The way you currently work? It doesn’t work.
There's been a change in how work gets done, from structured work to Dynamic Work. Digital transformation brought an explosion of new technology, all aimed at improving efficiency, collaboration, and productivity. This is more than we’ve seen in our over 20 years in the marketplace. Yet this all brings along with it Gray Work – the manual, tedious work we end up doing when our systems are still disconnected and don’t fit our needs. The world has moved past these disconnected solutions, and they've left a mess of problems in their wake.
Whatever industry you’re in, the way you work has changed, while projects get more complex. It takes coordination with more people, more flexibility, and more collaboration to get your most important work done. This is the era of Dynamic Work. And with continued uncertain economic conditions, wrangling and evolving to become a Dynamic Enterprise is more important than ever.
Look around—we’re seeing a productivity crisis. Our own research found that 58% of survey respondents spend less than 20 hours per week on meaningful work that adds value. This is especially critical in sectors that deliver complex portfolios of projects, like construction and manufacturing—projects that organizations across industries have to deal with. These challenges are the ones that have complex projects with physical and digital resources to coordinate. Think of building new infrastructure like Comcast did in building their next generation access network—it involves technology, physical assets, and lots of coordination.
The result is the need to find a new way of getting work done – what we call Dynamic Work Management. People have more on their plates, amid even more disruption than usual. And the work at hand is more dynamic—working with data from multiple systems, people from across your company, and even collaborators at other organizations.
Because of all this change, no single process will have the same set of requirements or specific needs every time. Until now, organizations have got away with working on spreadsheets or fitting core systems into their work, like jamming a square peg into a round hole. But the nature of dynamic work makes that impossible today.
Take Metso. The manufacturing company was struggling to coordinate their order management process, with order managers stuck digging through emails and other systems to find critical data. This made assignments easy to miss – and problems difficult to track. Centralizing all of their critical information on Quickbase has allowed them to pull in their ERP, inventory data, and more. Now, they can track data in real time, and customize reporting for high-priority orders. This has saved them over $1 million annually.
The Era of Dynamic Work
As a result, there is a need to find a new type of platform that goes beyond the complexity we've seen in the past. Not just individual productivity or small-team collaboration - the cross-functional Dynamic Work that is the most important to solve, involving more systems, data, and teams than before.
What these challenges require is the right people to have the right information at the right time. Siloed teams, systems, and even companies need to be in lockstep. And innovators across your entire business need to manage their information and processes, while IT securely controls who sees and does what.
The simple productivity tools designed to enable collaborative work are great for individuals managing tasks, sharing and reviewing documents, and understanding progress at a high level. Similarly, collaborative work management (CWM) tools can improve the way you manage individual teams and projects. These fall short of what modern work needs, unfortunately. Despite the recent success of CWM platforms, companies delivering complex programs still find themselves looking for more.
What they are looking for is the biggest opportunity a company has for scale and growth: managing highly complex programs that impact your functions and departments across your business every day. The cross-functional supply chain management, the real estate portfolios that require collaboration, the building projects that include multiple departments. The big, sticky work that drives your success.
Empowering the Dynamic Work Enterprise
To get across these complex operational processes and systems, standard technology won’t fit the bill. And investing in a new platform or tool for every single unique, complex project in your portfolio doesn’t make sense.
That’s where Quickbse’s Dynamic Work Management platform can unlock the potential of your people and empowering teams to customize how they manage each of their projects—all while keeping the control in IT’s hands through dashboards and reports. It goes beyond the ability of a ‘super-spreadsheet.’ It gives business innovators the ability to build enterprise applications and integrations without code. At the same time, IT can retain control over who builds and sees what.
Our research found that people are using 10 different systems on average to manage their projects. This means 10 different sets of information, and at least 10 different ways of interpreting what’s actually happening. Effective collaboration is nearly impossible. And it’s never the same 10 for every organization: our research found 77 different platforms that organizations use for their complex work. Quickbase’s no-code platform simplifies this, letting you connect your existing technology and create a single place where your people can find exactly the information they need, from any system at any time – without the clutter.
A partner to tackle your most critical work
At Quickbase, we want to help you accomplish your goals – particularly the ones that drive the focus of your functions and departments. Our platform helps you address the challenges at this level: those that impact the most people and processes across your business, but are underserved by existing technology in the market. We believe that solving the critical challenges in this space will usher in a new era of Dynamic Work.
And we think we’re on to something here—with over 20 years’ experience and nearly 6,000 customers, we’ve been able to deliver incredible results for our business and our customers. The more we see our customers succeed with their projects, from innovating prefabrication projects to managing complex order management, the more we feel confident in our vision.
Instead of leading existing categories, we’re more concerned with continuing to establish that Dynamic Work Management is truly the way modern work gets done, and filling the gaps that Gray Work creates.. That starts with clarity on goals, the people best equipped to solve them, and the ways that everyone’s work can impact them. And then attacking that work, as we like to say, All Together Now.
The right tools will let you do your work. Connecting those tools and the people using them with Quickbase will truly power this new era of Dynamic Work.
This blog was originally published on October 7, 2022, and updated on December 13, 2023.
