How To Make A Business Case For Columinity
While teams easily recognize the power of Columinity to help them improve, it is often harder to sell it to management. We offer three tips to help convince management.
What is the business case for Columinity? Teams quickly recognize the potential of Columinity. It provides teams with immediate, evidence-based feedback based on scientific teaming models to improve their effectiveness. But getting management to invest in team effectiveness is not always easy, which can be frustrating for teams eager to start.
In this post, we help make a strong internal business case for Columinity.
Tip 1: Focus on the challenge, not the tool
Columinity is a powerful tool, certainly. But introducing tools on their merits rarely works. It works better to focus on what it can do for your organization and its teams. What challenges can it help resolve? What bottlenecks can it highlight and remove?
Columinity excels at highlighting challenges that hinder your organization's potential. The success of every organization depends on how effectively
work flows through teams. Teams are where strategies become reality. Where planning, problem-solving, and decision-making happen every day. When organizations face challenges—unclear direction, bottlenecks, or poor coordination—these issues show up first and most clearly within teams.
Here are some of the challenges that customers use Columinity with:
- One customer struggled with team stability, and wanted to understand how and where instability impacted teamwork and team effectiveness.
- Another customer wanted to improve management support in those areas where it was needed, by measuring where gaps existed and how this impacted team effectiveness.
- A customer introduced a program-oriented structure, and wanted early warning signs when it negatively impacted teamwork, coordination and dependencies.
- Another customer struggled with a legacy product architecture that created tight coupling between many teams, thereby reducing responsiveness.
We recommend to introduce Columinity in relation to a real challenge experienced by teams and management. How would this challenge surface in the data collected by Columinity? What early warning signs could it offer? What creative solutions could it help generate? And how can it help implement those solutions and measure their impact over time? That way, the business case for Columinity is to resolve real challenges and unleash the potential of your organization.
Tip 2: Cut Costs With Columinity
Can Columinity reduce costs? While we prefer to focus on how it can improve conditions for teams, and improve business effectiveness, sometimes the most compelling argument for management is to show how it can reduce costs.
Yes, Columinity can help here in a number of ways:
- Lower turnover costs by improving job satisfaction and well-being.
- Reduce time wasted on meetings and work that isn't productive.
- Optimize coaching costs by making interventions targeted and effective.
- Cut training expenses by identifying what teams actually need.
Our ROI ranges from 400% to 4,000% depending on context. More importantly, Columinity establishes a solid baseline for measuring the effectiveness of other investments, such as coaching, hiring, and training. Read more about how Columinity helps cut costs in this blog post.
Tip 3: Columinity and other tools
Organizations often use various tools to collect data. Sometimes, these are home-grown maturity models. Other times, they are metrics originating from DORA, DevEx or Azure DevOps. Introducing more tools is not always greeted with enthusiasm.
How does Columinity compare to other options?
- Compared to home-grown solutions, Columinity is built on empirically tested, peer-reviewed, validated scientific surveys. This ensures that you are actually measuring the right things correctly. More importantly, you can compare results with benchmarks (like industries, world regions, company sizes, etc.), which is not possible with home-grown solutions.
- Compared to DORA, DevEx and Azure DevOps, Columinity is not restricted to software teams. DORA and Azure DevOps focus on delivery frequency, whereas Columinity focuses on team effectiveness (do the outcomes actually satisfy customers and teams alike).
- Compared to DevEx, Columinity focuses on teams rather than individual productivity.
- Columinity is built on a team-first approach. Results are shared directly with teams, accompanied with extensive evidence-based feedback to help them improve. Results across teams are available in the Teams Dashboard and Coaching Center.
- Columinity offers very strong anonymity protections to avoid micro-management of individuals.
We encourage organizations to use Columinity in conjunction with other tools (like DORA, DevOps) to paint a more complete picture. With the Columinity API (“Enterprise”-plan), it is also possible to integrate results into dashboards like PowerBI.
Download our pitch deck
Want to introduce Columinity internally? Try one of our Pitch Decks to help you make the case. In 10 slides, the deck shows how improving your teams benefits your business and highlights our unique benefits.
Download our English pitch deck. You can also download a Dutch, German, French or Romanian version, thanks to our kind community who translated them.
