In January, I joined BigChange as Head of Product Design and was immediately tasked with supporting the ongoing work within Job Finance, a crucial product feature for our customers. With a firm grasp on operational finances, businesses can make better decisions, save on costs, and increase profit margins.
As a tool to manage operations, some extremely powerful data passes through BigChange. Handled in the right way, this data can provide truly valuable insight – insight that will allow customers to spend less time number crunching and more time doing what they do best.
Since January we have been doing some substantial work ‘under the hood’ to rejuvenate Job Finance. BigChange has been around for 10 years so it’s probably no surprise that there are parts of the system that need modernisation. We were finding that the way we store financial data was not giving us the flexibility we need for reporting and importantly, it wasn’t going to support our future plans for Job Finance. This meant some challenging but necessary work was required to put it right. In the short term, this work will unlock better financial reporting (which you will see in the upcoming release), but in the longer term will set us up to provide insight within the BigChange interface itself.
As our Head of Product, Jason Nash mentions in his recent article, collaboration with our customers is vital to our success as we continue to develop and improve BigChange, Hence our work on Job Finance has involved frequent customer engagement. To make sure we are delivering real value to our customers it is crucial that we understand the problems they are trying to solve and the jobs they need to get done day-to-day. This is an ongoing process that doesn’t stop at the discovery phase. A tight feedback loop is what will ensure that we develop a useful and usable product as well as something that provides genuine value.
You will soon notice some new parts to the product tagged as ‘Beta’ within BigChange. During the Beta phase, features are continually tested and improved. Whilst features are in Beta, they may not work for everyone, but through data and feedback, they will be improved upon until we’re confident that we have something that delivers on Expectations.
This “build, measure, learn” approach is something we are extremely passionate about and hopefully, you’ll take the opportunity to have an input. Ultimately, we are creating a product for you, our customers, so it makes complete sense that you are involved in that process.
As well as Job Finance, the team have been contributing to several other pieces of work across the product. As part of a focus on reducing customer onboarding time, we are improving the way customers import their data into BigChange. This will also be taking an iterative development approach and you will see the first stages released into a Beta phase soon. Our vision is that this will become a comprehensive Import/Export hub that aids existing customers with their day-to-day import and export tasks, but will also play a key role in the onboarding experience for new customers and ultimately make their life a lot easier.
We have also been spending some time looking at the BigChange job lifecycle – the journey that a job makes from quote all the way through to the invoice. This lifecycle forms the backbone of a Field Service Management solution and is something that we are starting to align our processes and user interface more closely with. The full realisation of this is certainly a long-term project, but we have already started putting some of the building blocks in place with the recent work in Job Finance.
Hopefully, this gives you a flavour of some of the things we’ve been up to, and what you can expect to see in the near future. We are very keen to have you involved – please take the opportunity to feedback on any Beta features or use the Ideas portal for any other feedback/suggestions you may have.
Oli Clark
oli.clark@bigchange.com
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