A couple years ago I tore up my knee playing softball. It wasn’t super glorious, although I’m still grateful that we live in a day and age where they could take a ruined knee and make it work again. That still seems like an utter miracle.

That said, the long road back from injury included a staggering number of physical therapy appointments over the course of two years — at times as many as three times a week. 

To schedule each appointment, after I was done with the previous session I would walk out past the reception area and schedule the next one. It didn’t take long to realize that there was a serious issue with the scheduling software. 

Stephanie — who was relentlessly nice about it — would have to re-start from the beginning for each different physical therapist whose schedule she wanted to check. She would find a possible time for me with one therapist, then start over, try a different therapist, and find a comparison time. It took a shocking amount of typing and clicking to be able to say “Kathleen has a 3:15 on Wednesday. Now let me start over and check Randy’s schedule…” 

Often she would check the schedule like this for 4-5 different therapists in order to schedule one appointment. And that process happened 3 times a week just for me, but probably many thousands of times a week for all of the patients coming by her desk. What an atrocious use of Stephanie’s time and energy.

How Stephanie didn’t hurl her computer out the window is truly a mystery to me.

When you witness a situation like this, it’s pretty clear that no one on the software development team has spent much time hanging out at Stephanie’s desk, just watching her use the system they built. If they did, they would have 15 different ideas of things to improve within the first hour. And one of those ideas just might save the hospital system about 100,000 staff hours over the next year.

But chances are, someone in the IT or software team has come by at various times to fix an issue Stephanie submitted as a help ticket. Maybe they even fixed it, solved her problem, and left her happy. 

That’s great. But it’s not the same.

If you really want to improve your technology tools and systems, you have to get out from behind your ticketing queue. Ask people if you can watch them use that new feature at some point. Offer to help show them that thing again from the training at a time when they will actually need to use it. Check back in about how that event went, if they were able to enter the new contacts in, and whether they had any problems or ideas on how to improve it for next time.

If you really want your system to fulfill its potential as a gamechanger, get off your rear and get in the game.