Did you know that AchieveIt isn’t just for strategic planning and strategy execution? Our customers use AchieveIt to track and monitor a variety of projects and plans. Using our platform, a subsidiary of one of the largest utility companies in the country reduces risk and keeps 1500 employees safe. A healthcare system uses AchieveIt to monitor critical KPIs across geographic regions – and within each department. Others level up the execution of operational plans, track activity across large project portfolios, and monitor process improvement and cost reduction initiatives.
Here are the top 7 most common ways customers use AchieveIt:
1. Organizational Strategic Planning
Most organizations start by tracking their organizational strategic plan in Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, or Word. These plans typically involve setting a course for the future and developing capabilities that the organization doesn’t currently have. Since efficient plan tracking requires input from a variety of managers and directors, manual tracking in other tools becomes unwieldy and inefficient. It becomes difficult to quickly see the status of any single initiative, know-how up-to-date that information is, and have any sort of context around the state of the project.
Once an organization reaches this point, they’re a great candidate for immediate improvement with AchieveIt. Hal Levitt, Executive Director of Strategic Execution at Save Mart Supermarkets, says, “With AchieveIt, we can see in real-time how the staff and teams in all three divisions are making progress—or not— toward reaching goals.”
2. Departmental and Service-Line Plans
If an organization doesn’t have an enterprise-level strategic plan, it’ll often have each department or service line develop its own individual plan. AchieveIt helps organizations pull these disparate departmental plans into one centralized location, providing an overview across departments and the ability to all work together. We’ve had several customers realize that multiple departments were working on similar initiatives and duplicating work. A central location for all plans and initiatives prevents this from happening and fosters collaboration between teams.
AchieveIt gave Save Mart’s managers and teams the opportunity to transform their performance data and activity into actionable insights. This kind of capability would be challenging for any company, but especially so for a complex operation like Save Mart, spanning multiple locations, geographies, business models, and brands. Says Save Mart’s Project Management Office Leader, Frank Troglione, “It allows us to see how all the various departments are working and how they can work together more seamlessly. We can often see problems individual departments may not see on their own. Then we can alert them and check if support is needed to help solve the issue.”
3. Operational Execution
Ideally, strategic initiatives are broken into projects or goals that are tracked in an operations plan. Think about the strategic plan as managing the vision for the future, while the operational plan runs the day-to-day business. These plans also often live in Excel documents with hundreds of rows. Operational projects are often tracked on a monthly basis, and many of them have more binary tracking measures than strategic initiatives; either the operational project was completed, or it wasn’t.
For example, a large university needed a way for its six medical campuses and many employees to easily report on more than 20 new initiatives as part of a $75 million grant opportunity.
4. Risk Management
Organizations in highly regulated industries, such as utility providers, are required to track a variety of risk mitigation and compliance plans. As one of our customers said, “When I saw AchieveIt, I realized it was perfect. We can directly map our existing risk management plans into the open platform exactly how we want them. We can set up accountabilities and automatic reminders for project owners to record their updates, so we don’t have to use ‘people hours’ to badger team members for updates – calling, emailing, or compiling PowerPoints or Word Documents.”
Many companies have clear risk and compliance plans but lack an easy, quick, and efficient way to track improvement and mitigation activities. Every audit typically creates a long to-do list of items that need to be completed ASAP, and AchieveIt can help track that information. In the words of our customer Dina, Program Director for Performance Improvement for the University of Wisconsin Transplant Program, “We really appreciate the consistency across how we are documenting. I actually can’t wait for CMS Surveyors to come and ask about our projects. I’ll literally open AchieveIt and say, ‘What would you want to see? Take your pick.’ It’s revolutionary.”
5. Portfolio Management
Larger organizations can use AchieveIt to track entire portfolios of projects, across regions, business units, subsidiaries, or departments. For these customers, AchieveIt provides an easy way to look across previously-siloed areas of activity, and easily see progress toward the most critical initiatives in each.
For example, before AchieveIt, CHRISTUS Health’s Program Manager of Strategy Management said, “Imagine – the Chief Strategy Officer would walk down the hall, and say ‘I need to know how we’re performing on all of our ambulatory strategies – in the next 45 minutes.’ And we couldn’t quickly and easily say, ‘Here’s how they’re performing.’” Now, she says, “[With AchieveIt], we’ve been able to track our performance like never before. Being able to actually see the numbers, and see not just how each hospital or region is performing, but how the health system as a whole is performing is incredible.”
6. Project and Initiative Management
Projects and initiatives can range greatly in size. An executive at a major coffee retailer shares, “Imagine – our operations engineer would update the project tracker with the full design details for one location. That’s a full page for one location – and then there are 30 more coming down the pipe. And he has to find a vacuum cleaner that we can use in every retail location nationwide. We’ve got all these big and little things, and it’s all important work. Our teams out in the field rely on us to provide what they need to be successful and take care of our guests.”
So how do you track projects that are at the scale of launching a new brand and opening 30 new locations, while also finding vacuum cleaners and a new supplier for stir sticks? Initially, this customer used Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint, but, “It was just so cumbersome to manage. It’s safe to say my team LOVES AchieveIt. It has changed the way we work. When a new initiative comes up, everyone immediately says, ‘Put it in AchieveIt.’ It’s designed to help focus on the goals of this type of department. It’s simple to use and saves time.”
7. Process Improvement and Cost Reduction
Organizations are constantly looking for ways to operate more efficiently and for less cost. The outputs of these efforts often take the form of a process improvement or cost reduction plan which outlines the projects and initiatives necessary to drive change in a certain area. One of our customers tracks these projects in 90-day sprints. They identify 20-30 initiatives that can be completed in three months, then track the process of completion on a weekly basis. This keeps the initiatives top-of-mind for all the individuals involved and gives plenty of opportunities to get projects back on track if anything unexpected happens.
How Can We Help You?
Curious to see if AchieveIt could help you track and monitor your plans and projects? Sign up for a demo with a product specialist. We’ll learn more about your current processes, share a few quick facts about AchieveIt, and let you decide if you’d like to continue the conversation from there.
Ready to improve your plan execution?
Organizations of all types leverage AchieveIt to manage, execute, and connect their most important initiatives. Replace manual processes & siloed systems with interconnected plans in a single, automated platform.
