Trust

I’m sure all founders love introducing their wares to new folks. I do too. At Omnivisto – we’re lucky to have a product that is ‘tactile and engaging’ with fairly broad appeal which usually makes dialogue easy and engaging.

Perhaps the most valuable output from any such discussion is not when someone engages enthusiastically with your product. But instead, when some hidden flaw (or viewpoint) is identified that you just hadn’t accounted for previously.

Not for lack of trying, Omnivisto have genuinely struggled a bit on this last point. Either we are not asking the right people or we’re asking the wrong questions. If you don’t like the Vistogram and don’t think it’s got a role to play in the delivery of change in enterprise settings, GET IN TOUCH! Omnivisto is eager to hear from you.

But Omnivisto does talk to people of course. That’s a core activity right now as we look to bring our product to market. Sometimes the narrative backs up what we have captured previously. Sometimes we see a variation on an existing theme. Routinely we get sight of new requirements which have previously gone unnoticed. There’s a lot of value for Omnivisto here and we’ll be poorer if we ever stop looking for new perspectives and listening to them.

Sometimes though, someone says something that makes us sit up and listen. Omnivisto is 4 years old this year and new benefits, new workloads and new settings in which the Vistogram might find a useful role are not a daily occurrence.

A few weeks ago – some clear thinking and fresh eyes offered that the Vistogram was perhaps first and foremost about trust. Barely a month later, a similarly fresh set of eyes looked at the Vistogram and said something very similar. As I sometimes like to say – this is a useful datapoint.

So how do we get from a Vistogram to trust? It’s simpler than you think. You’re looking at a regular Vistogram below . Nothing too exciting to see here but it’s worth noting some points which might be distinct to your existing business capabilities.

The activities below are (if you choose) drawn from the live schedule data. It’s not a PowerPoint presentation or an email. If we choose, we can link the Vistogram to whatever ‘system of record’ we want and what we will be looking at is as close to the source data as it’s possible to get.

And of course – we can do this for all activities in the portfolio. It’s a few clicks away in a web browser. We know what is planned and (at least) should be going on. We can check that it actually is going on and we can monitor, control or just stay informed as is our preference. That’s not quite trust but it is assurance and that’s worthwhile. Don’t take my word for it either – transparency builds trust.

Now let’s switch this from a radially formatted Vistogram to a rectilinear format (we really need a better name for it so suggestions welcome). The naysayers among you might say “…isn’t that just a Gantt chart?” and the answer is no for reasons that will become clear shortly.

The proprietary algorithms used by Omnivisto to create the Vistogram mean that it will always have a fixed x and y axis. Moreover, the Vistogram will always have a practically useful x and y axis and that means we can do this.

This fixing of (particularly) the vertical axis is a unique capability of the Vistogram. It’s a by-product of the requirement to create a standard and consistent visualization of schedule data when the input data is anything but (standard or consistent).

Beyond the assurance described above (i.e. you’ll know what’s going on and when), you will also be able to see at a glance key metrics or KPIs which the customer, budget holder or project stakeholders have deemed meaningful and appropriate.

To sum up, we’ve taken schedule data, turned it into information (the Vistogram) and synthesized that information with additional data (the KPIs) to provide insight. And, to top all that – we’ve published it in a web browser for non-experts in a format that engages. By doing this we have made the data more valuable.

Is attributing value a stretch at this point? Well if you are in presales / customer success arenas and you tell your prospective customers that they’ll have persistent access to this sort of insight during the implementation phase of your technology – then potentially you’ll have shorter sales cycles and bigger deal sizes. Or at least – that’s what one Customer Success specialist told me recently.

And if your prospects and customers see data presented this way and it helps your sales, then maybe Omnivisto will pick up a view customers on the way too. When reporting and tracking is this good, you might not trust anything else quite as much.

***Note.

Our current software and services absolutely can render charts and KPIs on top of a  Vistogram. We can (and will) produce a ‘rectilinear’ Vistogram in due course and it’s relatively straight-forward but we haven’t done it yet.