Good enough

A few months back, I was contacted by a small delivery company. Their business was running off a custom-made app that, among other things, let their drivers talk to each other and headquarters, sending updates about deliveries, delays, things like that.

The agency that had built their custom app had gone belly-up and, luckily, the app had kept chugging along without an issue. But, since then, they’d been holding their breath every morning, hoping the server wouldn’t fall flat on its face.

They contacted me looking for help finding an alternative app built, in their words, “for the transport industry”.

I quickly figured out they weren’t doing anything particularly novel and simply suggested they use an app the drivers already had on their phones like WhatsApp.

I could feel the hesitation. They wanted the thing, the tool that would solve all their problems. There’s this idea that if you aren’t buying expensive software, you aren’t serious. I never heard back and assumed they’d gone elsewhere… until yesterday.

Turns out they tried the WhatsApp idea “as an experiment” and it worked perfectly, the business kept moving. Everyone was happy.

That said, a couple of limitations did appear: the lack of separation between professional and personal communication, and no way to keep an archive. We’re now talking about moving them to a self-hosted instance of Mattermost.

We never would have arrived at the above solution if they hadn’t tried the lazy, imperfect one first. As the motivational poster says: don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Colin