A short guide to internal tools

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. Everything we would tell a client about internal tools in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

Why it matters

The spreadsheet everyone fears is a specification. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

How we handle it

Internal tools rarely need to be beautiful, but they must be reliable. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

Common failure modes

Time saved compounds every single week. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

The short version

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Three things worth confirming about internal tools before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Internal tools rarely need to be beautiful, but they must be reliable — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.