One of the biggest problems of modern companies is the inability of existing management systems to adapt to changes in business size. Every time your company grows or shrinks, it requires significant reconfiguration of all spreadsheets, systems, and tools to match the new scale.
To better understand what we are talking about, let's start with how we look at business. For us, any company is a field of combining resources into results. And every company has management systems that are involved in every business process as resources.
We divide the results in the Management Systems category into two types: basic needs management systems and project management systems.
Basic needs management systems manage everything that is naturally repeated in every company, regardless of niche, size, or location. Project management systems, on the other hand, include unique outcomes in each company that depend on niche, size, and other factors.
This separation allows us to determine which set of tools for managing specific dimensions to place in one product ecosystem. In this way, we can adapt the company's structure to changes, minimizing stress and freeing up resources for other processes.
To better understand, "Management Systems" is everything you use to manage results in a company: from calculations in your brain, notes in a notebook, spreadsheets of varying complexity, messengers, and complex ERP systems.
The current situation is that existing management systems do not "understand" changes in the size of the company, which leads to constant reconfiguration costs. Companies have to change formulas in spreadsheets, reconfigure links, modify instructions, and manage access in numerous software tools. This is especially difficult for small companies, where their life depends on project activities, and any error in the management system causes critical workloads. It often leads to the "death" of the company.
Observations show that the average age of a successful founder is over 40. I think it's not hard to guess why. After about 10-15 years, most companies manage to figure out how to combine and serve more efficiently.
By separating the basic needs into one ecosystem, where there is a "driver" and rules that the company has a composition of co-owners, a set of structural units that describe the business model, and a team that occupies these structural units to combine the company's resources into results, we were able to organize the organic growth of the company. By adding a structural unit to the model, we automatically expand most of the things needed to manage basic needs, and the company will be able to spend much less on servicing growth.
Imagine that a company is a living organism that is growing. It has a set of organs that develop simultaneously with it, a spine on which a set of organs has somehow been formed to fulfill basic needs. The brain is the only control system that does not think about the realization of basic needs, and for project activities, you need to study the subject and find external tools for implementation, if necessary.
Here's what we did: we were able to find models that describe the nature of the company's life, took the perspective of "Management Systems," and created a conditional division into systems for managing basic needs. Everything that is not included here remains on systems for managing project activities. And this is where the fun begins...
This is how we managed to find a solution that allows us to serve growth and changing models. No desktop devices are required to manage basic needs, such ecosystems can easily fit into a mobile application, and many other changes lead to an increase in the efficiency of the "field of combination." As a result, startups will have a much better chance of successfully launching their projects.
What we see today are just "counters with sets of organs" to create a management system in your company. You come, assemble the "organism," it lives, produces, communicates, sells. Everything seems to be fine, there are a lot of successful cases, but no one can measure how many resources are spent on maintaining this often illogical linkage of organs, because each case seems to be unique. And as soon as the company begins to change in size, all the settings and connections are destroyed because they forgot to fix the table, break a link, take away access to the account, or simply did not pay for some "organ" on time.
What we have today is neither good nor bad. If we put all the settings of companies on a scale from 0 to 1, we will get a certain level of normality today, and we only want this value to become better. We believe that when ecosystems for fulfilling basic needs appear on the market, the efficiency of combining resources will become higher, and the percentage of early stage mortality will significantly decrease, whatever it is today...
Project management systems will also reach a new level of development as a result of this paradigm shift; it will simply become easier for them.
We have already experienced this with mobile devices when iOS and the iPhone appeared, and now it is happening in the automotive industry, where I think soon there will be an OS (possibly TOS or COS) that will be used by most automakers.
We spent a lot of time to understand the subject of "business environment," to understand the model, the cause-and-effect relationships, to describe them. To understand where the real cause of the "problems" is, and what is likely to influence it, we first create "Solutions," show them, discuss them, and look for where we might be wrong in our assumptions. And only then, based on these solutions, we build products and companies that will supply them.
The war is slowing us down as a company; out of the 19 planned months of commercial version development, we have passed only 12. The goal of remaining a Ukrainian company (jurisdiction, co-owners) requires special resources, but I believe that everything will happen as it should and when it should, and all these delays will cause great acceleration in the future in relation to the company's main goals.
We don't have enough resources to develop products in the form of software, we have to constantly shift calculations in the financial model, and I miss the team very much. But there are enough resources to support the basic needs of the company and continue to develop and improve solutions that are created to solve problems experienced by 2.1 billion people in the world who are participants in the area of life that we call the business environment.
And the better we understand the subject matter, the better products the company will be able to produce, the less money will be spent, and the more comfortable the team will be with the implementation.
I hope that someone has read this far and understands how satisfying it is to realize that the probability of benefit to the environment from what you do tends to 1, not 0.
And one phrase that I really liked is: "The world will become a better place when someone is different..."
