So this post has been a long time coming to be honest. Why does C8 exist and how did it come about ?

Glad you asked. As with a lot of us, particularly those working in fast paced environments, the never ending information flow has consequences. Consequences for us as individuals and also for our teams and businesses. Duplicated effort, constant searching for disconnected artefacts, lack of stakeholder transparency and dimishing confidence all take their toll on what shouldbe something enjoyable - creating a change for the better.

Dial back to 2014

In my case, it was 2014 and I had a PM gig at an Australian Government Statutory Authority (that term may well be different now but you get the picture). Like all businesses embarking on a project (in this case an ICT transformation) we had a set of standards, templates, documents and tools that were prescribed for us to use in delivering the vision of the organisation. Let’s be honest, that is the status quo when it comes to projects and if something doesn’t exist, somebody knocks something up in Word or, usually, Excel ‘to get the job done’. This organisation was no different. Ordinarily this project would have been quite easy to deliver - a COTS package (which turned out to be far from the truth but that’s a story for another time) to provide remote ‘field force’ capability to their organisation’s people out in the field.

Surely the world doesn’t need another platform to manage work, deliverables and expectations?

What we quickly found was that a trivial project can become anything but when there are multiple disparate geaographical locations and stakeholders involved. Very quickly it became apparent that we were spending a lot of our time on housekeeping and communication - just trying to keep everyone ‘in-the-loop’ and this was made all the more difficult by the previous failed attempts at this project, the myriad of documentation and a dispersed, non-tech savvy stakeholder group. We had next to no tracebility and certainly not enough tansparency and a whole host of angry emails and regional managers who thought that they were being left out.

So, when asked ‘Surely the world doesn’t need another platform to manage work, deliverables and expectations’ then the answer is yes.

Considering that the best out there are terrible, then yes, yes we do

That is when the concept that is now C8 was born. We are in the process of delivering a productivity platform that encompasses multiple targets and is designed to simply work.

User testing is now open starting with the initial version of C8 Desk Tools - please submit the test access form and we’ll get back to you.

EDIT [11 January 2021]: We have also opened up testing for our first web module - a R.A.I.D. module to help you and your teams keep control and actively manage external influences on your work and projects.