Mavenlink Contributing Guests

In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell describes “mavens” as “information specialists…people we rely upon to connect us with new information.” Mavens, Connectors, and Salesmen are the three different “agents of change” Gladwell identifies as starting popular trends.

While we can’t speak for all of the businesses using Mavenlink’s project management platform, we at Konnessi, LLC like to think of ourselves as the Mavens of the web development business. Through experience, business savvy, and plenty of “team building” activities centered around Call of Duty: Black Ops, we’ve become “agents of change” for our clients, building web presence, managing coordinated social media strategy, and maximizing return on web marketing investments for companies in a variety of sectors—all between frequent trips to the local coffee shop.

Our Achilles’ heel was that our Mavens had trouble working efficiently together. Our programmers and graphic artists (and even the lowly blog writers) were getting sidetracked and distracted, our project managers were frustrated, and our clients weren’t getting the top-notch service we had promised. We were still a group of Mavens, but we had trouble connecting. And when “connected” is literally your name (‘konnessi’ is the Maltese word for ‘connected’), that’s a big problem.

We had our Mavens. We had our Salesmen. Our Gladwellian trifecta was just missing a Connector.

With our trademarked Intellectual Equity Infusion™ deals sputtering, it became clear that we needed to cooperate if we were going to help our clients recognize their upside potential. We needed a tool to help our Mavens collaborate. (Well, we had a way, technically. But unfortunately it required an Xbox and led to interoffice rivalries.) We needed Mavenlink.

Once we had all joined the Mavenlink online workspace (and once we’d convinced the programmers to stop trying to earn experience points on it), completing projects was a cinch. It wasn’t that the platform did the work for us—although we certainly wouldn’t complain if that had been the case. It was just that we were able to track deadlines, organize and share information, and stick to SOP far more easily than we had before. We could invite our clients to join their project spaces, swap ideas, and brainstorm using the project feed. There were no more excuses for “forgetting” a particularly boring task. And because the timeline makes project deadlines transparent, we all had an extra incentive to stay on top of our work.

For the Konnessi team, Mavenlink was the missing link—it was the tool we needed to take our business plan and our talent from “good” to “OH MY!” After all, our clients were counting on us to collect and share knowledge about the marketplace like the Mavens that we are.

So even though we spend less time conducting covert missions behind enemy lines these days, it’s because we’re putting our unique web-business hybrid model to work. And that can definitely be considered a mission accomplished.