Genchi

You know the problem. A deadline slips, another fire drill ensues, and it turns out the team knew weeks ago. The information was there. An easy channel for surfacing it wasn't.

Conventional status reporting is painful and often inaccurate as reports get sanitized on the way up. By the time a project is obviously red, the good options have gone.

Genchi opens a different channel, straight to the people actually doing the work. Team members are prompted for a regular two-second check-in: one click, answering how confident they are their initiative will hit its goal by the deadline. Individual answers are anonymous, which is what makes them honest. Aggregated, they become a confidence score you can track over time.

This plugin puts that score into the conversation, rendered rather than described. Ask how your projects are tracking and your whole portfolio appears as color-coded cards. More complex project structures unfurl with a click, and clicking any card opens the confidence chart — the current score, the trend over the last fortnight, the anonymized individual check-ins, and any blockers or comments that add context.

Things rarely go wrong all at once. Seeing a team's confidence begin to slip is an opportunity to intervene while there is still time to change the outcome.

Replace the status meeting, and the incessant "so, how's it going?" calls, with a crisp and honest view.

Inspired by the Toyota Production System's genchi genbutsu — "go and see for yourself" — Genchi does the same for software teams: a picture built by the people actually doing the work, at minimal reporting cost.

Each connection is authorized by one person and shows only what they can already see in Genchi. Individual check-ins are never attributed. Check-ins are cast in Slack, or by email.

Genchi also imports initiatives from Jira and Asana, and is free for teams under 10.