A Happy Accident?

I had a great meeting yesterday with an experience resourcing manager about Oriador. His enthusiasm for the product was really satisfying to see.

What surprised me a little, is that they aren't all that interested in the staff scheduling side, that's all pretty much predetermined elsewhere. What's really got them excited is using Oriador Rota for resource management. Their work is regulated and has safety implications, so they need to have people with very specific skills at any given time. If they're short, they have to bring someone in to do it. Oriador shows them quickly and visually if they already have someone working who could do the job, maybe he's been allocated to a less expensive or difficult role, and they can then save money because they don't need to bring in extra or even agency staff. When he told me that as soon as the software saved them bringing in one or two unnecessary people it would already have paid for itself, I realised that I should probably put more effort into marketing it for this kind of thing.

I was reminded of Duane's very early Codesnipers piece, Pave the Cowpath. I'll be watching what happens when they roll out the software to a trial area early next year and get some real live data up and running, and I'll be following behind paving every cowpath I can! I've had suggestions of similar potential for the software in project management, so hopefully I can find the keys to unlocking that too.

Oh, I'm probably being a bit hard on myself calling it an accident, it's not like it all just happened without me noticing, but it certainly wasn't entirely expected, or anything like a priority. It's definitely happy, though.