Cloverleaf: Enhancing Performance through Collaborative Insights

Darrin Murriner, CEO & Co-founder

The first step to making something better is identifying the problem. Cloverleaf, a collaboration technology, applies this very principle to teams in enterprise environments to help improve their performance by systematic observation, analysis, and strategy formulation. The company is led by CEO and co-founder, Darrin Murriner, who firmly believes in the importance and relevance of modern-day team collaboration. Here are some of the key insights he has shared with us at CIO Applications, about the value of collaboration and the benefits to the organization from creating high performing teams:

Cloverleaf’s Position in the Collaboration Software Market and the Company’s Genesis

We believe that collaboration is about people, but somehow businesses have gotten too focused on the process. Before the company was started by my co-founder and I—we were part of a team that was high performing at a previous company. Looking at the culture in this organization made us ask questions about what makes people work well together and what some of those intangible assets are. These were factors that could not be seen while forming the team or when you are selecting yourself into the team. The need and the ability for you to create that for people on a consistent basis is what led us to build what we have today.

Specific Inadequacies or Challenges Addressed by Cloverleaf

When you look at the statistics in the performance of teams, it is very staggering. This is because it is the interactions between individuals that really derive value for organizations while the failure rates of teams, is exceedingly high. In the technology space alone, 51 percent of projects go over the timeline, 47 percent are over budget, 38 percent don’t meet objectives, and 15 percent fail outright, and when people try to quantify the impact of those failures, it equates to 12 percent of project cost, which is a huge expense.

Correspondingly, when you look back on what the causes are for those failures, a lot of it comes back to people and how they interact with each other on a day-to-day basis. In project management most of the focus is on the basic blocking and tackling of task management, budgets and timelines, and less on how people are interacting and how they can perform more effectively.

On How the Solution Works on a Functional Level

I think the driving factor of our product is how we integrate with technology solutions that people already use. There are a lot of avenues where people are communicating with each other. There is Slack and group messaging solutions, so one of the things that we found very early on was ways we can provide integration to expose data and information on how people work best in a useful format at the point that they are using it. This will have a very significant impact in terms of actually improving or changing behavior for the better, which is achieved by integration with Google Calendar and G-mail. What we do is look at their appointments and identify the people that they are meeting with that day to give them suggestions and recommendations on how they can improve their relationships and better their communication.

The driving factor of our product is how we integrate with technology solutions that people already use

Mitigating Problems to Bring about Favorable Outcomes

A financial services organization, with a team of IT professionals, primarily in a shared service capacity wanted us to help improve the level of collaborative activity across teams. Their interest was around using Cloverleaf to increase collaboration, and work toward improving behaviors, and not just educating team members. The result, just two months after using Cloverleaf, was an increase in the frequency of collaborative action, by almost 50 percent.

Cloverleaf Platform Used by the Cloverleaf Team

We are using our product, for selecting new team members into the organization as we are hiring and building out our team, and are thinking about some of the unique strengths and skill-sets that these people bring to meet the goals in terms of the next key area of growth for our organization.

On the Future of Cloverleaf

Our attention here is directed toward accessing and integrating people’s performance data so as to allow us to enhance the level of measurement recommendation and effectiveness of teams over time. We consider ourselves to be a risk management solution, for the biggest risk in project failure: people. Most organizations are spending millions of dollars on complex system development efforts, and studies have shown that the success rate is low in a company when the people are not working well together. As a CIO or a technology leader, you can manage the largest risks for your software development efforts, and we help you do that, which is our value proposition.