Qavalo: how 1 breakfast meeting raised a team's productivity by over 33%

I had a breakfast meeting with the executive team of Qavalo: Laurice (founder), JP (data scientist), and Carmela (manager). It began with an idea, and as with most things in the idea phase, we were not quite sure what the end result was going to be. But I was looking forward to looking at their processes to see if there was anything technology could do to help them monitor and increase their productivity.

Qavalo provides medical documentation quality assurance services to home health businesses in the USA. Their team was responsible for making sure all their clients' documentation is filled out correctly and completely, so attention to detail is critical. I listened to the Qavalo team explain their careful QA process, asked several questions along the way and dug into the details of each step. I was probing for patterns of repetitive steps or tasks, and we spotted one not long into the meeting.

400 hours every month

The staff had to copy and paste information from every task into a Google Sheet file so they could keep a record of the tasks they were working on. Individually this didn't take much time, but across the whole team it added up fast.

On average, it took each person 2 minutes to copy and paste all the information for one task. If a person had 30 tasks, that came to 60 minutes a day, a full hour. With a staff of 20, that's 20 hours a day spent copying and pasting, and 400 hours every month.

This was a ripe target, because a small improvement to one step could save a lot of time.

"What if we can make a tool that automatically copied and pasted the information in a single click? Would that help?" I asked.

"You could do that?!"

Laurice blurted out with eyes widening.

The Qavalo team already had a way of working that was delivering results, so they didn't need an entirely new system. They needed a few more tools to make parts of it more efficient.

So we started with that. We built a Google Chrome extension that extracted data from the tasks their staff were working on and sent it automatically to their database in Google Sheets.

"Can we please use it now?"

The Chrome extension made the staff's work more efficient. They were so happy with it that while we were still rolling it out to their team in batches, some staff members asked to be included in the next batch. The rollout went well and productivity went up right away.

As a bonus, they no longer needed to open Google Sheets, which made their computers faster and added even more to their productivity.

Over 33% more productive

The tool contributed to a total increase of over 33% in productivity for Qavalo's team, and that was an idea formed over breakfast. Wait 'til you hear what we come up with by lunch time! ;)

After the tool launched and their entire team was using it, Qavalo's Special Projects Manager JP said:

"We felt like we were part of the team and like we're not outsourcing you guys... Most of the time when there are outsourced developers, the projects don't really pan out as planned but with Symph, we really felt and saw the results right then and there."

If there is a tool that would make your company more productive, talk to us and we will see how we can help.