About Us
Introduction:
In 2020, our founder Richard Godfrey, published his book “Be The Five. Digital Confidence: A simple process for digital success.”
In one chapter of the book he explained his approach to delivering projects, particularly those of a digital or transformational change nature. It was never envisaged that a software product would be built from this but there was no software on the market that he could easily apply this approach to and hence Hashiru was born.
We believe we’re unique in having our own philosophy and framework that sits behind the software. In fact we think the philosphy is more important as it helps define how you use the system and how it helps. We’ve now expanded to look at how you deliver outcomes across the whole business, not just projects.
Our Story:
Richard’s background is one of sport. Whether that be playing or watching. It’s his passion and most of his early life was spent in this arena. It’s his knowledge of sport, playing and coaching that helped him devise his approach to projects. After all, is a football season not just a series of timeboxes with a delivery at the end of each. Do we not review the previous timebox and result and then re-plan what we need to do going forwards? Athletics is the same. We work towards a race, we plan it, train for it and we cover all bases, then we go out and deliver. But we have to be able to adapt. We might not feel 100%, our competitors might do something unexpected. We have to be seeing what’s in front of us and applying a level of agility to it.
And it’s this thought process that brings us to Hashiru. After all Scrum is named after rugby, and sprints were so named as they evoked a quality of intensity. Just like in athletics, there are many different lengths of race. And in projects we want the agility to change the race length depending on where we are at. And in most cases project teams are already working to timeboxes, they just call them months instead.
So back to Hashiru, well it's the Japanese word for ‘to run’ and well guess what, you run a business and you run a race. But why Japanese I hear you ask? Well, our founder has a love of all things Japanese. It was on his travel wishlist until recently, when he finally made it to Tokyo. And so much of what we use as good practice comes from Japan; Kanban, Kaizen, Ikigai, Lean and many more. So for us it’s a natural fit.
Richard will also talk about the time he did a Hash run in Brunei as a child and nearly drowned by misunderstanding ‘ankle deep’ as being literal. He disappeared under the water like Dawn French in the Vicar of Dibley. So there's a little nostalgic link with Hash and Hashiru.
Moving further forwards through time, Richard has held many positions such as Director of Digital, Projects Director and Implementation Director. He knows his way round the world of data, transformation, change, business development and continuous improvement. He has seen what works and what doesn’t.
He’s also been the one reporting up the chain and the one being reported to. And it's this knowledge that made him want to simplify the whole process and help businesses understand the role of qualitative data in performance. So we’ve put all of that together.
And the anime? Well that's just a little bit of Japanese ai fun to lighten the web pages. Aren’t software websites really boring? At least to us they are. So we’ve gone a different way. Let's make sites visually appealing and, well, less mundane.