Track, Communicate, and Motivate

Cardwell is a software development and management-consulting firm that helps clients succeed by improving organization-wide alignment and cross-functional collaboration. Jim Cardwell and Karla Norwood, the firm’s current CEO and President, founded Cardwell in 1983 as a leadership development and management process-consulting firm.

In response to strong client demand, Cardwell set out in the mid 1990s to transfer its extensive knowledge in these fields into a stand-alone software product. In 1998, the company launched Connections Online™, one of the first organization-wide software solutions designed to address executives’ challenges to leading companies towards their strategic goals.

Currently installed in more than 60 organizations across various industries, Connections Online consistently improves profitability and leadership effectiveness.

The Challenge

Executives and managers spend inordinate amounts of time leading projects and teams with the usual phone, meeting, email and Excel combination. Their efforts become especially complicated when managing cross-functional teams. In a recent study, The Gartner Group estimated that knowledge workers each waste nearly $5,000 per year finding, filing and delivering information because of poor company processes.

Lacking well-coordinated strategy implementation tools, many executives and team leaders are buried in similarly poor processes and rarely have enough time to lead their organization towards strategic goals.

What are the consequences? In the vast majority of cases, stagnation and failure. Recent surveys by KPMG and Northwestern University have found that while 80 percent of companies ultimately pick the right strategic goals to deliver meaningful returns for their stakeholders, only 16 percent of them reach these goals.

The Solution

Connections Online (www.connectionsonline.net) offers companies a fast, easy and affordable solution out of the morass. Designed for Web deployment and integration with Microsoft's Project and Office Suite, the software creates a virtual blueprint of an organization, its goals and strategic plans.

With its abilities to align myriad projects with the organization's overall strategy, as well as to foster collaboration among inter-disciplinary project teams, Connections Online keeps a company on track, connected and focused on its goals—from the ground up.

Additionally, with its powerful capacity to instantly connect employees anywhere in the world with real-time, critical information, Connections Online accelerates the pace at which companies can complete projects and reach their critical goals.