Mission Impossible

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to overcome the power of the status quo and cognitive bias that would prevent you from being open to the possibility that GRPMAX can deliver exactly what it says it can for you and/or your organization. Our mission, should we accept, is to take it from there and make it happen.

However, if you need a solution for a problem that no one else has been able to solve, or perhaps a new feature or capability that your current methods and/or technology cannot provide, GRPMAX can likely develop a solution.

Traditional or “routine” projects may be candidates for GRPMAX if you have encountered aspects of the project that are difficult or remain unsolved, or if you would like to determine whether or not better solutions might be available.

What’s Most Important™

It’s both a question (???) and a statement

Every avoidable (key word: avoidable) catastrophe or sub-optimal outcome, whether it affects just you, someone you know, an organization you work for, thousands, or even millions, is proof positive, in addition to decades of studies, that few individuals or organizations have the right answers to What’s Most Important? GRPMAX has more of those answers than you’re likely to find anywhere else.

Our decades of research and experience have shown that well over 90% of the time over 90% of individuals and organizations miss the things that are ultimately What’s Most Important to their stated goals and objectives and those of their stakeholders.

The word “ultimately” is used because if and when those things that fall into the category of What’s Most Important are finally recognized it is more often than not too late, after considerable setbacks with far reaching and costly negative consequences have already occurred.

Which one is worse: Not having a handle on What’s Most Important in your organization, or thinking that you do only to have circumstances prove otherwise?

Being in the dark on What’s Most Important can cost many millions of dollars, even reaching a billion or more in some cases. And it can significantly adversely effect brand and reputational value, sometimes sinking entire brands, divisions, and even entire organizations. We know because we have decades of experience applying our unique capabilities to track and forecast these kinds of events as they’ve played out with some of the biggest and best known brands in the country, in most cases (and sometimes well) before they happened.

Ask almost anyone what is most important to them or their organization, and you’ll find there is so much variation and subjective influence that it often renders the results moot.

As important as “What” is “How” you prioritize What’s Most Important

Whether you’re among the exceedingly small percentage of people who truly know What’s Most Important, or the 99+% of people who don’t, how you prioritize every piece of information, every opportunity, and every path you choose determines the outcome.

What’s Most Important is based upon GRPMAX’s decades-long track record of building the data, methods, and tools, that make it possible to determine, in advance, What’s Most Important and what needs to be prioritized in order to avoid the sub-optimal or catastrophic outcomes of those who don’t.

GRPMAX applies all of its respective capabilities and expertise, including Optimalism Q2i^®, Predictive Future Knowledge, and much more — available only from GRPMAX — into a defined, cohesive whole that makes What’s Most Important the best tool you are likely to find if you want to be able to see what you and almost everyone else will almost surely otherwise miss (until it’s too late).

Predictive Future Knowledge

What kind of advantage would your organization have if you knew today what was going to happen in the future? GRPMAX can’t give you next week’s stock prices today. However, using GRPMAX’s Predictive Future Knowledge Innovations it is entirely possible to accurately predict future trends and developments in your products or services or in those of competitors, as well as industry and socioeconomic trends.

If you change the concept of “predicting the future” to “knowing what is going to happen next,” you can easily see that in many cases if you simply had a way to know what was going to happen next you would in effect know what the future holds. Computer technology has already made this possible in applications as diverse as beating humans in the game of chess, to predicting the weather.

If you are trying to predict the outcome in a game of chess between a human and one of the “Deep” class of chess playing computers you can predict the future with near 100% accuracy because the computer will win almost every time. Using supercomputers the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s weather centers can predict the weather with an accuracy that is good enough to allow thousands of transportation related activities, including the launch of spacecraft, to avoid hazardous or deadly weather conditions.

Predictive Future Knowledge can show you what potentially damaging bugs or design flaws exist in your products before they can pose a problem in the marketplace in the form of dissatisfied customers or negative press.

Predictive Future Knowledge will let you know what new features your customers would like to see in your technology products before they tell you!

GRPMAX innovations can find bugs and design flaws that no one else can, including those that aren’t found by Beta testing, automated testing, or by testing labs. These are the kinds of problems that are typically only encountered by customers using your product at some point in the future AFTER your product is already shipping.

If you are a computer, software, or technology company you are probably constantly racing to get new products or new versions of those products to market before your competition. Some ideas for new products and features come from your own engineers and developers while others come from users of your products. GRPMAX’s innovations can identify key new technology or features that your customers will want, BEFORE your product ships.

Uncannily Broad-Reaching, Powerful, and Prescient

GRPMAX’s Predictive Future Knowledge Innovations have been mentioned on this website since the late 1990s, but primarily as applied to organizations, industries, and products or services. But it is much more broad-reaching, powerful, and prescient than that and isn’t limited to just those applications.

For example, the Great Recession that unfolded in the U.S. and spread across the Globe between 2007 and 2008, eventually becoming the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, caught almost everyone off guard and unprepared. Well, almost everyone… That’s because by 2006, which was still long before most people (including most experts) had any idea of what was coming, we were already sharing our insight, predictions, and advice with members of a small private group of clients of one of our affiliated programs.

The above example is just one of many. If you want to know today what is coming tomorrow GRPMAX’s Predictive Future Knowledge Innovations give you a window into the future.

Exhaustive Research and Analysis — Finds The Answers Others Miss

Years of research by GRPMAX CIO Phillip A. Covington finds that most searches (researching market information, finding a key product or supplier, or finding the information that you need to solve a key problem) fall short of finding the information that would result in the ideal solution (see TIMS Rule #7).

Perhaps you find a product or service that suits your needs, but a much better solution (that you don’t know about) is available that is more cost effective. Did you know that almost all sizeable organizations are currently paying for products or services that aren’t even necessary? Remember the stories about the government being charged $100.00 for a hammer, $500.00 for a toilet seat, or $30 for an ashtray that really costs only a few dollars? These were tangible, physical, everyday items that employees were familiar with and yet these invoices were paid for years before anyone noticed.

Technology is largely transparent or invisible. It can be extremely difficult, sometimes even for those involved in Information Systems and Technology, to know when you are paying too much, or worse yet paying for something that you don’t need. Not having the correct solution that you do need can be just as costly.

Have you ever needed market research or information only to later find that the information you ended up with didn’t give you the full picture?

All organizations face challenges simply searching through their own computerized collections of data. An entire industry has sprung up around Data Mining and search software but Information Overload continues to be just as much a problem today as ever.

GRPMAX was developing “Big Data” innovations since before the term had even come into common usage. And using an extensive database and TIMS innovations GRPMAX can find the data or solution you are looking for that all others will miss, regardless of which tools and methods they are currently using.

GRPMAX Exhaustive Research and Analysis services can easily result in substantial increases in insight and performance (including increased savings and earnings) for your company by making sure you have the right information to make informed decisions.

We have yet to encounter a sizeable organization at which savings or increased revenue cannot be achieved by using the TIMS Exhaustive Research and Analysis approach.

Maximum Product Testing — Finds The Bugs And Design Problems Others Miss

For those only interested in identifying bugs and design flaws in a product and who are not concerned with new features (see Predictive Future Knowledge Innovations above) Maximum Product Testing based on methods and technology derived from TIMS finds problems that all others miss.

Almost everyday some embarrassing, and often costly, announcement appears in the news about a security flaw or some major problem found in a software or hardware maker’s product.

Even if your product’s problems don’t make the news you’ll hear about it from dissatisfied customers.

Traditional Beta testing, automated, and lab testing simply does not catch all of the problems. If it did software and hardware manufactures wouldn’t continue to have problems with this issue. Few argue with the saying that: “All software contains bugs!” And since all modern hardware contains software most hardware contains bugs as well!

Using TIMS methods and technology GRPMAX can find bugs and design flaws that no one else can, including those that aren’t found by Beta testing, automated testing, or by testing labs. These are the kinds of problems that are typically only encountered by customers using your product at some point in the future AFTER your product is already shipping.

GRPMAX’s success rate with Maximum Product Testing is in excess of 90%, meaning that more than 90% of the time bugs and problems will be found in your product that others missed.

GRPMAX has provided this service for over 15 years, including to leading companies in the high tech industry, with the first major product being one of the earliest versions of what for years was one of the World’s most popular database standards, dBASE. Work started with the second version of the product, dBASE II, in the 1980s and continued through several of the transitions made by the product and company as they grew. GRPMAX CIO Phil Covington was the first to find problems in dBASE III soon after launch that enabled the company to quietly recall the product, fix the bugs, and re-launch as dBASE IV.

Another example of Mr. Covington’s involvement was/is the Colorado line of tape backup products, later purchased by HP, which spawned a whole industry of Travan-based tape backup products that provided workstation, departmental, and small business backup through the 1990s. Later, FireWire, USB, Bluetooth, and other communications standards made the need to connect devices to a computer’s parallel printer port obsolete. But something that everyone came to take for granted, the ability to plug a tape, disk, or Zip drive into the printer port, was originally not so easy, at least not until the bugs were worked out!

[Please note that past historical and not more recent examples are being used here for reasons of confidentiality as well as the general policy of GRPMAX. Mr. Covington has used Maximum Product Testing on a continuous basis to expose bugs and design and security flaws in some of the most important software and hardware products offered by the largest companies in the high tech industry. Just as you would not want problems with your company’s product known prematurely to a wider audience than necessary, so it is here, even for problems found outside of contractual obligations dictating confidentiality.

Especially before 9/11 many in the industry who found major bugs or security flaws used the reporting of them to the media as a way to spotlight their capabilities and those of their firm. In other words, it was viewed, by those who engaged in it, as great PR and free publicity.

Post 9/11 it is definitely frowned upon to report security flaws to the public before informing the software or hardware manufacturer so that they have time to develop a fix and make it available. The government has also wisely asked that those who find security flaws report them privately first. Whereas at GRPMAX this has always been the policy from the very beginning.

The above examples were used because dBASE has long since been acquired by other companies and the original manufacturer, Ashton Tate, is no longer in business. Likewise, HP has retired its long-running Colorado series of Travan tape drives, which in turn had earlier been purchased from Colorado Memory Systems.]

To inquire about any of the above services please contact:

Phillip A. Covington
Chief Innovation Officer and CEO