As an office manager, why did I start programming? #1

As an office manager, why did I start programming? #1

Uniting Diversified Tools

Introduction

In 2019, I was working as an office manager for a franchise company. Until then, I hadn't even thought of doing programming. I tried to increase productivity as much as possible with the given tools, but I was not satisfied. In the end, in the process of solving problems, I started programming with the idea that I should make what I needed by myself.

The bottlenecks and my attempt to improve them can be divided into two stages.

  1. Uniting Diversified Tools
  2. Web Application Development

This post is about "1. Uniting diversified tools".


Diversified tools

The company's structure was like this. The head office (office team) directly manages 10 stores across New Zealand through on-site operation teams. The office team was communicating with operation teams. And managing the tools for operation teams was one of the office team works.

The problem was that tools were diversified, not unified. Operation teams were using all different tools for rostering, task management, communication, payroll, cloud, email, and basic office tasks.

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Zoom Shift (Rostering), Monday (Task management), Slack (Communication), FlexiTime (Payroll), DropBox (Cloud), G suite (Email), Office365 (Office work)

Checking tasks on Monday, communicating with branches using Slack, exchanging emails with Gmail, and checking data on Dropbox

For the office team, it didn't matter as we were working in the office and were all familiar with the tools. But since operation teams did not just do office work in front of their desks, the more and more complex the tools became, the more difficult they felt to use. In particular, when we trained new managers, it was difficult to train each tool one by one, and whenever a new tool was added, all operation teams had to be trained. As the number of stores and the number of managers continues to increase, managing the accounts of the tool was also one of the inefficiencies.

When we all had to get into advanced tasks such as sales, labor costs, and COGs analysis, it was a shame to get caught up in tools.


Resolution process

While looking for ways to improve, I found Microsoft Office365. We thought that it would be possible to unite distributed tools as it was providing email, office work apps, communication, and cloud services all at once with one account.

Teams is commonly used now as remote work has increased, but at that time, Office 365 subscription just came out in the market, and Teams was a new app. So by creating an account and using it, I specified which app and how to use them would be the most efficient for the company at the time.

With the apps provided by Office365 centered on Teams, we determined they could cover operation jobs, and in early 2019, the existing tools were integrated into Office365.

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  • Office365 (Rostering, task management, communication, cloud, email, office work)
  • FlexiTime (Payroll)

Despite the many meetings with operation teams and training materials we prepared for the transitioning process, of course, there was a (great) backlash from the operation team. But I thought we had to bear it. Because I believed that if the overhead was reduced, we could focus on more important tasks.

Screen Shot 2022-09-05 at 8.32.12 PM.png Training materials for the uniting


Results?

We were satisfied with the results.

1. Doing most tasks with Teams

  • Office documents were opened in Teams, the communication app of Office365, without going back and forth between multiple applications, so most of the small tasks could be handled in Teams.
  • Teams can also be linked with other services such as wiki and voting, so additional features can be added without additional hassle.

2. Operation team training

  • Guides about Office 365 apps were provided by Microsoft, so I shared them through links.
  • Because the UIs between the Office365 apps were similar, managers could easily be familiar with other apps once they learned how to use one app.

It was efficient that they did not have to open multiple windows for work, and the cloud for data sharing, such as OneDrive or SharePoint, is tightly integrated with Teams and Outlook, so the operation teams only need to share files through Teams. Just after transitioning to Office365, the covid outbreak, and the entire staff often worked remotely. That's when Teams played a big role.

But sooner or later, other problems occurred.

(Continued to the next post “Web Application Development”.)