Ed Jennings
Perspectives

Delivering the World’s Largest Projects: Complexity Loves Company

Written By: Ed Jennings
August 15, 2022
4 min read
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Big ideas are incredibly hard to execute. Whether it’s building a skyscraper, installing a massive solar grid, managing thousands of retail properties across the country, or constructing a safe and sustainable energy distribution system, there’s no standard playbook for this kind of work.

Each complex project is bespoke, and requires a different set of processes, people, data and more — and each of these mega-projects ultimately contains sets of multiple, smaller projects. Coupled with the reality that most organizations are plagued by manual processes and inflexible, legacy tech, you have a recipe for wasted resources and frustrated employees. This struggle of complex, modern challenges and ineffective systems to address them is felt across industries and geographies.

At the same time, as an executive, I can hardly remember a time as challenging as this. It really feels like there’s one new curveball a week for organizations to deal with. Global economic uncertainty, the continued digitization of work, blurred lines between work and home life, and dramatic social change — all are continuing to impact how we view our work and our lives. Having joined Quickbase as CEO in May 2020, responsible for a business transformation during the pandemic, I realized we had to try a more collaborative, team-based approach.

At Quickbase, we determined that in order to succeed in such chaotic times, we needed to focus on our core value that “We Win Together.” This is how we tackle our own big, complex ideas and build connections across our team. To us, winning together means staying focused on the team — collaborating better, working efficiently, and collectively owning our opportunities to improve. “We Win Together” has informed our approach to taking on the challenges in the world around us and within our projects, which are all getting more complex by the day.

The idea of creating connections is an external reflection of how we think, the value our product provides, how we work with our customers, and our view of the world.

Bringing Our Company Values to Life

This idea isn’t something we just talk about internally and call it done; we bring this value to life with our customers as well. At its core, our no-code technology creates connections, clarity, and control across teams and organizations, bringing together all the pieces needed to solve the most complex challenges of today. Like how the City of Paterson, NJ is coordinating across agencies and systems to deliver lifesaving opioid treatment in minutes. Or how Lighthouse Electric is innovating their entire prefabrication process to better build the world around us. Or how AT&T is transforming communications by rolling out a 5G network across the U.S.

These kinds of challenges are where Quickbase shines — the unique, complex projects that are reshaping our world. Consider retrofitting the properties across your entire real estate portfolio to be greener. Or even something that hits a bit closer to home, in Quickbase’s headquarters in Boston, fixing an aging public transportation system. These aren’t your typical day-to-day, repeatable projects, but completely custom, often one-time efforts, with unique processes, stakeholders who haven’t worked together before, and systems that are not connected. Magnifying the issue is that it’s not just one project — organizations are managing large portfolios of these complex projects all at once.

The standard technology won’t fit the bill here. It doesn’t make sense to build a dedicated system or invest in new platforms for every single unique, complex project in your portfolio. No-code is technology built for today’s world — ever-changing, complex and fast-moving — empowering businesses to adapt as needs change and manage each of their projects with the customized capabilities they require. It means all teams can “win together,” creating connections across people and systems, unlocking siloed data, and empowering each and every project team member with the information they need to be successful, when and where they need it.

This attitude and this approach are not new at Quickbase. The idea of creating connections is an external reflection of how we think, the value our product provides, how we work with our customers, and our view of the world. We talk a lot as a team about how important it is that we win together — the same is just as true outside our walls. That’s why we’re uniting around a new call to action: All Together Now. We believe this captures how we work here at Quickbase, and how we see our customers changing the way they get things done and accomplish their most complex work.

It’s your job to drive big, complex project portfolios. That is hard enough. Solving the big, complex challenges of today requires connection, clarity, and control. We’re here to do that with you — so let’s do it together. And let’s do it now.

All Together Now.

Ed Jennings, CEO
Written By: Ed Jennings

Ed Jennings is the CEO of Quickbase.