You can see where the work has got to.
The state of a job lives in somebody's head or in a spreadsheet they own. Customers ring to ask where things are, two people give two different answers, and the month end numbers are put together by hand over an afternoon nobody has spare.
You might recognise some of this.
If three or four of these are true, this is the page for you. If none of them are, it probably is not, and we would rather you knew that now.
- Answering what is on at the moment means asking people
- The spreadsheet that holds it is owned by one person and edited by nobody else
- Customers ring to ask where something has got to
- Month end reporting is a day of copying and pasting
- Two people give two different answers about the same job
One made up example, before and after.
This is an illustration, not a client. Northridge Systems is a new practice and there are no case studies on this site. The example below is invented to show the shape of the problem and the shape of the fix. Nothing in it describes a real business or a real result.
A Friday now
- Somebody asks how many jobs are open.
- The answer is in one spreadsheet, one inbox and two people's heads.
- The spreadsheet was last updated on Wednesday, by somebody who has since gone on holiday.
- The numbers for the month are assembled by exporting three things and pasting them together.
- Nobody quite trusts the total, so a decision waits until Monday.
A Friday after
- One view shows every open job and the stage it is at.
- It is updated as a side effect of the work, not as a separate job somebody has to remember.
- A customer asking where something is gets an answer from whoever picks up the phone.
- The month's numbers come out of what is already recorded, and you can see how they were counted.
- Where a figure is missing, it says so rather than showing a nought.
What is actually handed over.
Written down before the work starts, as part of the quote, so there is no argument later about what was included.
- One view of the work, built from what you already record
- Agreed stages, so two people describe the same job the same way
- A weekly or monthly figure that shows its own working
- A way for the people who need it to see it, and nobody else
- The notes, the logins and the reasoning
Decisions stay with people.
Software is good at remembering and terrible at judgement. Where AI is genuinely useful we use it, and it drafts rather than decides: nothing reaches a customer without somebody looking at it first.
- What the stages are, and when a job moves between them
- What gets reported, and to whom
- Any judgement about whether a job is really finished
- Who can see the view
The next step is a conversation about this one thing.
Tell us what you would want to see on a Friday afternoon, and we will look at whether your own records can already answer it. It runs to 45 minutes and there is nothing to prepare. Within two working days you get one page: what we heard, what we would change first and what it would involve, yours to keep whether or not you use us.