A Story of Shooting for the Moon, Falling Short, and Settling into a Declining Orbit
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We used RESULTS.com for the entire company's full-time staff and all departments. It was our first attempt to put results-orientated metrics in front of everyone in a visual format. RESULTS.com was our solution to getting everyone focused on the right thing and heading in the same direction. In the process, we appreciated the collaboration toolset that makes for centralized meeting agendas, notes, and communication.
Pros
- It has a very nice graphical/visual display of metrics/KPIs that are fed into it.
- It has a fantastic meetings agenda and communication module that helped better connect our geographically distributed offices.
- It solved the problem we had of using several different platforms for each need - providing a central place for results-orientated information sharing and discussion.
Cons
- Like all BI software, the pretty graphics and charts and information are only as accurate as what is put into the system. It does not have parameters that will flag suspect data, which became a problem as our data sources increased and the results.com integration required more and more results.com-side development.
- The promise of having the corporate mission/vision/values/etc. all connected to individual priorities and associated KPIs never came to pass. Being early adopters, we purchased partly on the promises of salespeople. As time marched on, support and development dropped off in favor of increasing their sales department.
- We believe, through our experience with results.com, that the company was built to sell quickly. That is, we believe the owner/s blasted through their funding in the first year to onboard as many users as possible so they could increase value for a quick sale. Then we believe that when the money was mostly spent, and there was no sale, the company had to become a normal, profitable, long-term business which led to expense cutting, a RIF of developers and customer support, and the resulting slowdown/stoppage/inability to develop and support the product. Our feeling in the last months on the platform was one where it seemed the employees/owners were unhappy and disgruntled to have to actually run it as a business and deal with customers. (This is our guess and belief based on what we saw over time and without any knowledge whatsoever on what was actually happening over there.)
Likelihood to Recommend
Results.com would be a fantastic platform for a distributed team that has its data stored in a simple/single/common method and is looking for a single visual platform around which the culture of the company can collaborate, see relevant company metrics (and each other's metrics), and discuss the same.
RESULTS.com is likely unnecessary for any team that is physically located together within an office and who can physically meet together. Such a scenario likely already has wall-projected charts and physically posted information. Further, we found RESULTS.com to be a bad choice for a company that has its data in several different locations, requiring the integration of several different APIs all coordinated together. Our somewhat complicated/disparate data simply didn't work well in the system to the point where people eventually were conditioned to NOT believe the numbers shown in RESULTS.com.
