We were hired to digitize a government visitor register. The actual fix ended up cutting their daily footfall by 65%.

The manual register only recorded names, it explained nothing. Nobody could see which departments were getting slammed, which officials were overwhelmed, or how many people were even on site at any moment. Turned out a huge share of visits were for things that never needed an in person trip at all.

We built the analytics layer to actually show why footfall was that high, added out-of-office sync so visitors got told at the gate instead of after waiting, and let people book appointments online instead of just showing up. Daily visitors dropped from over 2000 to under 700.

Nobody asked us to reduce footfall. We were asked to digitize a register. The real problem was hiding one layer under the one we were hired to solve.

Curious if anyone else has had a project where the actual fix turned out to be a completely different problem than the one you were hired for.