Battle rhythm – The military name for the maintenance of an ordered routine. As defined by the US Department of Defence it is “A deliberate daily cycle of command, staff, and unit activities intended to synchronize current and future operations.” (DOD Dictionary¹)

Many companies and organizations struggle to maintain a system of tracking upcoming and outstanding tasks on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual cycle. The tasks could be simple daily tasks like the preparation of a cash report or weekly tasks like the preparation of the accounts receivable aging report. Usually, the larger the organization, the more complex the cycle of tasks and duties to be performed across departments.

The solution – create and deploy a company wide battle rhythm template. This is simply a custom task tracker that keeps track of all outstanding jobs and duties and allows process owners to update if their tasks are complete or not as they become due. The updated worksheets then relay their data to a dashboard where management can quickly have a real-time view of outstanding and complete tasks, and take appropriate action.

For this, all we need is an excel worksheet (placed in a location that can allow for collaborative updating and access – e.g., a cloud drive like OneDrive, SharePoint etc., or even a network drive on the company intranet.)

Next, using Arbutus Analytics, we transcribe the excel sheet into a format that can be read by a dashboard system like PowerBI. This allows us to create a PowerBI template that shows the status of the tasks on each cycle (daily, weekly, monthly etc) in real-time.

The system is simple, straightforward and for existing clients of Arbutus Analytics, does not involve procurement of any other system or license. The advantages of using this ‘home made’ task tracker are :

1. You can create any number of tasks and cycles for your company – you are not limited by anything and is as customizable as you need it to be.

2. No data leaves your premises. Unlike other task management applications that are cloud based, all your confidential company details remain in your systems.

3. Simple to deploy. All you do is use the excel worksheet template to create your tasks and their repetitive cycles. Arbutus takes over and does the rest. We have developed a script that does all the heavy lifting so you don’t have to.

4. No extra requirements. As mentioned, for existing Arbutus Server users, nothing else is required to set this up. For clients not using Arbutus, a license may be needed to perform the necessary transcribing of the data into a dashboard friendly dataset.

5. User friendly. Your employees and users may already be updating a worksheet to track their tasks and duties (a common way to keep track of tasks). With this system, they do not need any special training. Marking a task as complete on the excel sheet is as simple as clicking on a cell and choosing the ‘Completed’ Option. Simple.