Software Development Confessions

Technology Alone Can’t Bring You to the 21st Century

Having spent the last 12 years attending transportation trade shows, I have come to anticipate a familiar scene: Up to our booth walk the owner of a bus company and his operations manager. The operations manager has been with the company for 2 and a half years, and from day one on the job has been pleading with the owner to “get the technology we need to bring us to the 21st century.” Their company has done well, but they believe they have opportunities to expand by purchasing a neighboring bus company, and bidding for new work with a more distant but potentially lucrative school district. With rising prices for gas and busses, getting “lean and mean” to compete in today’s school transportation world means “taking the plunge” and making a sweeping implementation of technology to maximize resources and allow the company to scale to larger horizons.

Before they leave, there are always 2 questions: “how much does something like this cost?” and then the interesting one: “how long would it take us to get up and running?” Over the last few years, my answer to the second question has changed dramatically. I used to answer the question as though it related entirely to the software and training: “Oh a week or two at the most.” In the last couple of years, I have learned that a good implementation should take much longer: “Three to six months before you are completely functional.” When I see the raised eyebrows and startled expressions staring back at me, I am forced to explain the new variable that accounts for this longer implementation strategy: “It will take several weeks once you learn how the software works to adjust your workflow processes and customize your reports to make the most of this new system.”

In the landmark book about successful business practices “Good To Great”, business guru Jim Collins devotes an entire chapter to the roll of technology in the great companies that were studied for the book. The results of the study showed that:

“The good-to-great companies used technology as an accelerator of momentum, not a creator of it. None of the good-to-great companies began their transformations with pioneering technology, yet they all became pioneers in the application of technology once they grasped how it fit . . . You could have taken the exact same leading-edge technologies pioneered at the good-to-great companies and handed them to their direct comparisons for free, and the comparisons still would have failed to produce anywhere near the same results.”

For too many companies, implementing field trip or charter software means bringing it into the workplace and attempting to shoehorn current practices into the software. In this way, the software simply provides a different platform for employees to do what they have always done. In fact, our most successful installations involve companies who use this moment of change as an inflection point to review all the workflow processes of each employee affected by the change. Such a comprehensive and meticulous review is probably more important to improving the efficiency of the company than the technology itself. Without it, the technology implementation will be seen as a “magic bullet” which is sure to disappoint as it merely enshrines digitally the inefficient workflow processes which were previously limited to pencil and paper (or an older software platform).

This review is very simple, yet challenging. The simplicity is evident in the single question that must be repeated throughout the review: “why do we do things the way we do?” The truth is that whether a company is transporting passengers, selling software, or building motorcycles, we have all developed many practices that were the result of personal preferences of employees (some of whom may not even work for us any longer), the specialized needs of a certain client, or the limitations of an old software platform. Many times, the complex processes that a central employee has developed to successfully tackle each day’s challenges would be nearly impossible for someone new to succeed with should the swine flu render the local expert unavailable for a month.

The challenging part of the review is overcoming the defensiveness we all feel when we are asked “why do YOU do things the way YOU do?” Having visited hundreds of transportation departments all over the United States and Canada it is extremely common that we find excellent employees using inefficient systems. Separating the evaluation of the system from the person who uses or created it is vital. Often times we must tip our hat and say “under the circumstances, with the resources available, this is an amazingly intelligent way of making sure that you can handle the job you were given.” At the same time, the point of the review is to remove all of these factors and say “Given the resources now available and the task as it is now defined, what is the most efficient way for this company to operate, position by position.” Sometimes this means moving responsibilities from one employee to another. Sometimes this means telling a “special” client that they are going to have to adjust to a revised way of doing things. Sometimes it means removing a process that was developed to handle a “1 in 10,000” event, but adds labor or complexity to each transaction making it not worth the benefit.

Against the pull to settle for inefficient systems a good operations manger must also resist the opposite urge to create a “perfect system”. In our first few years in business we got a very high profile client who we were determined to “bend over backwards” for. This meant completely customizing many features to their every desire. The result was myriads of settings and many complicated logical steps. Our goal was to handle any possible scenario with the software. I will never forget what the owner relayed to me in a conversation we had several years after the implementation: “In retrospect I wish you would have told us that we couldn’t have our way, and forced us to use the system as you had designed it, because we ended up creating a monster for ourselves.” No software or workflow system is good enough to remove the need to have good employees who can make decisions and remember important information. In an attempt to realize the goal of having a system that a monkey could use, the result is ironically one which requires a rocket scientist to administer.

In summary, we have found at EasyBus that we can serve an unexpected roll with our clients in that we have seen the best practices of hundreds of similar transportation companies first hand. Each company is unique, but the best chance for success occurs when both the sales process and the training process is not one side or the other saying “this is what we do”, and then “this is what our software does”, but rather a dialogue of “how can we work together to implement a solution that makes this company as efficient as possible.” It takes more time and effort to think this way, but the results speak for themselves.

Michael C. Hinckley
President EasyBus, Inc.