The software that made you work backwards

Nuria wanted to do something very simple: enter into the computer a quote to renovate a bathroom. She had it all in her head, fresh out of the site visit. She sat down in front of the management software and, before she could write a single line item, the program asked her to create a "project". To create the project she needed a "client" set up. To set up the client, a "cost-centre code". And for the cost-centre code, a window with eleven mandatory fields, of which she used two.

Twenty minutes later, she still hadn't written the price of the bathroom. She was filling in boxes that meant nothing to her, making up codes so the program would let her through to the next screen. By the time she finally got to enter the line items, she'd forgotten half of what she'd discussed on the visit.

Nuria runs a full-renovations studio in Málaga. Eleven people between site and office. The program they used had been sold to them, three years earlier, by a very convincing salesman who told them it was "the industry standard". And maybe it was the standard for some industry. Just not hers.

What the program forced them to be

That program was made for a large construction firm, the kind that puts up buildings: jobs lasting years, with phases, monthly certifications, dozens of subcontractors and a whole administration department. For that, all those fields made sense. A job like that is a world of its own, and it needs its paperwork.

But Nuria's studio didn't put up buildings. It renovated bathrooms, kitchens and whole flats. Jobs of three weeks, of six, of three months. Where a construction firm sees "project, phases, certifications", Nuria saw "a bathroom, with its bits, for the lady on the third floor". Her way of working was a different one, faster and closer, and the program forced her to dress up every renovation as a major build just to enter it. To work backwards from how she thought.

The result is one every company that's been through this knows, though few say it out loud: the team stopped using the program for the important things. They used it at the end, grudgingly, to get the invoice out, because for that there was no way around it. But the real work — the quotes, the measurements, the tracking of each job — had moved somewhere else. To a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet Nuria kept, that only she knew, that lived on her laptop, and that was, in fact, the real brain of the company. The pricey program was a façade; the business beat in a hidden spreadsheet.

What she asked for and what she needed

Nuria called me convinced the solution was to change programs. She'd been looking at three others on the market, all alike, and wanted me to help her pick "the least bad one". She was also considering paying for a course so the team would "learn to use the one they had properly", because she'd come to think the problem was them, that they didn't know how.

I told her it wasn't her, nor her team, nor a missing course. The team knew how to do great renovations; what they didn't know how to do was pretend that a bathroom renovation is the building of a bridge, because nobody can do that naturally. It wasn't a training problem. It was a fit problem.

And switching to another program on the market, of the ones she'd seen, was swapping one alien mould for another alien mould. They were all made for the imaginary average company that doesn't exist, and they were all going to ask her, one way or another, to bend again to fit. The parallel spreadsheet would still be there, underneath, because it would still be the only place the studio worked the way it actually worked.

—So what do I do with the spreadsheet?
—Look at it properly. Because that spreadsheet, as scruffy as it seems, is the only one that knows how you work. Let's build a program that looks like it, not like a construction firm.

How it works, no smoke

We started backwards from how it had all started: instead of bringing in a program and seeing how we fitted the studio inside it, we looked at how the studio worked and built the program around it. That, in one sentence, is what "custom" means. It isn't more luxurious. It's the other way round.

I spent two mornings with Nuria and the site people, without touching a keyboard, just watching how they made a real quote. It turned out they thought of it by rooms: the bathroom, the kitchen, the living room. And within each room, by line items: plumbing, tiling, electrics. That's how they talked it through with the client and how they held it in their heads. Nuria's spreadsheet was laid out exactly like that, because she'd made it in her own image.

The program we built them starts where their work starts: "new job, which rooms?". You pick bathroom, and the typical bathroom line items appear, theirs, the ones they always put in, with their prices already loaded. You tap what this renovation needs and remove what it doesn't. The quote builds itself while you think, in the same order you think in. There are no cost-centre codes, no phases, no eleven fields. There are bathrooms, kitchens and ladies on the third floor. And when the quote is accepted, that same information serves to track the job and, at the end, to invoice, without writing anything again anywhere else.

The honest thing is to say what this asks in return. A custom program doesn't come ready-made as a gift: you have to sit down and tell how you work, and that takes its time and its honesty, because sometimes, telling it, you discover you were doing some things oddly for no reason. It isn't for everyone or for every process: if your way of working really is the standard one, a standard program will do and it's cheaper. What makes no sense is paying for a standard one and then working in secret in a spreadsheet because the standard one doesn't serve you.

What changed at the studio

First, the time. A renovation quote, which used to take Nuria more than two hours wrestling with the program or, in practice, with the spreadsheet and then copying it into the program, started coming out in twenty-five minutes. And it came out well made, with all the line items, no forgettings, because the program kept reminding her of what a bathroom usually involves.

Second, and more important, the parallel spreadsheet disappeared. Not because we banned it from anyone, but because it stopped being needed. When the program finally worked the way they did, there was no longer any reason to keep a secret brain on Nuria's laptop. And with it went the risk nobody wanted to name: that the laptop would break, or that Nuria would go on sick leave, and half the company would go with it.

And a third thing happened, quieter. The site people started using the program on their own, without anyone pushing them. When a tool goes with your head instead of against it, you don't have to force its use. It gets used by itself, because it helps.

Let the program work like you

There's something Nuria told me a few months on, and it's exactly the flip of the title.

—At last the program works like us, and not us like the program.

A lot of small companies carry software that's too big for them or too odd for them, and they've ended up believing it's their fault: that they don't know how, that they need a course, that they should adapt. And meanwhile, quietly, they've built their real system in a spreadsheet, in a notebook, in someone's head, where they do fit just as they are. That double life — the expensive façade and the hidden brain — is the clearest sign that the tool doesn't fit.

A tool isn't there for you to bend to it. It's there to fit your way of working and push it along. When a company has to work backwards to please its program, the problem is almost never the company. And that, today, has a fix: not by hunting for another alien mould, but by making the mould to the measure of whoever's going to wear it.