Studio Update #2 and How to Plan Pretty Much Anything

The core theme for the coming months at PGS is going to be focus. We’re working on new client projects, all of which are pretty interesting, including a UX audit for a digital literacy platform and creating software to monitor greenhouse gases for large industry.

A significant part of the work ahead of us this year, however, will be working on our own products. We were very lucky to be awarded a US$75,000 grant by CARIRI and the European Union to build Intrapay: a solution to a long-standing problem with intra-regional payments and export trade: high fees, poor transparency transparency, and predatory pricing.

We’ve also been making changes with Unqueue, our software suite, which was initially designed in 2020 to support small businesses but now has applications ranging from medium and large size businesses to governments, all while still supporting a network of micro-entrepreneurs with free delivery payments on inventory and order management. More about that soon.

Unqueue’s biggest potential was always been as a deep infrastructure solution. A testament to this is our most recent awarding by the United Nations Capital Development Fund of a US$100,000 grant to develop a wholesale implementation of the Unqueue infrastructure used to help governments, connect, farmers and buyers both domestically and internationally to reduce middleman fees, and ultimately food costs to the consumer in the Caribbean.

Since Unqueue’s 2020 launch, this is the first year that feels very planned. The wording is important: it’s also the first year that it’s felt like the plan was something bigger than “stay open, don’t die”. A lot of the work ahead of us is the result of conversations had and plans put in place over a year ago. This planning work has not just been about crafting the future for Unqueue, the Studio, and the services that we want to provide, but also in clarifying the future we want for our team, the company’s purpose, and how we see leadership evolving over time.

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The only reason that we’ve been able to focus in this kind of way is because we’ve been accountable to our progress since the start. Being able to refer to our past and compare it to our present with our future in mind has been an essential skill for planning a tech company that is growing not just in a burgeoning market, but also dealing with being service based, bootstrapped, and potentially unprofitable impact-focused.

It’s not a difficult process either: most planning takes place with a clear, declaration of intention and tracing them back to actions, measurable outcomes, and clear routes of accountability. The team that’s the best able to outline strategic visions, while also evolving them and staying true to their original intentions, will be the team that sees their efforts realised with quicker and efficiency, essential agility in our market.

At PGS, my job is to draft the outlines for strategic planning and have them passed by the team so that we can have coordination and sign off to work together. Doing this has gotten a lot easier over time, but here are a few of my tips to make it as efficient as possible:

1. Make S.M.A.R.T. goals. Without bogging us down with jargon, there’s a way in wish you can set goals that can either help you meet your goals or send you crazy. Do some reading up, and figure out how to set yours.
2. Make it about money. If the goal is related to revenue, it’s a good idea to remind yourself of that, especially if this revenue is critical for survival.
3. Pick a person. Goals don’t get executed by companies, they get executed by people. Ownership of a particular deliverable a goal on a team is essential, and it doesn’t have to be that the team leader is responsible for everything—indeed, it may be the least efficient if they are.
4. Give it room. In my experience, it’s best to outline goals from two perspectives: one an ideal, pie-in-the-sky scenario, and another one when nothing goes right, the enemies have surrounded, and the rations have all run out. Planning for success with both the scenarios in mind allows us to have both an expectation of how bad and good things can get, but also allows us to set our personal expectations around where we should be landing to do either a good job or great job, depending on how important the task is and the resources we have available.

This approach to strategic planning works for all kinds of things, not just planning projects and companies, but it’s especially efficient for these. At the risk of sounding more organised than I am, there’s a way in which resolving your companies vision to single spreadsheet can be both terrifying and very comforting, depending on what you leave room for.

You can use this sample linked here for a copy of the strategic planning template that we use for our company and project planning. Hope it’s helpful!

—Agyei