Bryan Needs a Title for His Home Page
16 months and no resolution…
We had a standard ruggedized field laptop for all worksite staff. It could take a beating, including sitting all day in a closed truck cab in Arizona in the middle of summer. Every jobsite with an office had a high-gain wifi antenna covering the site, extending the LAN over VPN to on-site staff.
Solid setup. Worked for everyone. Until we brought in a new field lead.
He seemed fine at his job. But we could not get him to use the computer. He wanted a tablet. That would be the trick to get him compliant with his paperwork.
So I secured a tablet version of the same ruggedized line.
Nope. He needed a stylus.
Got him a stylus. He lost it. And now the tablet was too bulky.
So we went a different direction entirely. My team built web-based integrations that let him do his submission work from his phone. The device already in his pocket.
He used it for a few weeks. Then stopped.
So I got him one of the lighter tablets we issued to office workers.
No. It needed to be an Apple tablet. That’s what all the other trades were using.
We were a Windows shop. Not out of preference. We’d done a full assessment before moving to tablet-based computing and the cost-benefit balance landed us on Surface Pros. They did what we needed at the right price.
I asked him what exactly he was going to run on an Apple tablet that he couldn’t do on any standard system we had. Everything he used was a web-based portal.
That moved to a conversation with one of the company owners, who was going to have to justify the $1,400 expense for what looked like a fit-in-with-my-peers demand.
I’m a platform-agnostic guy. If the tool does the job, that’s the tool. But $1,400 for a new system when we had hardware that exceeded requirements and was already integrated into our infrastructure? That’s a different problem.
He swore that this time, for real, for sure, if we just got him that Apple tablet, he would miraculously become compliant with his paperwork.
The result: marginal improvement. Never really compliant. Separated from the company four months later. The company was left holding hardware nobody needed on a payment contract.
Each individual ask sounded reasonable. Tablet. Stylus. Lighter form factor. Different brand. But stacked together they told a different story (and the phone integration said it all for me). We committed engineering hours to put the work on the device he was already carrying and it didn’t solve the real problem… but I needed to demonstrate good faith accommodation of the request with ownership. It wasn’t wasted effort though as the rest of the team benefited from the updates.
Sigh…
I fully support adapting to meet the needs of your staff. But there has to be a point where you say: this is the line. When the demands are clearly a way to put off doing the work, every concession just buys a few weeks of silence… never the actual compliance.
The diagnostic isn’t in any single request. It’s in the pattern.
Solid setup. Worked for everyone. Until we brought in a new field lead.
He seemed fine at his job. But we could not get him to use the computer. He wanted a tablet. That would be the trick to get him compliant with his paperwork.
So I secured a tablet version of the same ruggedized line.
Nope. He needed a stylus.
Got him a stylus. He lost it. And now the tablet was too bulky.
So we went a different direction entirely. My team built web-based integrations that let him do his submission work from his phone. The device already in his pocket.
He used it for a few weeks. Then stopped.
So I got him one of the lighter tablets we issued to office workers.
No. It needed to be an Apple tablet. That’s what all the other trades were using.
We were a Windows shop. Not out of preference. We’d done a full assessment before moving to tablet-based computing and the cost-benefit balance landed us on Surface Pros. They did what we needed at the right price.
I asked him what exactly he was going to run on an Apple tablet that he couldn’t do on any standard system we had. Everything he used was a web-based portal.
That moved to a conversation with one of the company owners, who was going to have to justify the $1,400 expense for what looked like a fit-in-with-my-peers demand.
I’m a platform-agnostic guy. If the tool does the job, that’s the tool. But $1,400 for a new system when we had hardware that exceeded requirements and was already integrated into our infrastructure? That’s a different problem.
He swore that this time, for real, for sure, if we just got him that Apple tablet, he would miraculously become compliant with his paperwork.
The result: marginal improvement. Never really compliant. Separated from the company four months later. The company was left holding hardware nobody needed on a payment contract.
Each individual ask sounded reasonable. Tablet. Stylus. Lighter form factor. Different brand. But stacked together they told a different story (and the phone integration said it all for me). We committed engineering hours to put the work on the device he was already carrying and it didn’t solve the real problem… but I needed to demonstrate good faith accommodation of the request with ownership. It wasn’t wasted effort though as the rest of the team benefited from the updates.
Sigh…
I fully support adapting to meet the needs of your staff. But there has to be a point where you say: this is the line. When the demands are clearly a way to put off doing the work, every concession just buys a few weeks of silence… never the actual compliance.
The diagnostic isn’t in any single request. It’s in the pattern.