A delivery system that let non-technical staff run a technical process

The plan

This one was built for Riverskies itself. The plan was a managed website service for small businesses: a short phone call, a few days' work, one review call, and a finished site. To make that work at volume, the people assembling the sites could not all be developers, and no two of them could end up doing the same job at once.

How a job moved through it

So the process came first and the software followed it. Every job moved across a board, one column per stage, visible to everyone in real time. Someone picked up a waiting job, entered the few details it needed, and submitted it. The setup that followed happened on its own: somewhere for the new site's code to live, a placeholder page, the hosting prepared, and that placeholder live on the customer's own address. The job then reappeared on the board at the next stage, ready for someone to build the site properly, and moved on again for review.

What it changed

The point wasn't the automation itself. It was that the technical steps stopped being something only a developer could do, and stopped being done slightly differently each time. Everything from sign-up to finished delivery worked this way, apart from taking the payment.

The subscription business behind it didn't go ahead. The delivery system itself was built and working.

What it solved

This solved problems that show up in any office, not just a technical one:

• two people starting the same job because neither could see the other had picked it up
• work sitting between stages with nobody sure whose turn it was
• the same set-up steps done by hand each time, slightly differently each time
• a routine job that could only move forward when the one technical person was free

If the same steps are being done by hand in your business, the Admin Automation Audit maps where, or work out what the same patterns cost first.