Prakash's Team Tracker

See where every electrical team is and what they are doing at each site, on one screen that never beeps.

Who this is for

Prakash Salunke runs Salunke Electricals from a one-room shop in Itwari, Nagpur. Four teams, eleven boys, mostly shop wiring and generator work across the city. Most mornings he is in the wholesale cable lane buying two-and-a-half square wire, standing where two hundred people are shouting at once. His phone is in his hand and it has buzzed nine times. He has heard none of them. He wants to know, in one look, whether the team sent to the Sitabuldi jewellery shop has reached.

How the job is done today

There is a WhatsApp group called Salunke Team with eleven boys in it. A lead types reached at 9.40, someone puts a photo of a burnt MCB, someone puts good morning. By noon Prakash has to scroll up to work out whether the Sitabuldi team ever went. Tomorrow's jobs live in a pocket diary in handwriting only he can read. When a customer rings asking why nobody has come, he rings three boys one after another until one picks up. Twice this month two teams turned up at the same site and the third site got no one.

The screens, in order

1. Today's board — Shows every team on one screen with the site it is standing at and how long since that team last said anything.
2. My job — Gives a team lead only the site he is on, so he can say where things stand without typing anything.
3. New job — Puts a customer's work on one team for one day.
4. Site card — Holds everything known about a single job in one place, including the run of taps the lead made through the day.
5. Week plan — Shows the next seven days for each team so Prakash can promise a customer Thursday and mean it.
6. Company setup — Lets a contractor who has bought this add their own teams and leads and see nobody else's.

What it keeps track of

• Teams — team name, which boys are on it, the lead's phone number, whether the team is working today
• Jobs — customer name, site address, phone number, what the work is, which team, which day, finished or not
• Status taps — which job, which team, reached or working or done or held up, the one line if held up, the time it was tapped
• Customers — name, phone, address, the jobs they have had before
• Firms — which contractor's account this is, who is allowed to sign in

The one decision that matters

The whole thing turns on whether the software pushes or is pulled. One way: alert Prakash when a team taps done, alert the lead when a job lands on him. The other way: no alerts at all, and instead every team's tile carries the time of its last tap and goes grey after two hours of silence, so the absence of news becomes the news. Go the second way. In the cable lane he will not hear a beep, and a lead up a ladder will not feel one. A board he glances at four times a day is honest about what it does not know, while an alert nobody heard is a quiet lie. The same reasoning is why nothing goes out to customers automatically in the first version either. Prakash rings them himself, and he would rather do that than trust a message he cannot confirm landed.

What to leave out of the first version

No live location of the boys on a map. It needs their phones awake all day, it flattens the battery, and every lead will feel followed, which is the fastest way to get four teams to stop tapping anything. A tap that says reached, from a man who chose to tap it, is worth more than a moving dot. Leave out photos, quotations and billing too. Prakash already has a bill book, and the thing he cannot do today is see his four teams at once.

How you would know it worked

A Thursday passes and Prakash does not ring a single boy to ask if he reached. When the Sitabuldi customer calls at eleven, he answers from the screen in front of him without scrolling the group.

Build it

Paste this in and let it run.

I run an electrical contracting firm in Nagpur with four teams and I want a website that shows on one screen which site each team is at, what they are doing, and how long since that team last touched it, so a team that has gone quiet is easy to spot. My team leads open the same site on their phones, see only their own job, and tap one of four big buttons, reached, working, done, held up, and type one line if held up. I should be able to add a job with customer name, address, phone and what the work is, put it on a team for a chosen day, and see the next seven days for each team so I know who is free on Thursday. No alerts or beeps, we work in noise. It must open on a slow phone. Later I want to sell this to other contractors, so each firm signs in and sees only its own teams.