holaSpirit

Pros

The process for building an agenda and during a staff meeting was intuitive and efficient. The report generated and email to all meeting participants made outputs easy to track. The process for proposing a policy through the email function of the governance meeting made it so easy to have a clear method for everyone to have a voice regarding the proposals. No more leaving a meeting feeling frustrated that nothing was accomplished. This software makes it very clear who is assigned to what role and what the status of their projects is. Cuts down on wasted time and increases staff moral and transparency.

Cons

Sometimes when I would click on a role whose accountabilities I wanted to review, the feature wouldn't open and I would have to try several times. This seems like it may have been a minor bug. Also there was a change to the layout of the projects that put them in a counterproductive order where the active projects were no longer displayed first. This was a little confusing and the original order was easier to navigate.

Pros

HolaSpirit has an intuative UI and has different 'paths' to achieve what you want to do or see. The search function is one of my favorite features, its quick, fast and finds everything that is stored in Holaspirit.

If you do need customer support, they respond quick and friendly.

Everything is webbased so all is excessible to everybody with a internet connection. Adding employees is simple, just enter a email adress and invite, within 1 min you are setup and ready to work.

Cons

HolaSpirit offers you the ability to make so called 'projects' and 'actions'. These are (still) kept very simple. They are not linked or tagged to other projects or actions, no meta data. So if your organisation has a lot of projects it can be hard to keep track if you use this funtion. On the other hand HolaSpirit offers connections/integrations with project management tools like Asana or Basecamp, but I should prefer one total solution. Perhaps these features come in the next release.

Pros

Embarking on the path of distributed management and role-based organization, regardless of the methodology chosen, is a risky, complex and complicated endeavor which requires the buy-in of the whole company. Tools are essential in supporting such transition. HolaSpirit has been a significant contributor to our successful migration to Teal due to its user-friendliness, to the way information can be centrally shared about people, roles, accountabilities, quality documents, processes, etc..., to its handling of tensions, tasks/projects, or metrics, and to provide multi-user on-line tactical meeting capability. Support is also very responsive and effective.

Cons

While simple changes in governance is easy to manage, more complex changes in roles and circles are tedious (I wish we could drag-drop roles/circles!). The lack of not being able to classify some information as restricted to just the circle or to some members is a significant limitation (e.g. meeting reports / outcome from HR or top management tactical meetings). Integration with Jira has been abandoned in our case -- some limitations as I understood. Small improvements in filtering / ordering / hiding some information could also help.

Pros

Ease of use is key for implementing holacracy, because keeping track of all the roles in an organization can be tedious. If it isn't easy to do so, it won't happen. And holaspirit does a great and ever improving job in doing so.

It has a great and responsive support team who are interested in improving the software.

All important aspects of holacracy are built into this product. Having integrations for your projects and actions is a nice addon, but not really necessary, especially for smaller organizations, since it is already handled well by holaspirit.

The developers keep a transparent roadmap in form of a public Trello board, where you can see if your favorite feature will be implemented soon.

Cons

The two integrations (Jira and Trello) for externalizing tasks are kept too simple for my tase. They work, but could be improved upon. (Automatic member assignment for projects in Trello for example. Integration for tasks as well as projects, etc. But from what I know about the team, there will surely be improvements in the future)

Pros

I've been engaged in organizational transformation for 30+ years. While many great achievements have been accomplished there has always been something missing to enable the organization to continue to produce breakthrough results.

The missing piece in all transformation efforts originating from outside intervention, and most internally generated initiatives as well, is an information system specifically designed to enable continuing transformation. This is mainly due to lack of system with can show results as they are being produced and not merely numbers after the fact.

A significant transformation of an enterprise is a complex process - not a linear one. There is no other platform that I've seen where complex activity can be managed and coordinated. holaSpirit allows display of all ongoing transformational activity, from initial intentions to coordination of activity across normal lines to the measurement of results. The most amazing and useful part of this is that everything can be viewed by all members of the enterprise, while information that needs to be restricted for confidentiality reasons can be part of the system as well.

This is the platform that every transformational initiative of any significant scale requires. I predict this will alter an organizational life forever. It has already started to give me access to needed info.

Cons

Not quite as flexible and adaptive as I'd like but the best that is out there so far. Not easy to learn.