As someone in an organization that also uses Cityworks (though I don't have access or experience to the administration side of this) a few thoughts on the underlying problem:
- A significant percentage of the issues we tend to face in our work flows come from people not doing all of the steps they're supposed to do. (We've had people forget to attach assets, not close work orders out properly, etc.) These sorts of problems are almost always managerial & administrative, and in theory, merely require higher-ups to lean on their subordinates to do the steps they've been told to do.
- When workers are routinely forgetting steps in a Work Order—especially across multiple employees—you have a reasonable case to ask questions like, "Is the problem that they're not doing their jobs, or is it that the requirements of the task are unreasonable?" Sometimes it can be easy to lose sight of the "good enough" in chasing the ideal. I know even in our work orders, it sometimes feels like there's well-meaning dead weight that we could reasonably give up on and take it off the shoulders of the field workers.
- Another problem we've run into in our organization is that we don't have the PLL extension, and yet we're tracking plan review-type activities in Cityworks. There are a number of growing pains there that basically amount to "square peg/round hole". Take a look at your Cityworks implementation(s) and see if you're actually using the right tool for the job inside the Cityworks ecosystem, before you fully reinvent the wheel.
As others have said or alluded to, there's a very strong chance that the road you're about to walk may end with "So, I built a work order management software suite from the ground up and could probably start a company on this, at this point." Many of ESRI's solutions are great, and for a smaller municipality, you could probably get a lot of effectiveness out of tying a few of them together. But beyond a certain footprint of municipal responsibilities, I think it's reasonable to ask whether the problem is better tackled by software that was purpose-designed for municipal asset tracking by folks in that side of the industry.
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M Reed
"The pessimist may be right oftener than the optimist, but the optimist has more fun, and neither can stop the march of events anyhow." — Lazarus Long, in Time Enough for Love, by Robert A. Heinlein
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