1.9.56 – Processes And Progress

Dear Ambitious Professional,

We trust you’ve made quite a bit of progress on your career journey these past few months. 

On our side, it’s such an exciting and humbling period we almost can’t put it in words.

We’ll go into more details in the sections below. As a 1-sentence summary, yet again we’ve completed well over 100 platform improvements! 

A few of those improvements we’ll discuss in today’s Alvanda Development Update: 1.9.56 – Processes And Progress.

If you have any questions or ideas, please email them to support@alvanda.com and our team will gladly help with any matter or consider any idea! 

Expansion Release Date: 6th of February, 2024

Today’s Update: 8th of August, 2024

Here’s the video version:

A Successful Launch

Since our launch a few months ago, we’ve had hundreds of professionals sign up to Alvanda, each one of them was looking for a better way of strategizing, planning, and executing on their own respective goals. 

Within Alvanda… They found what they were looking for.

We’ve conducted over 100 hours of Alvanda calls, answering implementation questions, providing business guidance in niche situations, taking in great ideas on what else we can build, and everything in between.

The positive feedback has been amazing… We already received over a dozen testimonials that you can now see sprinkled all across our website! 

We are SO grateful for all of your kind words and positive reviews! The team really rejoices seeing their years of hard work be appreciated so much by so many ambitious professionals!

And… Speaking of Alvanda’s launch…

Our Book Is Finally Out!

After about 2 years in writing, editing, and professional publishing with an esteemed New York publisher, our is finally out! We called it:

Unshackled: The 7 Levels Of Business Excellence

How to build, direct, and maintain a thriving empire in any economy.

My co-author, Aaron, and I, after working with hundreds of companies in 19 different sectors and generating over $1Billion for our clients, we’ve put ALL of our best strategies and deepest insights into these pages. 

In just a few short weeks, the book has gotten amazing traction, being launched in physical bookstores, airports, and digitally in over 50 countries! 

The feedback on the book so far has been even better than we expected, and we hope it will help millions of managers at all levels of their organization build systems and teams that achieve so much more than they ever have before.

Now, all of the above being said, let’s get right into the Development Updates!

New Features

This time around, our main focus was to take in and immediately execute on the OVER 100 points of feedback and ideas we got from our beloved early adopters! 

You guys rock! Thank you so much for joining us on this journey together! 

Now, let’s start off with some major features!

Processes

Yes, the long-awaited Processes Module is finally here! 

From now on, all Alvanda users (in Managerial roles) will be able to see even the most complex multi-departmental processes at a glance in one unified, beautiful layout. 

This will help you see exactly if and where any parts of a process can be improved. 

Oh, and one of the best parts is that Alvanda builds out this entire flow AUTOMATICALLY! 

You just need to create and connect Procedures (through the Procedure Pathways feature), and all those connections will show up here! 

This is a major module that required many months to build out and is just fresh out of the oven! 

So everyone please test it out and give us your feedback! 

Let us know what you would improve, if you find anything that doesn’t seem to work as you expect it to, or anything in between! And this goes for all other new features as well! 

Guiding Documents

A few months ago we conducted a Voting Poll, where all of you were basically asked “what business management features would you like us to build next?” 

Well, you voted, and we listened! 

Guiding Documents was the #1 most voted feature by our community. This new feature gives Alvanda users the ability to have as many documents within Alvanda as they wish. 

A few examples here can be:

1. Etiquette When Speaking With Clients, 
2. Company Address & Contact Info, or
3. Common Sense Reminders (our favorite)
4. Email Templates

Or basically any other pieces of information that you’d like to keep outside of Procedures.

This feature can ultimately replace any other note-taking tools you use, allowing you to have everything about your business, all in one place.

Bulk Tasks

Though this was the 8th most voted feature, we’ve noticed a significant increase in the number of occurrences when people wanted to use them. (i.e. the need for this feature rose more and more every week.) 

As such, we decided to bring it forward into this sprint. And… It’s live! 

You can now create just 1 task and bulk-assign it to as many people as you wish! (People that you have the authority to give tasks to, of course. 🙂

For example, 1 HR Professional can now create 1 New Task, associate the “360 Company Survey” Procedure to it, and then delegate it to EVERYONE in the company, with just 1 click.

This ability to assign 1 task to multiple users also has a significant ripple effect across the entire system, because all of the automations you set up within Alvanda or outside of it (more on this is a bit), will now have this option. 

We can’t wait to see all the cool use cases you will build out! 

Improved Features

Outside of dozens of minor tweaks, for example changing the “Employees” term to “Colleagues” everywhere in the platform (As per requests from multiple users–Again, we love you guys! Keep sending your thoughts over!), we’ve also made some significant improvements across the board. For example…

An Improved Procedure Editing UX

Previously, if a Step that’s in the start or middle of a Procedure gets deleted, Alvanda would automatically choose which steps within a Procedure should be linked to one another. 

Now, though this was an intentional automation, some of you were saying that sometimes you’d prefer to choose yourself. 

So, as always, we listened… And we made it happen! 

Now, when you try to delete any Step that has multiple in/out Steps, a super-simple-to-use popup appears, asking you how you’d like the new layout to look like. 

Additionally, we’ve made it so that the “Step Name” field is automatically focused when creating a new Step. This saves all of us at least 1 second every time we add a new Step. 

Across all of our users, that’s 7 hours of time saved per year! And, as we scale, that can quickly turn into 10s or even 100s of hours saved for our community. 

An Improved Sorting UX

We realized many users (in this case including our own team) would have to think twice about what Ascending and Descending mean, and would end up just clicking on one to figure out what it does. 🙂 

Now, we’ve updated our Sorting options to make it even easier to understand. 

And, based on your feedback, all lists are now sorted by “Date (Newest First)” by default! This way, you can always see the latest information in every section of Alvanda. 

A Modern Form Submission Experience, Everywhere

Previously within Alvanda, you couldn’t press “Tab” to keep going from one field to the next. This was because there were many other items on the page that would get focused, in between fields.

However, on many of our Alvanda Systems Consulting calls, we noticed people had the tendency to write what they wanted in one field, and then by habit press Tab, so they go to the next field. 

As a result, we decided to put in the extra effort to reorder the on-page element indexes so that pressing Tab on one field will always take you to the immediate next field. 

This will again shave seconds off every information input within Alvanda, further saving tens of hours every year, and also leading to a better user experience overall. 

Create Components from Procedures

We’ve noticed that when someone first uses Alvanda, they’re not yet thinking in terms of Procedures (how to do tasks) and Components (the deliverables from tasks). 

Many times, users would start building out Procedures, and then realize they want to store information somewhere, and previously that would mean they had to close the Procedure editing page, and go into Components to create a new Component.

Now, we’ve made it so you can create new Components directly from within the Procedure Builder itself! 

The option is clearly visible when you try to add a Component type to your Procedure.

Create New Procedures From Strategic Initiatives

Similarly, after you would finish a productive brainstorming session on what Strategic Action Items you and your team would work on next quarter, you’d realize you don’t have procedures for half of the items you wrote down. 

Before, this would mean you would have to close the Strategic Initiatives page + go to the Procedure Builder + click on Create New Procedure + then come back to the Strategic Initiatives page. 

Now, we’ve added that option directly within the Strategic Initiatives page itslef! 

Even More Helpful Tooltips

As Alvanda keeps evolving and we keep bringing you more and more cool features. The interface will also keep updating, one improvement at a time. 

As that keeps happening, new parts will not have tooltips or tutorials yet, because the interface didn’t exist before. 🙂 

But, as time goes on, we always go back to all new areas, and we make sure we have as much helpful guidance sprinkled in everywhere as we can. 

Bug Fixes

1. Fixed an issue where deleting the very first step in a Procedure would sometimes break subsequent connections within that Procedure.
2. Also fixed an issue where deleting a Component from within the first Step would sometimes still leave inherited Components in subsequent steps.
3. Resolved an issue where some country flags were displaying incorrectly. This was due to a mismatch of the public country number and country flag lists.
4. Adjusted the position of buttons in the Task progression screens so they align perfectly with all input boxes, regardless of screen resolution.
5. Solved an issue where adding the same Component Blueprint twice to the same Step would sometimes overwrite the first one.
6. Corrected a minor UI glitch where on certain resolutions you couldn’t see a Procedure’s Name when opening a Procedure Preview from within a Task’s History page.
7. Fixed an issue where users would get notifications of other people joining the Company, even if they weren’t part of the same team. (This was originally intentional) 
8. Resolved a niche case where if multiple “Person” type fields were mandatory within a Component History page, the “Save” button wouldn’t show an error if one of them was left empty.

Development Roadmap of Alvanda

In just a couple months, we’ve made significant progress on the features you’ve all voted on (already releasing 2/12 features!), whilst also finishing up several other major Modules that we’ve been working on for quite a while. 

It’s amazing to see all of our weeks and months of effort being deployed and used by hundreds of professionals on our public servers. 

We’re grateful for the success we’ve had thus far, and are excited for what we’ll bring you next! 

Procedure Templates 

Now that we’ve successfully delivered on the #1 most voted feature in our last Development Roadmap Poll, we can move on to the next one in line!

We already started working on a set of Procedure Templates that will be cloned into every current and future account, so all of you have clear examples of how Alvanda can be used to build more structure and consistency within your respective teams. 

Integration to 7,000 Other Apps

Webhooks and API Integrations were the 6th most voted feature in our last Development Roadmap Voting Poll. 

However, similar to Bulk Tasks, several past and new Community Members kept asking about integrations. And when are they going to come out?

As such, we’ve decided to bring this ahead. And so, if everything goes as planned, in a few short weeks you can set up automations between Alvanda and Gmail, Sheets, Hubspot, Dropbox, Calendar, and literally 7,000 other platforms! 

Multi-Company Support

We’re close to finishing development on the last feature that was requested during Alvanda’s Beta Phase. Which ended earlier this year. 

Multi-company Support will allow both freelancers that work at multiple companies (with different emails) to see all of them in 1 dropdown AND people that own multiple businesses to see all of them under 1 account. 

The Alvanda Marketplace 

Imagine, 1 single place where you can see and clone EVERY business procedure you’ll ever want! 

It would be like the Netflix of business procedures IF Netflix would actually have EVERY movie within it! 🙂 

That is what we strive to build. That is what you’ll have, if current plans go as planned, in a few weeks.

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

As you can see, we’ve been very busy building up Alvanda, one new feature, one improvement, and one bug fix at a time. 🙂 

It’s been a crazy few months, where we were barely keeping up with all of the amazing conversations we had and ideas we bounced around with all of you!

If you know anyone that would benefit from transitioning from glorified task lists to ACTUAL Business Management Software, where they can both define every procedure thay have AND have their entire team follow it, all in the same 1 platform, then please share this link with them! 

Let’s grow this wonderful community we have, so that we can all benefit from one another’s ideas, perspectives, and insights. 

Thank you, see you within Alvanda! 

P.S.: If any of you would like our team of Business System Specialists to help you build out all of your Procedures, Role Descriptions, Strategic Initiatives, or anything else within Alvanda, email us at support@alvanda.com and we’ll take it from there!