Email – What Do You Think

In a perfect world, how would you organise your workflow?

We’re looking for people’s ideas here to help direct our development of Front Office Box. Any thoughts you have and want to share? Please add them as comments at the bottom of the page. The more people we can get to contribute, the better will be the application which comes out of it.

Background

Seems a long time ago now when we decided to enable the workflow to be driven by email. It started with simply being able to file important emails where we could find them, and where they made sense – linked to companies, people and opportunities.

For months, with the help of some very patient users, we struggled through all sorts of problems with the technology (funnily enough email isn’t a standard internet technology and doesn’t plug and play the way we might expect).

The original workflow was simply assign to Opportunity/Action – in the background we linked the record to companies and people.

Usage showed a number of problems, firstly with identifying the correct opportunity and then secondly, easy access to the planning and scheduling functions. We addressed these with a) adding company name to the opportunity name displayed, b) create new action and c) greying out the links to the assigned record until next refresh.

With this users could more easily find the right opportunity and it was simple to add a new action to the existing opportunity. The greyed out links gave direct access to the Action, Opportunity and Company records.

This left us with a number of issues we still haven’t solved

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Naturally enough people liked the idea of forwarding or copying email to FOB – then driving planning and scheduling from the dashboard. But then they wanted to be able to create new companies, opportunities and people right there, on the dashboard.

We could put all those links on the dashboard but at a serious cost.

1. It would cut right across our Plan>Act>Review process
2. It would add lot of complexity to the dashboard and confusion to the workflow
3. Under the covers the app would get horribly complicated

None of these would be good news for our users, or for us, even though it sounds simple.

Our Fundamentals

Building software which gives everybody what they want results in Microsoft, and we aren’t going to do that. We have to restrict what we do to the things which create value for users at the lowest possible cost to them in terms of complexity and to us in terms of development and maintenance. Inevitably this means something for everybody, and everything for nobody. We have to use our ideas to provide what users don’t yet know they want and then persuade them they want it. And we have to explain they can’t have what they want if it doesn’t make sense to everybody else.

Plan>Act>Review wasn’t our idea. It was first described 100 years ago and has been the central concept of all management consulting for the last 50. In our version it’s really simple – Plan what you want do, Act in accordance with the Plan, Review progress and revise the Plan to accommodate what we learned. The Japanese called it Continuous Improvement. We just built it into our workflow because it’s the right way to do things. Otherwise FOB would just be a series of lists – just like all the other software you might use.

There are two factors which kill software businesses a)cost of sale and b) redevelopment to accommodate new technology. The more complexity we build under the covers the harder it becomes to change anything. In software the law of diminishing returns kicks in much earlier than people would expect. Development needn’t be expensive, and maintenance can be minimal if it’s built properly. But redevelopment with backward compatibility is a nightmare. Keeping the code under the covers as simple as possible is our best guarantee of still being there to support users in the business when everybody else has gone bust.

So here’s the question we like help with, in the context of those fundamentals

Communication driven workflow is going to become ever more important, but not limited to email. We can now send our voicemail and Twitter/Friendfeed Direct Messages to the Dashboard. At some point soon we’ll be doing the same with Wave messages.

Given FOB is a management application, for relationships, plans and schedules – How would you like to drive it from your incoming communications. How would you prefer to go from message to create a new person record, create a new company record, create a new plan record, add milestones, add actions and assign that message to where it makes sense to keep it.

And you can read the story of my first encounter with this issue and others at Inbox to Excellence

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