by Stephen Danos
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by Stephen Danos
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In order to gain a competitive advantage in today’s business world, companies need to make speed a habit and accelerate workflows, all while avoiding the Red Queen Effect: working faster and harder to stay in the same place.

As pressure to innovate grows, companies need to continuously improve on their products and processes, taking in to account internal observations and customer feedback. This means being proactive and, like experienced chess players, thinking several steps ahead to compete without sacrificing quality.

The combination of a clear foundational vision, organizational alignment, and emphasis on speed allows business leaders to build successful, cross-functional teams. Once these are firmly in place, businesses can run faster and smarter.
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by Brendan Reed
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When it comes to getting work done via mobile devices, you often need to update content or data, and make quick, simple changes on the go.

We spoke with customers, gathered feedback, and created a mobile app experience that helps them stay in step with their work.

Today, we are proud to release the next version of the Smartsheet mobile app — available for iOS and Android — that will help you get more done, wherever you work.
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by Staff Writer

Project managers at companies of all sizes have to choose from an ever-evolving collection of work management techniques. Out of the gate, they need to know if a given methodology — whether it’s Lean, Waterfall, or Agile — fits with their company and cross-functional department objectives, culture, and speed of business.

So, how do you know which work management techniques are the most important? And which ones will actually help make your project a success? Many factors can hinder the success of a project,  but the critical path method can help keep projects on track and budget.
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While it was originally a time-consuming, hand-drawn set of diagrams, today you can use Smartsheet, a work execution platform, to instantly track the critical path or the most important tasks that, if missed, will delay your entire project — with just a click of a button.
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Here’s what you need to know about critical path, why you should use it in your next project, and how Smartsheet helps you tie critical path to automated actions, status updates, and approvals to help your team move faster than ever before.
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by Staff Writer
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In order to keep up with momentum, high-growth companies are consistently expanding their workforces – in the private sector alone, job creation has been on the rise for seven straight years.

But adding new headcount isn’t a guarantee your growing needs will be met. The speed at which businesses run today requires new employees to hit the ground running.

Unfortunately, onboarding processes — the mechanisms through which new employees learn the skills, cultural norms, and other requirements they need to succeed — can often be lacking. In one recent study, more than three quarters of HR leaders reported that onboarding processes are underutilized at their companies.

In the long term, successful onboarding helps to drive employee engagement and job satisfaction. But more immediately, having a well-designed onboarding process ensures that new employees have all the tools and knowledge they need to succeed — and to succeed fast.  

Here are five ways to accelerate new employee productivity and make the most out of new talent.
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by Stephen Danos

When leaders move with speed, whether in decision-making or in running efficient meetings, the benefits can spread throughout an entire organization.

Studies show that leaders ranked in the top 10 percent based on their leadership speed see positive results in the attitudes of their direct reports — 63 percent of whom say they would do everything possible to make their company successful.

That’s according to the book Speed: How Leaders Accelerate Successful Execution, in which the authors propose that there is no statistical downside to speed, as long as leaders take the time to periodically pause and reassess whether their efforts are aligned to their organization's overall strategy.

Business leaders who avoid these five common pitfalls can motivate their teams to execute more quickly — and at a higher level.
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by David Lotz

by Stephen Branstetter
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I covet more time: more time for important work, more time with my spouse and kids, more time with friends, more time to work out and get healthy.

I used to hate creating weekly status reports. While important, they felt like a waste of time. Often, my status reports were simply a manual process of collecting data that already exists elsewhere mixed with tracking down people for further clarification.

So I started playing around with ways to simplify the process and save time using Smartsheet.

Automated actions are simple solutions that save me and my team time, reduce the number of status meetings, create more consistency in the frequency of our reports, and improve data quality.

And these benefits free us up to focus on more rewarding projects and less on manual, repetitive tasks.
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by Stephen Danos
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At the enterprise level, these undesired outcomes tend to stem from problems caused by increased organizational complexity, murky accountability, and an overabundance of data that cause decision makers to suffer from analysis paralysis.

Getting on the path to better decision making starts with recognizing and addressing these challenges — often with the help of the right enterprise-grade work-execution tool.
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by Staff Writer
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If you feel like you’re under pressure to make business decisions faster than ever before, you’re not alone. According to a Harvard Business Review report, 65 percent of managers say they face shrinking decision-making windows. And once a decision is made, three-quarters say they’re on the hook to achieve results in less time.

There’s good reason for businesses to push for speedy decision making. In a review of traits linked to organizational health, McKinsey researchers found that the majority of businesses that measured high for agility also ranked within the top quartile of overall business health. Agility is defined as speed of decision-making combined with stability, or having clear operating goals and metrics.

So how can organizations make faster decisions more easily? Start by letting go of these three things that can get in the way of moving fast.
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