Get your forms right

I HAVE ALWAYS MAINTAINED THAT THE paperwork should work for you ... not the other way round. Take the case of one of my installer colleagues ...

His wife had a mishap with the door of the garden shed. Her hands were full so she kicked the door shut and it bounced back and hit her in the mouth. She ended up with a loose tooth. Her loving husband (after rolling around on the floor laughing at the comedy of the situation) said, all full of sympathy, "You need a dentist", and got on the phone.

His wife was not registered with a dental practice and after a lot of ringing round the loving husband discovered that none of the local dentists were taking on any new patients, NHS or private. It was a weekend so in desperation he called the NHS emergency helpline and the phone was answered by a helpful young lady. He explained about the accident and the loose tooth.

"Right, I need to take some details" she said, Name, address, age, sex ...?"

"I've told you once, it's my wife."

"Height, weight ...?"

"Would you like her inside leg and cap size? She only needs a dentist".

"Look, Mr XXXX, it doesn't matter who you are or what the problem is, I have to fill in this form on my computer or it won't let me process it any further. Now, has she turned blue?"

"No, she's only got a loose tooth," he yelled.

"Has she stopped breathing"?

Eventually, beaten into submission by the system, he shut up and answered the questions.

Then the air becomes blue
She finally ran out of questions: "Right Mr XXXX, your wife needs a dentist. We don't deal with that here, you have to ring your local dentist direct".

After that his language degenerated into a string of profanities that I think are better not repeated on these pages.

Here we have a classic parallel with things that happen in our trade. We have people that design forms and documents that someone else has to use and, to put it bluntly, a lot of them don't work so the poor sod that has to fill them in puts what he thinks where, and invariably gets it wrong.

We also have the phenomenon of the "One size fits all" form. This form is designed to do a variety of jobs and is usually very easily recognised by the sheer number of closely packed tick boxes and the total lack of enough space to write down what you actually did and the parts used.

The idea is a good one but somehow it lost its way between concept and design and quite often the one person who was NOT consulted was the end user of the form ... the installation engineer. He, in turn, is so befuddled that he fills in the wrong tick boxes and the result is a lack of the information needed to charge the customer the right amount or to fix the problem so that it doesn't happen again.

There have been cases where the installing company and the customer have had heated arguments over bills and service that were purely the fault of wrong form filling, when, in fact, the job was done well. It is the type of scenario that we are trying to avoid by getting our forms right.

Trying to find a compromise is a nightmare. Do we have a tick box for every little item to be checked and every possible scenario covered and end up with a form that is as long as War and Peace? Or do we have a simplistic one that relies on the engineer getting it right and remembering everything? On the one hand you end up with a four-page form and only ticking about half a page worth of the available boxes. On the other hand, the simplistic form gives the harassed engineer a glorious opportunity to forget to check half the stuff he should check. I think it's true to say that I have yet to see the perfect form.

Larger companies tend to go for the tick box form because, on its return, the secretary has to transfer all the info from the form to the computer and trying to decipher an accurate story from the spidery hieroglyphics that some engineers call writing requires a university degree in Egyptology – a rare qualification for the average alarm company secretary.

  Larger companies also tend to favour a separate form for each part of the job. This means that the luckless engineer has to carry about six different pads of forms with him at all times and, of course, the very form that he needs at his next call is the one that he just ran out of, so he has to use the wrong form or give the job a miss. Either way, it makes more work than it saves, and it gets the company a neat little deviation fault at the next QA inspection.

Some forms can be combined with reasonable success. A well-designed job sheet can be used for repairs, temporary disconnections, and changes during an installation.

Checklist and completion combined
I have seen one form act as a handover checklist and a servicing docket, the theory being that most of the checks done on one job are done on the other so why not combine them? Far more often I see the handover checklist combined with the certificate of completion so that the customer has only the one form to sign at the close of an install.

If you have ‘borrowed’ another company’s terms and conditions, how do you know they are legal?

I used to use a three in one form that combined the handover checklist, the certificate of completion and had a space for any changes made during the install. It worked for me but it may not work for you. I frequently come across forms that just do not work, but the installer is convinced that they are the bee's knees because they have "borrowed" them from a respected rival down the road. Here we have a classic situation, not only with forms but all manner of other things like terms and conditions and written procedures. But plagiarism can lead to problems.

The first is a legal one. You have stolen someone else's copyright, and it could end in a legal battle in the courts. Another problem, particularly if you "borrowed" terms and conditions: Do you know they are legal?

I have known a company to deliberately write illegal sets of terms and conditions, the object being to bully the customer into playing ball even when they have decided to take their bat home and no longer want that company on their premises. For example ... some years ago a customer of mine decided to expand his business and bought another shop.

There was an alarm in the shop that did not work so I was despatched to fix it, which I did. There were various bits that were disconnected and wires cut, in fact the system had not been used for some time because the alarm exit route was the back door which was padlocked from the inside and the key opened up from the front (instant bells) door.

After about a month my customer received a letter from the previous alarm company saying that the system was on rental and if he didn't pay they would come and take the system out.

My advice to the customer was simple:
"You bought it as part of the shop so do not pay. Tell them to take it up with the estate agent and the previous owner. You have not signed anything so refuse to let them in your shop and, don't forget, they are not going to waste time taking out a system that they cannot re-sell or re-use. In fact, they haven't a leg to stand on."

But all it took was one solicitor's letter and the customer crumbled. They conned him into signing a new five year lease on what was the crappiest, old out of date system you could imagine ... AND, they charged him over £100 for "fixing" the alarm I had already fixed.

In this case I am convinced that the company was just using paperwork to bully the customer, and I am also convinced that they would never have let it go as far as getting to court.

Now, I am certainly not advocating that we all rip off our customers to that extent but it is a classic example of how, if you get the paperwork right, you can often turn things to your advantage. But it is quite often a case that if you "borrow" a form or document from someone else you may find that, because you don't know the background of how that document came into being, it doesn't work for you and can even get you into trouble.

Let me quote another true instance: Two men were in partnership, one was the manager, one was the worker. The worker became convinced that the manager was not pulling his weight and they parted company.

Shambles of a job sheet
Some time afterwards, I visited the worker who had set up on his own and wanted to join an inspectorate. He was using just one job sheet on which he wrote everything ... and it was a shambles. He was forgetting bits, not writing down the essentials like times of arrival and departure and parts used.

I was seeing cryptic comments like "Change passive" or "Fix new wire in shop".

His wife (doing the books) was failing to charge for all manner of things because she wasn't aware that they had been fitted or that time had been spent. They were losing money hand over fist.

Later I had to visit the manager's new company and found exactly the same form being used by him ... only in this case he had a set of procedures to go with it. The idea was a good one and it worked. The procedures were in fact a series of method statements, printed out and encapsulated in plastic, set in a hard backed file and issued to each of his engineers. Each procedure started with "Log your time of arrival and show your ID card to the customer".

Each procedure then listed exactly how to go about doing the job in hand and stating what details must be recorded. There were procedures for commissioning, changes during install, repairs, servicing, temporary disconnections and the taking over of a system installed by others.

It must have taken hours to write up and study out but, at the end of the day, it worked well. There are a few morals to these tales, one is that you need to know the reasons why as well as what to do, another is that the man in charge of the paper can often make more money or save more money than the man with the clippers.