What was wrong
Managers constantly needed help from other teams: something changed in Salesforce, a list built, an operational issue fixed, dozens of other things.
Usually the manager had no idea who actually owned the request. So we had people whose job was essentially to receive requests, work out who should handle them, route them, and chase them to completion. We were also running Asana across hundreds of employees to track it.
The question that reframed it
Why does a manager need to know our org chart just to ask for something?
They don't. The software can figure that out instead.
What I did
I worked through the types of requests managers actually submitted and what the receiving teams needed to act on them. Then I designed a structured help desk: instead of writing "hey, I need help with this," a manager picks the type of thing they need, the system asks for the information that specific request requires, and it routes itself.
A decision I'm proud of
Someone proposed that managers should just select which team to send the request to.
I pushed back. If managers already knew which team handled what, we wouldn't have had a routing problem in the first place. I argued for organizing around what the manager needs, not who they guess should handle it. That's the direction we took.
What we built
- Structured request types with required fields per type
- Automatic routing to the owning team
- Comments between managers and teams
- Status tracking, SLA visibility, overdue flagging
- Manager visibility into everything they have open
Used across the company. It removed the need for roughly 40 roles whose main job was manually coordinating these requests, and let us move off an enterprise Asana deployment that had been costing around six figures a year.
What I learned
A lot of automation isn't really about making people work faster. It's about removing decisions they should never have had to make.