The core of our application are the processes, allowing organizations and their teams to easily customize project processes and implement their methodologies (design thinking, agile, etc) Once a process is defined, it can be saved as a template, automated  and scaled across an organization for consistent, repeatable process management that will guide the organization during each project and will save hours of work and coordination.

Teams build solutions and make decisions faster. 

With clear processes and a centralized space for collaboration, teams get work done faster. Organizations and their teams are more agile because they are able to start working following the steps of the process and spending less time coordinating and finding information about work.

Watch Nova in action!

When a project starts, project leads do their best to provide direction to the team and clarify as much information as they can. The bigger the team is and bigger are the responsibilities of the team lead the less time this person has to guide the team and the higher are the number of assumptions, time waited looking for templates, examples and emails sent to ask for clarification – but most importantly success is often at stake. The lack of guided collaboration and coordination between team members and their ideas and knowledge the more likely the project is to need to be reviewed and re-designed.

Nova reduces the mental anxiety that uncertainty and unclear processes create on teams. Cross-functional and remote teams can use Nova to make decisions, collaborate with the team while having the certainty of how things should be done.

Organizations often have individual domain knowledge holders who are in charge of mastering the process and communicating that process to the team. Nova helps integrate that knowledge into the same space where people work, and ensure that the knowledge remains once those important individuals leave the company. In addition to employees, this also includes consultants, experts, mentors and facilitators who can make their knowledge accessible to the team inside of Nova, which helps organizations implement expert processes long term.

New employees can learn and instantly follow processes and methodologies as they start working. They are guided during the whole process – reducing the amount of time a manager needs to spend explaining processes, requirements and the organization of files.

Productivity gains can occur when individuals and teams have the opportunity to focus uninterrupted and do what they do best, such as creating a brand campaign or designing a new product. However, employees spend less than half of their time during the day on the work that is critical to bringing value.  According to a survey conducted by McKinsey Global Institute of a broad set of knowledge workers:

• 28% of time is spent answering email;
• 19% of time is spent gathering information; and
• 14% of time is spent on internal communication.

While during the project implementation project management tools help organizations manage and track their tasks, during the thinking phase teams need a space to think, discuss, collaborate, gather data and make decisions following company standards and processes. While in project management I can manage simple tasks such as “Send an invoice to Maria” or “Share a new social media post” these actions don’t require collaboration, tools or processes. If the tasks are more complicated such as: “Create a marketing strategy” or “Design a new umbrella” the manager may include instructions about the objective, but the process is not clear, and is fully dependent on the individual. From an organization perspective this leaves success up to chance. Project management tools were primarily designed to focus on remembering simple actions and tracking completion of those actions, and do not fully unify process, implementation and tracking.

While applications like email, skype, teams, among others help teams communicate, they were not designed to provide a thinking system to guide the team and help the organization to make decisions and move forward efficiently. The average knowledge worker receives 121 emails per day—these emails and messages are used to mostly ask for status updates, clarification about processes or additional information about requirements. This doesn’t provide a clear picture of what steps need to be followed and most importantly these messages keep the team divided – while one person gets a message someone has already started working on it without those clarifications. Communication ends up dividing the team and making decision-makers spend most of their time answering emails instead of providing value to the team.

Teams today must navigate work that is increasingly cross-functional and distributed, while also making the right decisions and moving quickly to meet objectives. For example, a product launch usually requires coordination across multiple departments—product management, engineering, marketing, sales, and customer support. In some cases these hierarchical processes centralize managers as decision makers but also as bottlenecks because all the thinking process and requirements depend on their ability to communicate how to meet each objective across teams. Organizations cannot afford to be slowed down by inefficient processes. Individuals and teams need to be empowered to design their own processes, manage their work, change course when needed, and make autonomous decisions aligned with organizational goals to ensure business agility in rapidly changing markets.

Clarity drives employee engagement and happiness.

Team members work on projects and tasks that are often not required. This happens because of the lack of clarity and need of team members to make assumptions to be able to move their work forward. This constant uncertainty makes organizations lose their team engagement as effort is not observed as a good thing, but rather as an inefficiency. Organizations and their teams must be able to provide clear workflows from a higher perspective all the way to smaller tasks and steps,, while making sure employees feel aligned with their team, and have clear expectations and roadmap to do their job well. This is an opportunity for organizations to create clear processes, track progress and keep improving processes using data about employee engagement to make their efforts as rewarding as possible.

There is no easy way to guide the team without a meeting, and companies are having problems finding the right time to schedule meetings around different time zones.

Teams today are more distributed than ever. Teams are often working with other departments and inviting collaborators from outside the organization to some work session to get a broader perspective.

The traditional meeting remains the same using alternative technologies – while employees believe most of the meetings they are assigned to were unnecessary.

With Nova, you can facilitate meetings automatically asynchronously. 

As the world is rapidly changing, CEOs and Executive teams must be able to come up with cutting-edge solutions, adapt to new trends and technologies and innovation. Even though 84% percent of executives and CEOs said they believe innovation is key for their long-term success, a McKinsey study revealed their inefficient capacity to innovate due to the lack of a formalized way to align their team and formalize their processes.

Despite the growth in collaboration technology, there has been little improvement in innovation and process development to help organizations and their team to plan, manage, and guide their collective thinking to better innovate and make decisions.

Traditional hierarchies often centralized managers, experts and consultants as the decision-makers and these provide instructions and clarify information for team members, meaning that thousands of emails and messages are sent before contributors and team members have the clarity they need to execute on work.

We provide the first guided collaboration space for effective thinking. We enable organizations and their teams to make better decisions and design better solutions and strategies while improving employee engagement and allowing everyone to know what, who, when and how they will reach their goals and how their contributions connect to a broader vision of the organization.