teamfocus is an incredibly powerful project team management system that uses Workflows at its heart. A major part of this power comes from the customizability that teamfocus provides out of the box. Why is this customizability important?

The simple fact is that every company is different—or at least the successful ones differentiate themselves. In any given market there may be room for more than one company to be successful. In fact, there could be several market leaders.

In their 1995 book The Discipline of Market Leaders, authors Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema outlined three types of market leaders, based on their strategic focus:

• Companies that aim for operational excellence;
• Companies that are committed to product leadership; and,
• Companies that are dedicated to customer intimacy.

What should be immediately clear is that in order to successfully differentiate themselves along lines like these, companies will need to have remarkably differentiated strategies. These will dictate unique business processes, and thus the company aspiring for market leadership will require customized workflows.

If we look at a simple ordering process for a consumer electronics company, the processes might differ as follows:

• An operationally excellent company might offer a simple web form for customers that quickly integrates to the ordering, credit and shipping systems within the company so that the order ships quickly;
• A product leader might set itself up with a retail place to showcase its products to its customers, who can then purchase from stock, or order in for later delivery; or,
• A company dedicated to its customers might send a representative to the customer’s premises to determine their specific needs and wants and to provide a completely customized solution.

Although the end result is a customer ordering and receiving a product, the processes are very different, and the workflows within the company would need to be optimised. Using teamfocus as a system for task management for teams will help to keep everything together.

Every person in the company will need to be aware of the strategic focus (i.e. operational excellence, product leadership or customer intimacy) and their role within this. Processes and workflows need to be tied together seamlessly.

As stated a couple of weeks ago in our post of Personal Productivity for Teams:

most breakdowns in business processes occur not within the discrete process elements, but within handoffs (or transitions) between process elements…

So a true workflow cannot be a canned, out-of-the-box thing. It must be unique—unique to the company and its strategic focus.

As a web based task management solution teamfocus provides the ultimate flexibility in setting up customized employee task management capabilities. The workflows can be customized, and so can the reporting. This is something that should not be overlooked—there is an old saying that suggests ‘you get what you measure’.

The great thing about teamfocus is that it’s an online task management system for organizations large and small. With a free option for up to three users teamfocus can even be a family task manager.