Why WorkMesh exists

For most of my career, I kept running into the same problem.

A business process needed a system, but the system either did not exist, did not quite fit the problem, or cost so much that it was difficult to justify.

There was usually software available for a specific purpose, but it came with a catch: the business had to conform to the software.

That always seemed backwards to me.

Businesses do not all work the same way. Projects do not all manage risk, change, contracts, interfaces, safety or compliance in exactly the same way. Yet enterprise software has traditionally been built around a fairly rigid idea of how the process should work.

If your process is different, you either change the business to suit the tool, spend a lot of money customising it, or find another way.

And very often, that other way is Excel.

Why we keep going back to spreadsheets

There is a reason spreadsheets are everywhere.

They are flexible. They are familiar. If I need another column, I add one. I give it a name, decide what goes into it and keep working.

That kind of flexibility is incredibly useful.

The problem is that a spreadsheet is still a spreadsheet.

Once it becomes an important business process, the gaps start to matter.

Multiple people are working in the same register. You need to know who changed something and when. Some information should be restricted. Attachments and evidence need to sit against the right record. Actions need owners and due dates. Managers need to know what is overdue or sitting unresolved.

The spreadsheet may still contain the data, but it is no longer really managing the process.

I have seen this on projects again and again. We needed a register for change, contracts, interfaces or another specific process. There was no practical system that fitted exactly what we needed, so we built another spreadsheet.

It solved the immediate problem, but it brought the same limitations with it: multiple-user issues, limited audit history, weak security and no strong mechanism to make sure something actually happened next.

The moment the problem became impossible to ignore

About four years ago, I was working with a risk system that did a reasonable job of managing a risk register.

But it stopped short of things I considered important.

I wanted monthly backups. I wanted a complete audit history. I wanted to be able to use the data for proper analysis, including Monte Carlo analysis.

And I remember thinking:

Why is this so hard? It should be easy.

That was not the first time I had seen the gap, but it was probably the point where the idea behind WorkMesh became much clearer.

Why could we not build something that had the flexibility people liked about spreadsheets, but with the audit history, security, privacy and control expected from a proper business system?

The two things WorkMesh had to do

When I started building WorkMesh, I had two basic objectives.

The first was flexibility.

I wanted adding a field in WorkMesh to feel as simple as adding a column to a spreadsheet. Add the field, give it a name, choose the type and start using it.

Not a token collection of a few “custom fields” added around a rigid system. Real flexibility that could become part of the way the process is managed.

The second objective was control.

That flexibility could not come at the expense of audit history, security or privacy.

A business should be able to control who can see particular records and fields. It should be able to retain evidence and attachments. It should know what changed, who changed it and when.

But the biggest difference, for me, is Actions.

A process should lead to action

A record is not the outcome.

A risk register is not useful because it contains risks. A compliance register is not useful because it contains obligations. A safety system is not useful because it contains incidents or hazards.

The value comes from what happens next.

My view is that a process is really a way of moving Actions between accountable parties.

If something reaches a particular state, someone should know what they need to do. There should be an owner. There may be a due date, evidence, an approval, a reminder or an escalation. Eventually there should be an outcome.

That is why WorkMesh is built around Actions.

If we are creating an action-focused process, WorkMesh should help make sure the right person knows what needs to happen next, while management can focus on the exceptions that need attention.

It started as a hobby

WorkMesh did not start as a grand software-company plan.

Initially, it was a hobby.

I wanted to know whether I could build a tool for our own company that solved some of the problems we kept encountering.

Within a few weeks, I realised the idea had much larger potential.

The difficult part was not simply creating a configurable register. It was building the shared services and framework around it so that the same foundation could support many different business processes without becoming another rigid product.

That road has been much longer than those first few weeks.

But the underlying idea has stayed the same.

There are many problems I have encountered during my career that software still does not solve particularly well. WorkMesh gives us a framework to keep tackling them without needing to build a completely separate product every time.

Better than choosing between rigid software and another spreadsheet

I do not think spreadsheets are bad.

They are often exactly where a good process starts.

But there comes a point where an important business process needs more: accountability, auditability, controlled access, evidence, workflow and clear Actions.

At the other end of the spectrum, businesses should not have to spend tens of thousands of dollars on rigid software and then reshape their process around the tool.

That is the gap WorkMesh is intended to fill.

Flexible enough to shape around the process. Structured enough to manage it properly. Focused on the Actions that actually drive the outcome.

WorkMesh exists because I believe businesses should be able to build better systems around the way they work, improve outcomes and protect their information without breaking the bank.

Build better processes. Drive action. Reduce cost.