How Carbon6 uses KATA to keep everyone org-wide on the same page

“As a leader, KATA makes me look like a superhuman — I am able to effortlessly know what’s going on with every project by consuming updates and key decisions for the projects that matter right from within Slack. I don’t need to have been at the meeting to feel like I was, and I don’t have to waste time in 1:1s getting updates. Instead I spend time with my team on problem solving and strategizing.”

Lynette Pretorius, VP of Ops at Carbon6

Carbon6 came to DreamTeam seeking three things from their evaluation of the KATA platform

1. Create a central place for teams to collaborate across departments
2. Build and maintain internal context and knowledge in one place
3. Allow teams to stay within the workflows they are familiar with

Recently we asked Lynette about her experience, spanning from how she chose KATA to the benefits it has brought her and others across the organization.

There are so many project management tools out there. How did you settle on KATA?

Trying to select a project management tool, I was dragging my feet - all the options were similar in functionality, similarly priced, and only alright. The steep learning curve turned me off from the more robust options out there in the market. Then KATA came along and I knew it was exactly what I wished existed - a simple and intuitive interface without the unnecessary complications, but with all the right integrations to our existing tools and workflows. Plus, KATA has a totally fresh approach to managing projects and hit on something no other tool did: creating a repository of context that will, over time, allow anyone to onboard more quickly and equip every employee to work smarter by learning from the projects that came before. We’ve never looked back on our choice to adopt KATA.

How did you do things before and how has KATA made them better?

My KATA aha moment was seeing a new hire onboard at Carbon6. In one of his initial meetings he referenced relevant context about a project — when I asked, surprised, where he came across that document, he said “Oh, I found it in the KATA project.” This is exactly why we adopted KATA - to create a hub of context and alignment across our organization that will span across projects and teams to allow everyone to easily stay on the same page.

Tool change can be hard. How easy was it to adopt KATA inside your organization?

Other project management tools have a high barrier of adoption — they don’t seem to understand that for non-project managers, expecting adoption of a tool that is completely outside existing workflows with a steep learning curve is doomed before it starts. KATA is easy to start using as a viewer or builder, and allows everyone in our company to quickly view and access context with single sign-on. Plus, it fits and integrates with the tools everyone already uses, making the product stick easily.

What process overhead or waste have you been able to eliminate with KATA?

As a leader, KATA makes me look like a superhuman — I am able to effortlessly know what’s going on with every project by consuming updates and key decisions for the projects that matter right from within Slack. I don’t need to have been at the meeting to feel like I was, and I don’t have to waste time in 1:1s getting updates. Instead I spend time with my team on problem solving and strategizing.

How has KATA helped increase visibility for key stakeholders at Carbon6?

After recently sending out a bunch of updates via KATA, I saw our CFO remark to someone in a different Slack channel about the great work they were doing on a project. Note that our CFO isn’t personally a KATA user, but he is clearly still benefiting from the visibility the updates provide him in Slack. There is no other world in which a CFO would have been able to say this if we weren’t using KATA and automatically pushing updates out through Slack. This has happened multiple times with executive stakeholders – the visibility KATA creates is unparalleled.