A question was posted on reddit
My brother just hired me on to help with the admin side of his 4-person construction company. We do a lot of subcontracting, and we use Trello to organize who is hired to do which job and where. For the most part, this system works great, however because of the amount of work we are getting, it’s starting to feel a little clunky. SO…
I’m looking for an alternative program. I love how simple and user friendly Trello is. But it would be great to add a calendar, a “contact” page, maybe even sync my current excel sheets contact list.
Any recommendations?? Thanks!
You could try finding ready-made commercial packages for your industry and business size.
You can try to see if Trello can be configured to better meet your needs. And to do that you might need to spend a handful of hours doing a bit of lightweight documenting, conversations, brainstorming as I describe below:
You are already starting off on a good foot by being curious if there is a way to improve how you are currently working in terms of process and tools.
Things like Trello and Jira are glorified to-do lists. Especially useful for accessing 24×7 and remotely. They are also generic as hell. Not a care in the world for what industry you are in (well, Jira might have some hints of being a software issue tracker).
I would recommend continuing to capture just enough of your needs (aka, requirements as you have begun to articulate herein). Also, it is important to capture the pains that you are currently experiencing. And maybe jotting down potential gains you could see; e,g,, “if only X were possible.”
That is, do not merely settle for finding a new tool. Maybe it is time to also step back and ask yourselves where you are headed. What is our current way of working, pains and all, and what might we want to shape for our future way of working?
Suggestion: Grab a handful of your team (and maybe some trusted sub-contractors) that know how you work and are interested in finding a better way, and consider doing something like this:
- Capture a high-level view of your CURRENT process… from intake (work order) to cash (i.e., accounts receivable)
- Get a large whiteboard — 4’x8′ for example,
- plenty of pastel-colored post-it notes and black markers
- Get some whiteboard markers
- Put INTAKE (Start) at the left, and CASH (End) on the right
- Get the coffee and donuts going, or beers and brats… hand out sticky pads and thick markers
- Set a timer to work in 15-min chunks, for example, and step back and discuss.
- Encourage people to start filling in the details between START and END
- Different people might know different parts of the process
- Use simple ideas (do not write a novel on a sticky)
- Work order arrives
- Acknowledge receipt
- Triage new orders
- Needs estimate
- Estimated
- Estimate sent to customer
- etc.
- Along the way, as people are contributing to building this “flow chart” be sure to jot down things that really suck — because believe me, folks will moan and groan when they hit parts of the process
- I like to write down PAINS on pink (a shade of red) stickies so it is easy to see and ponder
- “Work items getting lost in the shuffle”
- “Management by text message sucks”
- Also, track when “reverse flows” happen (and how often) — for example,
- having to do rework
- estimate needs another pass
- quality problem
- customer rejected the work
- shit, a request fell through the cracks
- etc.
FUTURE PROCESS
- You might want to tweak how you currently work to address pain points
- You can do this as you dream up a more ideal way of working
- You might need the OTHER side of the whiteboard — if it was one of those on rollers 😉
You could do this over a few meetings… let it stay up in the office and ponder it over lunch for a week or so.
This process gets the entire team on board with owning this problem. Or at least participating and building a shared understanding.
You might even be shocked at how much you can accomplish with a manual system — at least for parts of your process. After all, companies were successful before computers.
If you do not know what your process should look like manually, you might just find yourselves being driven by the biases inherent in a tool that you expect to solve your problem. Some tools might be perfect for your industry, and might even show you good “default” ways to start out because they are built off of the backs of real people using them to solve needs similar to yours. And other tools could lead you to ruin.
If I had to guess you will end up with some high-level bits of the process that emerge that could map to a set of simple lists and a set of steps within each.
- Intake Processing (including no-bids)
- Job Preparation
- Work in Progress
- Work in Review
- Invoicing/Accounts Receivable
Once you see the types of things you need to do from the exercise above, you could:
- Look for a product for your type of construction work (though they might all be bloated and geared towards larger companies)
- Try some simple ways to create a process flow in something like Jira or even Trello now that you have a handle on what a better way of working could look like
Might even be worth paying someone to help guide you to finding/creating a solution that meets your needs. Because it is easy for me to see how to force a tool like Trello or Jira into behaving for a specific need, but that’s after decades of experience.
It’s a great opportunity to put a bit of effort into learning how to find new ways to work. Because you should do it as often as needed.