Nobody on Your Crew Is Using the System You Paid For
David Selva · · 3 min read
Team Adoption, Tree Service, Field Operations
Software doesn't fail in the trades because it's bad. It fails because it was designed around the person who bought it.
The estimate is in the system. The job notes are on a legal pad on the dash of the chip truck. Photos of the split limb are in a foreman's camera roll. The change order the homeowner agreed to is a voice memo nobody else has heard.
You are paying every month for software holding about a third of your operation, and the missing two thirds are the parts that decide whether a job goes right or turns into an argument.
Bought by one person, used by another
This is the pattern in every trade running field crews, and tree service has it worse than most.
The person who chose the system sat at a desk, looked at pipelines and reports, and judged it on what it could show him. The people who have to feed it are standing in a yard in gloves, next to a running chipper, holding a phone in a rugged case they can barely see in direct sun.
None of that second job was part of the buying decision. So the tool gets rated useful by one person and impossible by five — and the five win, because they are the ones holding the information.
What hard to use means on a job site
It has very little to do with training. It's the number of taps between finishing something and having it recorded.
Three things that decide whether a crew uses it
- Can it be done one-handed, standing up, in under fifteen seconds
- Does it work with no signal on the property and sync when the truck hits the road
- Does entering it once mean nobody gets asked about it again over the radio
If any of those is a no, your foreman keeps the legal pad. He isn't being difficult. He's being efficient with the tool that actually works at arm's length.
The workaround is the most useful feedback you'll get
When a crew routes around the system, that isn't a discipline problem to be met with a policy. It is free, specific, accurate feedback about the system, and most owners throw it away.
The legal pad tells you which fields are too slow. The voice memos tell you which record has no fast way in. The camera roll tells you photo upload is failing on a rural connection.
I would rather have that than run a training session, because training mostly teaches people to tolerate friction — and the tolerance evaporates the week the season gets busy.
What I'd fix before buying anything else
Pick the one thing your crews are supposed to record and reliably don't. Usually it's job completion or on-site photos.
Make that one thing reachable in a single tap from a phone's home screen, then delete every field on it that isn't legally or operationally required. Not fewer screens — fewer fields. Crews are rarely refusing to record the job. They're refusing to fill in eleven boxes about it in the sun.
Watch somebody use it on a Tuesday
Not a demo and not a meeting. Stand on a job site and watch a foreman try to close out a job with gloves on, in daylight, with the saw running twenty feet away.
Two minutes of that tells you whether you have an adoption problem or a design problem. It is nearly always the second one.