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We live in a fast-paced world. And with that comes change, both planned and unplanned. Tracking these changes is important to our business growth, but it’s also important for us to remember what we’ve done right. This blog post will discuss how you can keep track of your success by utilizing a monthly status report or “changelog.”
Building a business from the ground up means you have to build your systems and processes from the ground up. As the organization matures and you begin iterating on existing processes, keeping track of the changes across an organization is virtually impossible. We have SOP’s for just about everything in the company but we started to lose perspective on the changes in terms of the quantity, impact and timing. What I wanted was to get a snapshot of the changes in our organization. One afternoon I was reading a Change Log for a tool that we use trying to understand if an issue we’d been experiencing was fixed yet or had been changed. I thought this would be a simple and effective way to track high-level business changes. If software developers had used changelogs for decades to document their systems and platforms, why couldn’t we do the same for a business? They’re different but similar.
I took the idea and started off in a core tool of ours, Notion. I set up an empty page and created a header with the Year-Month at the top. Underneath I created four more sub-headers, Team Changes, Client Changes, Operational Changes and Service Changes. That was it! Our first entry looked like this:
202109
-Team Changes: Dee joined our team as a storyteller, “XXXX” has started maternity leave.
-Client Changes: No new clients.
-Operational Changes: No operational changes.
-Service Changes: Decided to pilot a shift in our subscription services in terms of project configuration, moving them to annual plans
After some refinement (and copying over data from our leadership team report) we were able to backfill the first two months of our changelog. To be honest, I’d forgotten about some of the changes we’ve made over the last few months. It was nice to look back and realize the meaningful and purposeful change we’ve introduced over just the last 2 months.
Moving forward, we will append snippets from our weekly team meetings to this changelog as we go. Since its really a changelog around how the company operates, we’ll be sharing this with the full team and keeping it accessible to all within Notion.