The Art of a Simple Workflow

Keep things simple.

Have you ever found yourself assigning staff a set of tasks and sending them off to site only to find out that they missed half of what you said and ended up not completing the job? Or worse – not even arrived at the correct site?

Often the workflow can be boiled down to:

  • Travel to site
  • Perform tasks e.g.
  • Trim the hedges
  • Mow the lawn
  • Rake the leaves
  • Take a photo for evidence of the work that has been done
  • Move to the next location and repeat

One solution to this is to give your staff a paper-based job sheet with information regarding the site and the tasks required to be competed. This can work well if you have two to three employees, but problems can arise as your business grows in size. It’s not long before papers are lost and the necessary information is not captured.

The next solution is to leverage mobile technology and have staff use an app for recording their progress. This can have its own challenges as it requires staff to learn a new tool and if the tool is complicated, then mistakes can be made.

When we started creating the JobTasker mobile app, it wasn’t long before we realized that keeping the workflow simple was a number one priority.

While we as developers are experienced with technology and building apps, the guys out in the field doing the work just wanted something simple and easy to use.

Based on our users feedback we were able to focus on features that added to simplifying the users experience, these included:

  • Pin code login
  • Google maps navigation to a site
  • Multiple photo upload
  • Simple display and interface for completing tasks

This has made a JobTasker into a simple and easy to use app for field workers of any technological skill level.