One of the most frustrating things a frontline employee can experience:
A list of things to fix from a report you don’t have access to.
I got an email from my manager. Thirty-five work orders I needed to close. Inactive. All I had was a screenshot from a report I couldn’t open. To close them in SAP, I’d have to manually type all 35 work order numbers in SAP and make adjustments.
Not only is that a pain to do, it’s inviting room for error. That’s a person doing mechanical work that a system should make needed changes apparent and possibly automatic. That’s an hour that produces nothing except correcting a process that was never designed for them.
That one email frustrated me immensely and taught me something that I won’t forget.
When you build for the person doing the work:
- Not for the report
- Not for the dashboard
- Not for the deployment checklist
Then, they actually use it. When they use it, they tell you what’s wrong with it. And when they tell you what’s wrong, the system gets better.
That feedback loop doesn’t exist when the frontline is locked out.
This is the experience I come back to every time I’m deciding what a system should do and for whom.