My company is using the Gazelles strategic planning framework (www.gazelles.com). For reference, the first book was Mastering The Rockefeller Habbits and the revised one is called Scaling Up.
As many folks on this forum have commented, there needs to be improved high level tracking tools to help with strategic planning. Right now I’m stuck in an awkward place of having the day to day work of my teams in Asana, which works great, but the strategic plan is in the www.aligntoday.com software (built specifically to mirror the Gazelles framework)…and so I found myself yesterday wondering how I was going to build the crosswalk between them.
my use case of the two software platforms is very specific. So more generally - has anyone been using the Gazelles framework in Asana and how did you set it up? Thanks!
Hi @Kristian_Sekse - Sorry to see we haven’t had any replies here yet. I’m unfamiliar with the Gazelles planning framework but I’m interested in learning more.
I’m not sure if it would be helpful to you, but we have lots of folks here discussing the GTD methodology. Here is an example thread:
Also, if you’re interested in connecting two software apps, you might consider a tool like IFTTT, Zapier, or Tray.io.
Thanks @Alexis. The GTD seems very in line with Asana’s (and my) methodology for sure. Gazelles has more of a blend of task-based things (Asana great at) with metric and KPI based things. Here is a screen grab of what the dashboard looks like. Could you visualize a way to have Company Wide metrics like Align does in Asana?
While Asana does not have a visual exactly like the one you’ve shared, we have a few options for sharing company wide metrics. It sounds like conducting an advanced search would be a positive option for you. You may also want to create unique dashboards. I recommend that you take a look at these resources:
The company I worked for before I retired used the Gazelle System in the last two years I was there. As I have used both systems I can make some pretty good observations. As Gazelles publishes there key form online Gazelles.pdf (2.4 MB)
free to the world I attached it so their is a better perspective. Asana offers you an opportunity to be much more powerful in the execution of specific tasks necessary to accomplish KPI’s or OKR sometimes used interchangeably. Rhythm Systems Learn is very similar in some content to Gazelles. In the end I think the key integration is going to be in delineating your KPI’s and the executable tasks to achieve. This kind of goes along with two frequent statements.
“Vision without execution is hallucination” - Thomas A. Edison
"only a small percentage of people have specific, well-defined goals. And people who most frequently reach their goals are those who write them down and develop the plans to reach them”.
There are a number of posts on KPI’s and OKR’s on this blog and how they are set up but I think one of the better resources is available through one of our Asana Champions @Todd_Cavanaugh at www.projectmanagementpros.com. He has a specific portion of his course that I think has great similarities to what you try to accomplish in Gazelles.
We have two other full time Asana Consultants that frequent this board also, @Sebastian_Paasch and @paulminors. Sebastian has a tremendous post on the board Deleted
And back to @Todd_Cavanaugh course I have attached an extract of his course material menu.
. As his course is Asana A-Z I think it would be a valuable resource in transitioning your team to use Gazelle principles with a Asana software thus allowing you to eventually not have to use Gazelles. With the integration to 4 of the storage services, ie Dropbox, Google Drive, Box and OneDrive, Asana will give you great flexibility to have collaborative reports required by Gazelles. Use of Asana’s custom fields will provide you additional resources to re-work Asana to be used a the Gazelles tool. Hope this helps
Thanks @James_Carl for getting me into this conversation.
I am not familiar with the Gazelles system but as far as I remember, my friend @Arkadi_Jampolski used it in his company? Or was it another one ?
For high level goals and company alignment I can recommend OKRs a lot, you find more about how Google is scaling its business with it and how to implement with Asana here:
From my point of view, we should use as few tools as possible, so if another software is perhaps 10% better to vizualize your company objectives, I would still strongly recommend to have it in Asana, because
Less complexity
Less friction for employees
Better alignment with day to day to dos
Less work, since you only have to update one source of truth
There is also a great piece of content from Dustin Moskovitz and Jennifer Nan from Asana:
thx @Sebastian_Paasch for mentioning @James_Carl we got some inspirations from Scaling UP, good book btw.
We use sections in asana for the different form fields from Gazelles. Pretty basic. Then we’re creating a roadmap project with “master tasks”. These tasks are basically the big things we wanna do on a quarterly basis. The Rocks or Key Initiatives… I’m thinking about adding a custom field with a %-progress indicator for setting up Dashboards.
Then the major task gets its own project and the according project team members. It gets multi-homed from the roadmap into its own project. It sits there on top of the tasks the project team is doing and gets annotated and edited.
Things that aren’t goals with an assignee (e.g. Purpose) are also in the asana roadmap but they get communicated in company gatherings and management planning sessions. We don’t work with these in asana.
Generally, I’m not an expert in Gazelle’s framework and we only use bits and pieces from it. Hope you got some ideas out of my comment.
Hi everyone- I’m so sorry for the long radio silence. It has been awesome reading all your comments and suggestions and I will be doing some more thinking about how to use the google sheets integration to help solve some of my company dashboard challenges. Did a quick beta test yesterday and it seemed to work pretty well. I’m thinking if I can use a combination of dashboards and Google I could get it to work.
I’ll post back once I sketch it out more. Thanks again!
Make sure you do your homework and references on coach selection. Our coach led us through the general principals of Gazelles which is very good but was very weak on helping people develop executable plans and using collaborative tools even their own software.
Do a search for OKR or KPI in this forum and it will give you a wealth of material to visualize the bridge between Gazelles and Asana. Here is a start.
It seems your team needs good management - something I had experience with in the past. I think you should establish good connections between the members of the team by reorganizing their work. You may try different software, there is one great option for enteros/solutions, it’s good for both proper data processing and establishing a working pipeline for the team. Functionality and flexibility are important now, but it’s also stable and can be used in one’s discretion.
