From a shared inbox to a system of record.
A county health department's pool permitting modernization had stalled. The CEO of Troubadour Health, a public health consulting firm that puts data against complex public health problems, reached out to me directly. What began as helping accelerate it became owning the end-to-end technical build: one automated system of record, and data the department could actually manage the work with.
THE CHALLENGE
More than fifty pool permits a year arrived by email. Details were retyped into a spreadsheet, status was tracked by inbox and memory, and every letter was typed by hand. Applications routinely arrived incomplete, and nobody knew until someone opened them.
But the deeper problem wasn't the manual labor at all. It was that the department couldn't see its own work.
Status lived in four places at once and none of them agreed, which meant leadership could not answer a single basic management question:
- How long does a permit actually take?
- Where do they stall?
- Is the statutory thirty-day review clock being met?
Those answers weren't hard to get. They were structurally impossible, because the data didn't exist in any form you could ask a question of.
WHAT GOT BUILT
One intake, one record, seven flows.
Intake is a Microsoft Form, designed against two things at once: the spreadsheet staff already lived in, and the DH 4159 state form. Matching both meant the new system produced records staff would recognize and the state would accept. The SharePoint list behind it is the program's first real system of record, with fifty-one historical records migrated in and status values rebuilt to match the milestones the manager already used rather than generic labels. The seven flows that move a permit between those milestones run on Power Automate.
The views split by who is looking. Day-to-day permit management sits in one, a stripped-back inspector view in another, so each role opens to the fields its own work actually needs.
A version of this system already existed in another county, built for septic permits. Copying it was the fast path and the wrong one. Most of the early rework came from the gap between what pools actually need and what septic had been built for.
Much of the calendar went to the parts you can't see: getting access provisioned inside a government tenant, and getting the consultant, the department, and government IT aligned on who could touch what. Once both were in place, the core system came together in a few weeks.
RIGHT-SIZING AGAINST REALITY
I planned for more than I built. The original design called for heavier automation and a much larger list.
I pulled back, for reasons about the client rather than the code. The team maintaining it is small, there is no dedicated technical staff to fix it when something breaks, and this was an active production project in a government tenant.
Mid-build, more conversations with the EPH manager kept sharpening the picture of what would actually benefit the team. We made keep-or-cut decisions against the original design, and most of them were cuts: fewer columns in the lists, fewer and shallower automations, fewer views. The wide version I had drawn got molded into the shape of their actual practice, something the team would be glad to work in rather than something that overwhelms them back into the spreadsheet.
What got built is smaller than what was drawn. That was the point.
"The technical requirements ultimately exceeded the initial scope of the engagement and those typically expected of an internship. Michael effectively assumed primary responsibility for the system architecture and implementation."
THE IMPACT
One centralized record
A structured electronic intake system feeding one system of record, in place of four disagreeing copies. Every permit timestamped, moving through defined milestones.
Efficiency, with oversight preserved
Work that ran on staff memory now runs on its own, incomplete applications are rejected at intake, and staff keep every decision.
The baseline that never existed
Handed off in July 2026, the system's first product is measurement itself: volume, cycle time, where permits stall, whether the thirty-day clock is met.
A framework built to expand
Runs on Microsoft 365 licensing the department already owned, and the same architecture extends to food service, lodging, groupcare, and septic.
It closed the way engagements should: a leadership summary, a staff guide, and a live walkthrough to train the team. The EPH manager, the consultant, and the IT team were genuinely excited to see the system come to life, and to get their time back from the repetitive manual work it replaces.
The difference between a system that gets used and one that gets abandoned is almost entirely what happens in the last week.