why’ it is so hard and complicated to become a self-organized company? Well, if you did, I can already tell you a secret, you’re not the only one!
Looking back in the time
When we started holaSpirit 2 years ago, we were enthusiastic about building a software for organizations that want to organize in a holistic way, using Holacracy as their set of rules. We didn’t know that this would become so fascinating!.
Frankly, 2016 was a challenging year as we first thought that companies will directly consider holaSpirit once they have chosen for a Holacracy structure. However, this thought was completely wrong as most of the companies choose Holacracy and the tool comes automatically with coaching and training sessions in the consultancy firm toolbox. Having discovered this fact, developing all of the features requested by the Holacracy coaches became our main priorities last year. And that is exactly what we’ve been doing since last year — delivering new features on a weekly basis.
What we’ve learned from our Journey
As a SaaS provider, we rapidly experienced the need for integrating other tools into our platform to make its practice more efficient and productive. We discovered that using multiple tools for different purposes can create confusion, duplication and a lot of time loss. For this reason, we integrated some of the best apps for project management and online communication purposes. Examples of these apps are Trello, Asana, Jira, Slack, Google Hangout and Zoom etc.
Moreover, as a Holacracy practitioner ourselves, we designed new processes — the so-called Holacracy apps — to reinvent the way we organize our HR and Finance activities on a daily basis. Practicing these new ways made us realize the need for tools that are fully integrated with holaSpirit and that is why we started to consider this domain.
Last but not least, another important discoveries was the fact that many organizations experienced some difficulties in using holaSpirit when they didn’t receive any Holacracy coaching or training. And to be honest, we’ve made a lot of effort to understand how to solve this general issue. One of the things we considered was to adapt our software to the level and knowledge of any type of organisation. However, we didn’t choose this option as we thought there might be a better way.
A platform that supports Self-Organization
Having this holistic way of organizing in mind, we’ve chosen to think broader and move towards a company that offers a platform for the Next-Generation Enterprises that supports them in their transition to become self-organized.
Below are the few challenges we will try to solve:
1/ How to on-board new organization that want to make an easy first step on their way to a « teal organization » starting with a new org design based on a clear separation of roles and people.
2/ How to help organizations to connect their roles with all their stuff: projects, task, objectives and key results, …
3/ How to help organization to support new Self-management practices, especially in the HR area.
4/ How to help organisations that have chosen Holacracy as their OS to develop a good practice on a daily basis
5/ How to make this happen as simple as 1, 2, 3 in terms of features, user interface and user experience in general.
To summarize, how to build a platform for the Next-Generation Enterprise, supporting new way of working, new governance, new HR practices.
To be continued.
