Still Using Microsoft Word to Manage EOS®?

As your company is running on the Entrepreneurial Operating System^®, you’re probably gaining more Traction^® every year. Congratulations! But if you’re using legacy software to manage the EOS Tools, you may be holding back the progress you could be making.

Spreadsheets, Word documents and project management tools are familiar and handy, but they weren’t built for EOS. They’re great at doing some things, but those things aren’t EOS. It’s like using a wrench as a hammer—you can pound that nail in, but it’s going to take a lot of work.

Let’s take a closer look at the ways that legacy software tools are holding your leadership team back from greater Traction and more productivity.

Change Is the One Constant

No matter what software tools you’re using, you have to manually update them every time you have a Level 10 Meeting. That means taking time before every meeting to update your Scorecard, your Issues List, your tracking sheets for Rocks and To-Dos. After the meeting, you’ve got more updating to do, as you disseminate cascading messages.

If you don’t have anything else going on, that’s not such a big deal. But for most of us, real life gets in the way—unexpected surprises pop up, somebody comes to you with an emergency, you get sick, or you’re just plain busy. And you forget to make the updates. Now your Level 10 Meeting doesn’t have the latest data to review, or your cascading messages don’t get sent out that week.

As Linda Maclachlan of YJT Solutions put it, “The actual process of updating spreadsheets and lists for Level 10 Meetings was cumbersome, and there were a few weeks when the ‘updating’ didn’t happen and we worked from last week’s marked-up copies.”

Hunting and Gathering

It’s Level 10 Meeting day—time to pull together all the information and data you need for the meeting. Oh, snap. You’re still waiting on input from three people. You’ll need to go hound them for their input…again.

Plus, you just realized that the Issues List you were about to use is an old version. You go back to the network folder, but the current version isn’t there. Where’d it go?! It must’ve gotten saved to some other folder by accident. That’s alright, you’ve still got…yikes! Just 15 minutes! Better find that file, fast.

Extra Effort

Technology can save you a lot of time—if it’s the right technology. But the wrong tech can actually create more work to deal with. In the case of EOS, you’re probably using multiple tools to capture, manage and report information. Your To-Dos are in Trello, the Scorecard is a spreadsheet and Issues are listed in a Word document. You might also use a project management tool like Microsoft Project or Basecamp.

That’s quite a spread of tools! EOS is built on the idea of simplicity, but you’re creating more layers of complexity with each software application you add. That complexity just means more manual work for you—and more time away from your core activities.

Lost Information

The more tools you have, the more spread out your information becomes. That makes it harder to track down important items, because they could be just about anywhere! Did you capture that To-Do in a Word document, or on paper? Which spreadsheet had that note about sales numbers—or was it on the Issues List? Where are those numbers for Ben’s department located? Was that item Sarah needs in Trello or Basecamp?

You could spend countless hours hunting down information. Worse yet, important information could get recorded but never seen again, because it was saved in a Word document just like a dozen others.

Wonky Workarounds

No matter how great your software solution is, if it’s not built specifically for implementing EOS, you’ll be fitting a square peg into a round hole. Some of those software pegs will fit a little easier than other pegs, but they’re still square. You’ll have missing functions, and extra features you don’t need that get in the way.

To make up for one gap in Software X, you’ll need to add Software Y to your toolbelt. If only those two applications could integrate with each other! Instead, you’ve got to implement some manual workarounds.

The Traction Tools Difference

Traction Tools software for EOS eliminates the issues that come with other software applications. Because Traction Tools was built around the way EOS works, it’s an all-in-one solution that fits EOS like a glove. That means no wonky workarounds or clunky workflows. And all of your information is contained in one centralized location.

Traction Tools provides automation capabilities that can give you back hundreds of man-hours, and thousands of dollars in lost costs. There’s no more hunting and gathering, no extra manual labor and no lost information. It’s everything you need to run on EOS, from A to Z.

“Traction Tools has brought our EOS journey to an entirely new level. Level 10 Meetings are run better, more To-Dos are getting done and communication is better across the entire organization. We have only been using it for one month but we love it!” —Scott Wendelburg, President and Owner, Winco Stamping

If you’re using software to help your company run on EOS, you should use a tool that won’t hold you back. Traction Tools was built to boost your productivity and guide you seamlessly through the EOS Process^®. As a result, we were the first licensed software for EOS, and the EOS Worldwide leadership team uses Traction Tools on a regular basis.

Get the most out of the software you use to run on EOS. See how Traction Tools can do that for your company. Get an on-demand demo now!

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