1.0.0 – From Chaos To Order

We’re excited to announce Alvanda’s very first Expansion Release, appropriately named: From Chaos To Order. 

After half a year in Open Beta, this first Expansion marks an important milestone in Alvanda’s history, symbolizing our systems’ readiness to start adding value to the thousands of businesses from all over the world.

Today, we give you a glimpse into the titanic amounts of work our dedicated team has put in to bring to life Alvanda – The Ultimate Real-Time Process Optimization Platform.

Beta Phase Closing

After two years in development, Alvanda finally launched in Open Beta mid-2023, inviting dozens of progressive companies to test Alvanda’s systems and their applicability within their day to day operations. 

The results were mind-blowing. 

We received both hundreds of points of feedback and words of encouragement. 

The companies that joined the Open Beta have truly helped shape the direction of Alvanda, ensuring its systems are fit for purpose for hundreds of real world scenarios. 

Today marks the end of the Open Beta, and the start of something so much bigger. 

We’re now less than a month away from our official Public Launch Date, giving us ample time to prepare ourselves for the massive inflow of companies that will be testing Alvanda’s systems at scale!

However, before we begin launch preparations, we’d like to share with you today a small fraction of what our team has been building for you. 

Enjoy!

New Features

Company-Wide Support & Feedback

How many times have you or has someone on your team gotten stuck at a specific step of a process? Either because the task had unexpected levels of complexity OR because the process itself wasn’t clear. 

Alvanda fixes this age-old issue by making it super easy for anyone in your company to both request help and provide feedback on any specific step of any procedure.

Overdue Task Escalations

How many times have you asked something from a colleague, just to find out a week later that they haven’t actually done what you asked them to do? 

Alvanda solves this issue as well by allowing companies to set automatic escalation settings for every single overdue task. This increases company-wide transparency and focus like nothing else.

Standalone Notifications Page & Filters

As per popular request, we built a standalone Notifications Page where all Alvanda users are now able to both see and filter through all their notifications. 

This helps everyone stay on top of what’s going on in the company, relative to the Role(s) they hold within the organization.

Changing Estimated Times

Managers now have the ability to allow their colleagues to change estimated times for specific steps within procedures. 

This comes in handy when, for example, you define a “Holding a Meeting” Procedure for 30 minutes, but certain meetings are estimated to take 1 hour. In such cases, colleagues can change the estimated time on a case by case basis. 

P.S.: As a workaround to this, if you want to force some meetings to have specific durations, then you can create procedures for specific meeting times. For example, having a “Holding A Daily Huddle” Procedure, alongside the more generic “Holding A Meeting” one.

Comments and Comment Reporting

All Alvanda users can now discuss task deliverables, sales prospects, or any other type of Components directly on the specific Component’s page.  

P.S.: We’ve also created a feature allowing anyone in the company to report the comments of their colleagues. These reports will go directly to the Company Administrator(s).

Archive Components

As your team grows through the years, much of the information from previous years might not be relevant anymore. As such, we’ve added the option of Archiving Components that don’t serve a purpose for you anymore. 

Recurring Tasks

Literally the most requested feature during the entire Beta Phase was the ability to make Tasks recurring. 

So we went ahead and gave our dear users exactly what they wanted: The most useful Recurring Tasks settings interface they’ve ever had.

Improved Features

Significantly improved load times when transitioning from one field to another in the Strategic Initiatives section.

Also, added the ability to select “None” in the Procedures dropdown within the Strategic Initiatives, allowing companies to engage in new, unprocedurized activities with the purpose of testing different strategies to reach their goals.

Improved the visibility of the Add Component dropdown from within the Procedure Builder so it stands out more.

To make the onboarding experience much easier and also significantly reduce the learning and adoption curves new companies have with Alvanda, we added Tutorial Videos on almost every single page in the platform.

We’ve made it much easier to select between years and months on our Date Picker, and have also added the option to select specific times in the day.

Company Admins now have the option to create new Departments directly from the “Select Department” dropdown from within the New Position creation screen.

Images can now be uploaded into the Guidance section of each step of a Procedure, allowing Managers to literally show their team where to click or provide whatever other forms of guidance they wish.

Bug Fixes

1. Fixed a bug where certain fields across Alvanda were displaying with red borders by default, instead of turning red only after an error occurred.
2. Resolved a case where some Components History section was not updating after manual changes were made and saved.
3. Fixed certain time duration units (minutes, hours, days) not displaying correctly whilst following tasks. 
4. Corrected an issue where selecting due dates in the Checkpoint or Due Before fields was not working as intended.
5. Fixed some issues related to Tasks where Completed Tasks were not immediately moving from a users To-Do List and Time Spent was not displaying correctly.
6. A problem where, on occasion, Components generated from Completed Tasks would not appear in the Components Library was addressed.
7. Fixed an issue with Task Statuses of Overdue Tasks within Strategic Roadmaps were updating only after users would open a Task.

Development Roadmap

Pathway Improvements

After many different feedback conversations over both text and calls, we defined every single way the companies from our Beta Phase wished to automatically delegate cross-departmental tasks based on Procedure outcomes. 

And… We compiled everything into one simple-to-use interface. Coming to Alvanda later this year.

Processes

As part of Alvanda’s original Vision from over 2 years ago, this year we will finally build out the Processes Module, where you’ll be able to see even the most complex multi-departmental processes at a glance in a beautiful layout, helping you clearly see if there are (and exactly where) any parts of a process that can be improved. 

Marketplace

After holding quite a few Onboarding Calls with several amazing companies, everyone agreed it would be hugely valuable for all companies to have a large database of pre-built Procedures, Input Forms, Job Descriptions, and everything in between. 

So, we listened, and now the Alvanda Marketplace is officially in development!

Help Center

More so, seeing how well received our guidance was during our Onboarding Calls, we decided we will build out an entire Help Center where users will be able to have access to useful videos and articles on how to manage their team and their work for the best possible outcomes.

Multi-Company Support

During our Beta Phase, we noticed many companies like to consolidate their operations across multiple different business units AND that many professionals tend to have more than one job. 

As such, later this year we will add Multi-Company Support within Alvanda, making it easy for anyone to switch between accounts and teams and get right back to work without a second’s delay.

And many other value-adding features, such as Bandwidth Reports so you can see who’s swamped and who can take on more tasks and a more visual Calendar View for your task list.

Opportunity To Join

Looking at what we’ve recently achieved, and what we plan on building moving forward, we’d like to ask: 

Do you know anyone who can help us build or promote Alvanda? 

If you do, please send the link to this article their way, so they get a sense of what we do, and if they enjoy what they see, they can email our team at: support@alvanda.com

Thank you.

Final Thoughts

In 2021, when the idea of Alvanda, The Ultimate Real-Time Process Optimization Platform was born, we as a team gave ourselves a timeline of one year to build out our MVP and go to market.

Oh, how wrong we were. 

Over 2 years later we finally launched our Beta, and now, 2.5 years later, Alvanda is ready and we’re finally preparing for our official launch, hopefully on the 26th of February, 2024.

It’s been a much longer process than we expected, but we strongly believe that people won’t care too much about whether something was late, but what they will care about is whether or not it was great.

As you can see from this one brief summary which includes maybe half of the work we’ve done, our team has in fact put in both the product design and development effort into making Alvanda as useful as possible for every team that wants to take their effectiveness to the next level. 

We’re very happy we got this far, and can’t wait to see how everyone will start using the platform!