Here at Your Tech, we are always innovating, whether it’s accomplishing the never before seen electronics vision in your home or just looking for another way to deliver exceptional service to our clients. This article is about our journey to greater efficiency for our clients – achieved by creating the ultimate to-do list!
Formulating Ideas for the To-Do List
During a company meeting, we came up with the following features we desired in a to-do list:
- Only Doable Tasks – As you can imagine, there are many steps to completing a project. We didn’t want our co-workers or clients to become anxious about the sheer number of tasks that must be performed. A to-do list that only showed currently “doable” tasks would be immensely helpful. As each task is completed, we wanted the list to update with new tasks that then became “doable”.
- Track Progress – We wanted to be able to keep a detailed log of our progress on each project. Ideally, a database would be created by the to-do list. As each person checks something off, it should include a time stamp and user ID.
- Training – As our co-workers would be using this everyday, including new employees, we thought it would be ideal to have training tutorials integrated directly into items on the list. This would make it easy to learn as you go, and would be a great resource to double-check troublesome installation scenarios.
The Futile Search for a Solution
And so, we decided it was time to implement this simple to-do list!
We did a google search for task management and organizational tools and contacted the first five companies we found. We soon realized that although they were quick to tout their products and ask for our credit card information, none of their products would come close to delivering everything we needed.
We actually ended up contacting over 100 different companies in our search, but ultimately, not one was able to deliver all the features we were looking for. Unwilling to compromise, we looked for a different solution.
Using Our Talent to Create
During in-office sessions of what we call “innovation time”, we concluded that the best solution would be for our technicians to create the to-do list themselves.
Doing it this way, we ended up using our own in-house talent to create the perfect custom-tailored program. It came down to simply thinking of this web design project as another home automation system. We chose WordPress as the platform since we used it to build this main website and our drag and drop designer. With a bit of trial and error and troubleshooting (much like home automation programming), we pulled it off on our own!
Amazing Results
We set out to create a streamlined, “doable” only task manager, with data tracking and built-in training tools but ended up with something much more!
During the development process, we had the idea to share this program with our customers. We did this by providing the customer a simple link that they could click at any time to see which tasks have or haven’t been completed.
We also built in management reports which allowed us to reward our best talent with bonuses based on actual work completed or research who installed a faulty part discovered in the future. The training component next to each task has also inspired our new talent to take on tasks they would otherwise have considered daunting.
This project has been one of our best behind the scenes accomplishments because it’s leading to even happier customers and keeping our employees focused as we continue to grow.
< – – Check out an Example Client’s To-Do List- – >
