Too simple to be true — automatically sorting email reports.
If you receive a lot of emails in your inbox or a group inbox and feel it’s overwhelming sorting them then look no further, we are here to help you out!
During the fall Malmö Civic Lab has spent their time at the Property and Street department (Fastighets-och Gatukontoret). We have been helping them to map, prototype, and build a new process for reporting maintenance of streets and parks during warranty time before they enter long-term maintenance (drift). We had been tasked to focus on greenery and playgrounds.
Where we are at. Currently, after something is built in the city we contract the entrepreneur to do maintenance on the area they have just built, be it a park, a playground, or a street with bushes and trees. We call this 3 year period a warranty time. During this period we want monthly reports to secure that the entrepreneur has done the maintenance tasks outlined in the contract. The reports coming in today are sent via email as an attached word document or PDF. We in the city then move each of these reports into folders based on which project they belong to.
Our recommendation for removing these reports altogether is another blog post! This activity alone results in 1h a week being spent “physically” moving these documents from the email inbox to the right project folder and the constant fear we have of not trusting if we put it in the right folder or not
As the video shows it takes Martin roughly a good minute per email. He receives about 60 of these a week. (Yes the ones of you who remember correctly we were asking for this monthly, but the entrepreneur wants to show off that they are doing things every week so we receive them way more often).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52uGpDm43Nc&
The sad part of this story is the realization that we are probably not alone in doing things this way. So this blogpost is simply to help all of you who receive emails with attachments and need to put them into a folder take back your time.
Solution that you could copy
What digital tools are really good at is turning the back end of your service into the hands of the users. Basically, what used to be core to your process you let the “user” do for you. For example, before you used to call your travel agency and give them a lot of detailed information about when and where you wanted to go over the phone and the travel agency would sit there and type it in for you. Today this sounds absurd, wasting the cost of salary of the person only typing in your travel data. We are now used to typing it in ourselves, where we are going, and when. Also, the tooling for building these systems is very simple. There are simple form tools like Google Forms and Microsoft Forms that help us tell the user what data or which questions they need to answer. Today, these are also automatically connected to databases often just excel sheet tools.
To remove the 1 hour spent each week we set up a form and asked the entrepreneurs to send in their reports by attaching them to the form rather than sending in an email. The only thing they needed to do was to tell us which project this report was for.
https://www.loom.com/share/e5fcbd7def894af4aadbb6343db74441
Of course, we want to do better and learn more about what is actually reported in these documents, to be able to analyze all that good data and take action. But we also need to meet our organization where it is, with this first step. It feels safe and not frightening, it does not directly change that much for the entrepreneurs and it saves valuable time.
