The NAPA Way – transparency

by Juhana Salminen, Quality and Process Coach at NAPA 

Transparency of (almost) everything is the corner-stone of succeeding without hierarchy

In my first blog regarding the NAPA Way, I stated that three years ago, when we moved to self-management at NAPA, we replaced control and approvals with transparency and freedom to make decisions.

I claim that transparency of information is the key to succeeding in a self-managed organization. This transparency improves trust, responsibility-taking, awareness, and business-thinking. All-in-all, it enables better decision-making. Accessibility and transparency of information have proven to be even more critical lately when the whole company has been working remotely due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

What was discussed in the Board of Directors’ meeting – I’ll check the meeting notes

I want to highlight one decision that doesn’t sound that remarkable but has proven to be an essential one. One person in NAPA’s Systems Team initiated the decision and suggested moving NAPA Intranet to the Confluence platform. Thanks to Confluence, all the information in our Intranet can now be easily accessed, commented, edited, and followed by anybody very quickly and easily. This was a significant step towards transparency, as well as towards the removal of approvals and control.

So, what kind of information do we have in NAPA Intranet? Naturally, all our instructions, processes, strategies, guidelines, and internal blogs can be found there. However, the leading pieces of information from the transparency point-of-view are all the meeting notes and decision documentation. By all the meeting notes, I mean all the meeting notes. There you can find the meeting notes from the NAPA Board of Directors’, Steering Team’s, and all other teams’ and business units’ meetings, as well as customer and partner meetings. Most of the sessions are also recorded, and the recordings are available for all Naparians.

I have an important decision to make – I need advice from my colleagues

In the same way, all the decisions are documented in Intranet’s Decision logs, at the start of the decision-making process. The decisions are open for everybody to comment, give advice or input, argue, or support. The decision owner is responsible for making the decision after seeking advice from people with expertise in the matter, and from all those who will be meaningfully affected by it. I will tell you more about our decision-making in one of my upcoming blog posts.

Has the corona situation affected our sales – Let’s see what our reports tell

We have put quite a much effort in making the information transparent and as usable as possible for everybody. We are utilizing Power BI in providing up-to-date information for everybody from NetSuite, which is our ERP system. Through daily updated Power BI reports everybody can easily check, for example,

• How much our business units, territories, or individual salespersons are selling different products, and how their sales pipelines look like
• How much I (or whoever else) have spent on flight tickets, accommodation, representation, etc.
• How profitable the different projects have been
• How much the different vendors are billing from us

There are also many other reports available, and new ones are constantly developed. We also produce a monthly report about business, financial forecast, opportunities, risks, etc. for the Board of Directors and owners. These monthly reports are naturally available for everyone internally.

Development roadmaps, backlogs, and metrics have traditionally been well available for everyone. Anyway, these are nowadays much easier to access through NAPA Intranet.

Transparency rules!

Of course, there will always be some information that is not available for everybody, such as job applications, salaries, etc. personal information protected by legislation. All in all, the majority of information is transparently available to everybody. And we are all the time improving, also in this field. Those times are gone when someone could even think of gaining something by holding back the information. Transparency rules! Or what do you think?

How does working for a transparent company like this sound to you? Please visit NAPA Careers and check out our open positions.

This blog was first published on LinkedIn on 17 April 2020 by Juhana Salminen.

This is the second blog in a series of postings about The NAPA Way – the way how we together manage and continuously improve NAPA as a company, as a workplace, and as a member of society. This second article is all about the transparency of information at NAPA.