Product

Bridging the gap

Lately, it seems like things have been evolving faster than ever over here at Bloomfilter. Without exaggeration, it’s fair to say that we’re on the verge of launching one of the biggest and most significant updates yet to the platform. These include some important changes to how Bloomfilter handles priorities, financials, and process flows, as well as a transition toward a consumption-based pricing model. 

We’ll be getting into the details of all of these very soon in some future posts, so watch out for that. But before we do, it’s worth taking some time to review one of the key ways Bloomfilter is helping businesses improve their development cycles.

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So here’s the problem

Obviously, peel back the surface of any company and you’re going to find a series of development cycles. These can be related to anything — such as production, marketing, or sales — but will all have a series of activities meant to produce a specific outcome. They’re usually no more than two weeks long. But this doesn’t mean they’ll iterate at the same time. In fact, more likely than not, they’ll all exist on their own time intervals.

And that’s okay, so long as everything is properly synced to the business’s annual planning cycle. The way this is often done is by using some kind of planning process (like SAFe) to match up the two-week development cycles with the longer business processes. And the way we see that usually getting done is some CTO or CPO going through an Excel or PowerPoint doc, trying their best to explain how everything lines up.

As you can probably guess, this is where the problems begin. Not only are the results of this kind of process imperfect, they’re imperfect in two distinct ways. 

First, there’s the way information moves upstream from the operational layer to the executives. As this happens, critical aspects of it can get lost. Like a game of telephone, the data moving from node to node can quickly become distorted and unclear. Political dynamics can also come into play as different people silo information and slow down the flow. Before long, the separate development and business cycles won’t just be out of sync — they’ll be drifting wildly apart.

Second, there’s the flow of information as it moves downstream from the executives to the operational layer. The big issue here is when PMs, developers, and other employees aren’t able to get a good understanding of which aspects of their work create the most business value. Without having the proper business context, they also may not know which information to share on which cadence, or may run into challenges when it comes to aligning resources.

All this is to say that, so long as meetings, PowerPoints, and Excel docs remain the primary medium for transferring information from executive priorities to operational execution, problems around timeframes, accuracy, and more are likely to persist. And the more layers of complexity you add to this, the worse it will become.

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So long as meetings, PowerPoints, and Excel docs remain the primary medium for transferring information from executive priorities to operational execution, problems around timeframes, accuracy, and more are likely to persist.

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A quick note

As anyone with experience knows, none of this is unique to the SDLC. In fact, you’ll find these kinds of issues in every business process. 

The CRO knows this — it’s why they use tools like Salesforce and Clari to ensure they’re taking care of risks and other issues in real-time. And the CFO knows this too — it’s why they use ERPs and process mining tools like Celonis to get real-time visibility into their processes. 

Of course, just because it’s a known problem elsewhere doesn’t mean that satisfying solutions have so far cropped up for the SDLC.

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How Bloomfilter solves the problem

The problem, vastly simplified, comes down to an information transmission issue. Excel, PowerPoint, and other manual existing processes are doing a poor job of bridging the gap between the executive and operational levels. 

But we’ve designed our Initiatives feature to take care of all this for you by syncing up the executive planning and strategy cycles, then placing it inside of an operational system that gets updated in real-time. This means every query happens in the same system, requiring far fewer nodes of transmission and reducing unnecessary lags and delays that might otherwise cost you time and money.

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The result turns this:

Into this:

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Let’s take a look at how it all works

1. You’ll first identify your initiatives. These refer to any strategic goals or objectives you want to accomplish. Required fields will include a name, description, and a target end date.

2. Next, you’ll want to assign a business value. While this can be arbitrary (1-10), you may be able to increase its business value if you can assign it a dollar value.
3. Then you’ll want to map the initiatives to the work being done to support them (epics in Jira)
4. Once you’ve begun your initiative, you’ll be able to easily track it all the way through completion:

5. You’ll also be able to see which key work products are contributing to the initiative, as well as how well is work getting done there:

6. And you can get a detailed look at the teams that are supporting the initiative, including how much of their focus is actually going toward this work (as opposed to other things):

7. Click a level deeper on any of these graphs to see the individual tasks and work units that make this up

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“Bloomfilter is the only platform I have ever seen that allows me to understand and quantify the business value all the work that’s happening inside my organization …. And it does it in realtime. This allows me to sync my planning and execution in an incredibly powerful way. 

– Michael Keithley - CIO @ UTA

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Summary

The way information gets shared and exchanged in your organization matters. Although certain processes may seem baked in, it’s worth taking a closer look at what is actually happening below the surface. By making your operational cycles observable in real-time, Bloomfilter’s Initiatives features will help you see how well you are actually syncing up with your larger strategic plans and objectives. And that’s the first step toward making you more predictable and, ultimately, efficient.