Trying to automate a broken system is a bad idea

Retrospecting about phases of life usually gives new insights because you are reminiscing with little more maturity. Also, you tend to avoid all the unnecessary noise and look at the bigger picture. It has been 1.5 years since I graduated from college and I wanted to document one important learning.

During the start of the second year, I and my friends Sanyam and Shrey started building a leave management system. The idea was simple: replace the manual, paper-based hostel leave process with a web application. The web application would automate a lot of steps that were done by different personas (students, hostel wardens, parents, and security guards) and would also keep a digital record of all the leaves and attendance-related data.

We hacked up a prototype with the core features in a couple of weeks and before going all in, we presented it to the vice-chancellor and the tech head of our college digital infrastructure. They were very impressed and promised us that they would start using this system after we implement the other features.

We built out the complete application in the next month and then also volunteered for doing all the leg work and handling the logistics required for putting the system in place. We never anticipated that 80% of our total effort would go into this and the fact that building the application was the easiest part.

Eventually, after a few trial runs, the project was shut down because it was not adopted by the students and the wardens. It was a very slow death and we didn’t think of it much at that time because there were a lot of other things which were keeping us busy.

But now the reason is more clear than ever - there was no “leave management system” in the first place. It was all a facade. Only the first-year students would follow the system maybe because they were still afraid of the authority. But other than that, it was in the interest of the wardens, students, and security guards to let a flawed system continue whose only output was a ton of paper leave applications with false signatures. The higher-ups were unaware of this because nothing looked out of place.

We were over-ambitious and thought that by using tech, we can fix the broken system. Now I understand that changing the status quo requires intention before anything else.

For the record, this experience was one of the highlights of my college life and I would not trade it for anything else.