What’s It All About?

People working together to accomplish something requires dialog. Much of this dialog involves one person making a request of another. These person-to-person conversations are the building blocks for managing workflow and executing corporate initiatives. Current tools are not effective for tracking and reporting on these conversations. Requests made through email have no database or workflow structure and status gets lost. Task and project management tools enable assigning of tasks, but there is no required response indicating agreement to perform, nor visibility into the dialog about work-in-progress.

Projects fail too often; and failure rates are higher than statistics would indicate as unsuccessful initiatives are often hidden behind redefined outcomes. All failed projects fail for the same fundamental reason—agreements have not been kept. Agreements are either missing entirely, flawed at the start, poorly tracked, or just not delivered on. Facts around the project are lost to organizational memory and learning is curtailed.

The smallest unit of cooperative action is the conversation that takes place between a requester and a performer. In neither email nor traditional project management solutions is there any visibility into that conversation.

The key distinction in the 4 Spires solution is a negotiated commitment. To achieve a negotiated commitment the requester is obliged to make a clear and specific request describing their desired outcome(s) and expected due date. Then the performer must provide an explicit response by agreeing to the request, proposing a counter-offer, or declining. The dialog progresses with more precision and more energy, and it is documented until a real commitment is made. Commitments drive actions that lead to results.

Users identify a performer and describe their request and desired due date, thus beginning a conversation for taking action together.

* Workflow system tracks the agreement and progression status. Each participant is presented with the appropriate context for making the next response and with only the actions appropriate to the current stage of the conversation.
* Captures a complete dialog thread of every action and associated comment by all parties in the context of the request.
* Extensive automatic date tracking shows who took what action on which dates.
* List Views show all commitments the user has made to others and commitments others have made to them. Commitments are tracked by requester, performer, due date, status, and by project.
* Displays hierarchical relationship of parent-to-child network of commitments. Users can drill down to view subordinate commitments.

The software instantiates a closed-loop conversation model and assists users by enforcing and documenting the progress of the agreement from negotiation through to completion.

Behind the interface is a MySQL database. Passwords and comments are encrypted.

The interface to your requests is accessible anywhere in your browser.

All transactions conducted in the system are documented via email to the participants.
* Users are notified of actions through email and can link directly from email to conversation details to respond to or advance the conversation.
* User entries/updates are copied to their email for parallel tracking and alerts.