Service Request Pipeline

The Challenge

Teams requested work from each other by emailing Word docs.

BIW’s events division runs on cross-team requests: marketing asks tech for a website, design asks marketing for assets. Each request meant downloading a doc template, filling it out, and emailing it to a point person who handled billing and queued the work.

• Point person out of office? The request stalls until a lead reassigns it
• Files bouncing through inboxes, no single source of truth
• Team leads had no view of what their people were actually working on

The Brief

Make the request process less painful. How was up to me.

The Approach

Kill the document, keep the workflow.

Each team got a short form in place of the bloated template. The company already ran on Smartsheet, so I built the automation on top of it: a submitted request lands in the receiving team’s workspace instantly and the point person gets an email. Nobody downloads anything, nobody’s inbox is the database.

The Outcome

saved per request

5 min

doc files in circulation

0

requests visible to supervisors

100%

Requests stopped depending on one person being at their desk. If the point person was out, anyone on the team could pick it up, and supervisors finally had live visibility into incoming work instead of finding out in status meetings.