The program nobody at the hotel could explain
A hotel in Stockholm made every guest's door code through one program. A consultant had written it about fifteen years earlier. It worked, most days. Nobody at the hotel knew how, and the consultant was about to retire.
That is more common than it sounds. A small business runs on something important, and everything anyone knows about it sits in one person's head.
What the owner actually needed
Not new technology. Three things:
- The door codes to keep working, every day, with no gap.
- The staff to stop depending on one screen on one computer.
- Never again being one retirement away from not knowing how his own business works.
How I did it
I read before I touched anything. The locks run on dormakaba's Winkey, sold today as Webkey. Its documentation was from 2005 and 2010. Documentation that old describes what someone meant to build, not always what is there. So I checked each part against the real system, without changing anything, until I knew what actually works.
I built the new next to the old. The old program kept running the whole time. The new one ran beside it until its results matched. Checked against the booking system, 19 of 19 and 70 of 70 arrivals matched.
I wrote everything down, for the owner. What the system does and how to run it. Those notes belong to the hotel, not to me. If I disappear tomorrow, the next person starts from a written record instead of from nothing.
The build itself took four working days. Getting there took months. The research and preparation ran from April to September, fitted around the owner's calendar: a hotel owner's week has little room for meetings, so we met when we could and I worked through the rest between them. By the time I started building, there was very little left to guess. That is why the build was short. It has been in daily use since September.
What changed for the staff
They make door codes from their phones now. Today's arrivals are there with the right codes. Nobody has to sit at a particular computer, and nobody has to know how the old program worked.
The old program is still there, and it stays until the owner decides he trusts the new one. When doors actually have to open, that is how it should be.
If this sounds like your business
Most small companies I talk to have something like this: a program, an integration, a spreadsheet with macros that someone built years ago. It works. Nobody quite knows how. The person who knows is leaving, or already has.
It is cheaper to deal with before it breaks than after. I start with a fixed-price discovery phase: I look at what you have and tell you what it actually does and what it would take to make it safe. If we go ahead, that cost comes off the build. Everything I build comes with a written record you own, a 90-day warranty, and the option for me to keep it running.
If you have a program nobody dares touch, tell me about it. I reply within a working day.