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Innovations stem as solutions for complex problems. The world is constantly in an altering state where new problems arise every day and to meet these demands the organizations have to adopt the agile framework to deliver value to customers. One of the recent instances being the crisis of COVID-19, where the world faced unprecedented challenges and we all witnessed a plethora of innovations. What with remote work taking the center seat in the working of all organizations, Raghu Konka (Founder and CEO of Prakya) set himself up to support the agile community by building a revolutionary project management tool. Raghu draws inspiration from Eric Yuan who is the founder and CEO of Zoom and he proved to the world that when you have a compelling product it does not matter how much crowded the competition is, your product will stand out and win.
Raghu is a veteran in the industry with over two decades of extensive experience in enterprise collaboration, execution, strategy, architecture, design, and development. He has developed several successful products and services and built high-performance teams. Prior to his entrepreneurial venture, he was the Vice President of Engineering managing a large team. When working in a large team the challenge is to ensure that everyone is on the same page and working in harmony. Raghu’s team was using a project management tool to ensure collaboration and to track progress. But due to the time invested in this tool and the work needed to create visibility among various stakeholders it was very difficult. Raghu searched for several Project management tools but all were either task-based or scored teams’ work and just managed them. This led to imagineering Prakya which would empower the team instead of managing them.
Raghu and Sunil (Co-founder and Vice President of Engineering), have both worked in the software industry for nearly two decades. Both were aware of the limitation in how teams and individuals struggled to create visibility or how some of the work remains hidden from customers and stakeholders or how the teams that got lost in day-to-day activities completely land upon the moon when their goal was to go to mars. The discussions on the possible solution for these issues soon shaped into creating Prakya in Jan 2020, a unified agile workplace with multi-dimensional visibility, and a smart team operating system that could help agile teams to handle their work better. The mission is to eliminate work about work, allow complete visibility of the project to different stakeholders and build a powerful AI-based team operating system that helps agile teams to collaborate better and create value for their customers. “Prakya is on its way to becoming a revolutionary product, a Unified Agile Workplace for organizations to empower teams instead of managing them,” said Raghu.
Prakya was incorporated in 2020, just before the advent of the pandemic. COVID-19’s havoc on companies and the emphasis it brought on remote teams catalysed the mission and vision of Prakya. Most of the currently popular project management tools have graduated from being simple task management frameworks or spreadsheets to being able to handle small teams and projects. The key focus of all these organizations has been in integrating all collaborative tools which would speed up the work. Prakya understands agile work differently. Even if the tools are integrated there is a deeper set of issues and problems which need to be addressed. Raghu adds, “For us, a project is not simply a set of tasks that can be assigned to team members and tracked for completion.”
Prakya allows the customers to define and visually represent their operational value streams, business processes and link day-to-day execution to the same. This enables them to see different dimensions of their day-to-day work progress within the context of the role they are playing in the organization. Furthermore, the top management can map the progress through initiatives and roadmaps to day-to-day work, connecting all the dots between strategy and execution. It helps both co-located & remote teams to connect, work together seamlessly and act as a single living organism due to the unified collaboration suite which can handle video conferencing, calendar management, team instant messaging, document sharing, and visual diagramming.
Prakya is a unified agile workplace that offers an agile work management solution that empowers teams to work cohesively. Through this solution, the teams can create user stories, features, and epics which are the building blocks of agile work. They can then create program increments, sprints and manage their project with scrum meetings and retrospectives. It allows the top management to track the progress through the strategy board while the operational teams can create a visual representation of their operational processes and connect the elements of agile work to visually track progress and adjust as their work progresses. The delivery teams can create and track releases and deployments to ensure that customers receive flawless products.
Even if the teams are working remotely they can easily connect through video calls with one or several participants. Moreover, Prakya allows users to synchronize their calendars so it is easy to find common meet times. Apart from this, the user can create/upload/share documents through the platform and seamlessly collaborate with the team members. “Prakya is built for agile work. Its engine is different in that it embraces agile philosophy and has been designed to handle the needs of teams involved in agile work,” explains Raghu.
Staying true to its mission, Prakya eliminates the work about work by creating 360-degree visibility which updates the user with real-time information that too based on the context of the user persona. By utilizing Prakya there is no need to switch from context and the team can simply focus on getting their work done. Another key differentiator of Prakya is that it is vertically integrated which means the customers never have to worry about how integrations are holding together. Raghu explains, “You don’t have to panic if a vendor has changed the API and if they must rewrite some code to accommodate the changes. In fact, Prakya sees integrations as a slowdown and hence unproductive.”
When Raghu and Sunil conceptualized Prakya in 2019—the pre-COVID era—they were able to detect the early trends in the industry and the requirement for a better team collaboration tool that empowers the team and enhances productivity even if they are working remotely. COVID may have disrupted the industries but it accelerated the adoption of digital tools. Also, a study suggests that 65% of the US workforce will be remote/hybrid by the year 2025, and globally it would touch about 30%. This creates a big opportunity for Prakya. The team is continually striving to fulfil their vision and eliminate ‘Work about Work’.
Today, the organizations are going through rapid digital transformation. Raghu anticipates that by 2022 organizations will adapt and optimize their resources to the growing phenomenon of remote working and hybrid workforce. Prakya’ platform has many features that will assist the hybrid workforce and empower the teams to manage their projects better. Prakya will play a vital role in digitally mapping business processes, assisting with business continuity, brings the teams together so that the organization can act as a single living organism.
