Terrane Prism

When I walked into Terrane Land Surveying in 2017, they had an internal system that we'll call "The Bridge." Surprisingly functional, honestly. Visually...challenging. It was built by a technical person who taught themselves to code and held the whole thing together with band-aids, toothpicks, and glue. Again, impressive. But it was built in silos, one piece at a time, while the business kept running around it. Five departments, each with their own workarounds and frustrations and bottlenecks.

Scheduling coordinators were losing about 30% of their time just navigating the interface and looking stuff up. Field crews had very rudimentary mobile access, so they'd miss key information sometimes on field visits and have to go back out (costing Terrane an average of $1,000 per return visit). Operations managers couldn't see accurate project status across the business. People had this sort of resigned acceptance about it. "The Bridge is just not going to get much better at this point."

But there was optimism too. Someone told me in my first week, "It's really powerful to have a tool like this, but it feels like we've hit a ceiling with how it's put together right now. There's too many workarounds, too many fields, too many places to navigate." And another said: "I'm really excited to see how you can unlock the potential of all of our internal knowledge and skills. We have guys here that learned from their Dad and their Dad's Dad. Who else can leverage that kind of generational knowledge about Washington State land?" That felt like a real mandate.

The biggest insight came early. About 70% of Terrane's projects followed a standard workflow, the bread-and-butter surveys that kept the business running. But the other 30% had specific requirements that couldn't be changed or shortcut. Building separate solutions for each department would've meant five systems that didn't talk to each other (which is closer to what they had when I arrived). So we decided to rebuild from the ground up. One unified architecture with nesting hierarchies and parent-child relationships that let broad processes get specific and nuanced when they needed to, with guardrails to stop the custom workarounds people had been inventing on their own.

Over almost five years, I designed and led a custom suite of software that had 7 individual apps ranging from fully custom tooling to customized out-of-box solutions (Zoho/Quickbooks). A desktop scheduler with drag-and-drop and integrated ArcGIS mapping. A mobile field portal with GPS, offline capability, and a special instructions checklist that field crews had to confirm before leaving a site. Revamped databases and analytics processes that gave operations real visibility for the first time.

My design influence ended up going well beyond the software. I started running periodic process audit sessions with the five department heads and the COO -- surfacing what new services or products each department had started offering, and figuring out how to keep those nuanced needs in alignment with the unified workflow we were building. The goal was always the same: same structure, same language, same data points across departments, with enough flexibility for each team to run efficiently. Without that, people would invent workarounds, dirty data would pile up in The Bridge, and the analytics tools would have blind spots that made them a lot less useful. That cross-department work doesn't show up in the metrics, but it's what made the software actually stick.

The work saved about $500K annually. Cycle times dropped 13%. Field crew go-backs dropped 10%. The biggest lesson I took with me: planning and prioritization are most of the work. With contracted devs at high hourly rates, every poorly scoped sprint burns money fast. That's just as true now that I build with AI. The code execution keeps getting faster, but choosing what to build and when is still 70 to 80% of the effort.