Operations Software · Active

Consultation staff operations

The operational half of the consultation platform — the tools staff use to run the day rather than the tools visitors use to book.

Role: Architecture and delivery
Category: Operations Software
Status: Active

The problem

A visitor-facing booking system solves the visitor's problem and can quietly create work for staff. Somebody still has to approve bookings, take the ones that arrive by phone, handle the family that turns up together, keep notes across repeat visits and decide who goes in next.

Approach

Build the staff side as a product rather than an admin panel. Staff have their own login and approval flow, can book on behalf of someone who called, work with households rather than isolated individuals, and drive the day through check-in, queue and completion.

What it does

Assisted booking: Staff can create appointments for people who booked by phone or in person, using the same slot and hold logic as the public flow.
Approval workflow: Bookings can require confirmation rather than being automatically final, which reflects how the practice actually operates.
Households: People arrive as families. Modelling households rather than individuals matches reality and prevents duplicate records.
Notes and timeline: A per-visitor history so a repeat consultation starts with context rather than from nothing.
Consultation completion: Closing an appointment is an explicit act, which is what makes the queue and the record accurate.
Public waiting display: The queue rendered for a waiting area, which reduces the number of interruptions staff field.

The hard parts

Visitor UX and operational UX pull apart: What is simplest for a visitor is often more work for staff, and the reverse. Every decision has to be evaluated from both ends of the same record.
Staff software is used all day: A visitor uses the booking flow twice a year. Staff use this for eight hours. The tolerance for friction is completely different, and so is the design.

Detail

Client confidentiality

I'm not naming the practice, and I describe no visitor, household or consultation content.

The pattern worth taking away

I treat consumer-facing and operations-facing software for the same process as two products sharing a database. Treating the second one as "the admin screens" is how operational software ends up being the thing everybody complains about.

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