Example engagement
Work orders travel on paper, sign-offs wait for someone to get back to a desk, and the office types it all in again the next morning. How we would put the day’s work on the phone in a technician’s pocket.
A finished job is signed off where it happened and is ready to invoice the same hour. Managers see the day as it runs, and the office stops typing yesterday’s paperwork into the system.
The business runs on a system built for a desk, and a stack of paper built around it. A technician finishes a job, the customer signs a sheet, and the sheet reaches the office the next day. Managers find out how the week went on Monday, from an email.
Which jobs are done away from a desk, by whom, and what they need to see and record to finish one. It is always a shorter list than the system’s menu. If the system’s own mobile app would do the job, we say so.
A small application that does three or four things well: today’s jobs in order, the steps of each one, the customer’s signature, and nothing else. It reads from and writes to the system you already run, so there is no second set of records.
Adoption is the measure. We watch who opens it and what they do, remove what nobody uses, and add the next job only when the first has become a habit.
Where it goes wrong
Every engagement has a part that fights back. This is the one we would plan for first.
Building too much. The first version of an operations app wants to do everything the desk system does. The ones that get used do very little. We would ship the smallest version that removes one sheet of paper, and earn the rest.
Thirty minutes. Bring the process, and we will tell you whether it needs software at all.
