Services
Six shapes of job. Most engagements are one of them, and a few turn out to be two once someone has read the existing system.
Platforms and services
The system the business runs on
The thing that takes the orders, moves the money, or holds the records. It usually exists already, usually predates everyone still working there, and usually cannot be switched off for a weekend. Most of this work is done in public, on a running system.
Sounds familiar if- It works, but nobody wants to change it
- The person who wrote it has left
- A release takes a day and a held breath
Internal tools
The screen your team lives in all day
Nobody demos an internal tool, which is why they stay bad for years. The gain is measured in how many times a day someone stops swearing at it, and that is a real number even when it is an awkward one to put on a slide.
Sounds familiar if- The real workflow lives in a spreadsheet beside the app
- New staff need a week of shadowing to use it
- Someone has built a private script to make it bearable
Booking and scheduling
Where money and time meet
Availability, capacity, cancellation, overbooking, timezones, and the awkward hour twice a year when the clocks move. Easy to build badly and expensive to get wrong, because every error is either an empty slot or an angry person.
Sounds familiar if- Double bookings get fixed by hand
- Cancellations are a phone call
- Capacity is somebody’s judgement rather than a rule
Data and reporting
Getting the number out of the machine
The number exists. It is in three systems, in two shapes, and the monthly version is assembled by a person who is on holiday next week. This work is mostly about agreeing what the number means before automating the wrong one.
Sounds familiar if- Two departments quote different figures for the same thing
- The monthly report takes a person two days
- Nobody can say exactly how a headline number is derived
Keeping it running
Monitoring, on-call, the 3am page
Alerting that fires on things people should actually wake up for, and stays quiet otherwise. An alert nobody acts on is worse than no alert, because it teaches the team to ignore the channel.
Sounds familiar if- You find out from a customer
- The alert channel is muted
- Recovery depends on one person being reachable
The site that announces it
Same team, same week
The public page for the thing we just built, or for something someone else built. Fixed date, one chance at a first impression. It gets the same people as the platform work, which is unusual and is most of the reason it stays consistent with the product.
Sounds familiar if- The launch date is fixed and close
- The current page predates the current product
- The site and the product disagree about what the product does