The Advanced Job Safety Analysis (JSA) was one of the very first ‘advanced’ forms we designed completely from scratch, and its visual and technical influence can be seen in forms we design today.

It’s definitely a step up from most of the JSA’s currently available on ServiceM8. Which is why we call it the Advanced JSA.

Background

You know the story. A trades-based business owner struggling to have their staff record the pre-start job safety checks prior to beginning work. 

In this case, it was an electrician based in New Zealand, and he and his partner had just landed a new sub-contract servicing a chain of popular fast food restaurants and petrol stations (servos) in the local area. Health and safety compliance was a must with this new customer.

The problem was the current and previous job management systems had various levels of functionality for custom forms. But each were limited, inflexible, or labour intensive. As a result, the team was suffering from ‘form fatigue’ and would skip them altogether. 

This electrician belonged to a peer group through a coaching business called Lifestyle Tradie. And several of his peers suggested ServiceM8 to solve this and a number of other issues.

The Brief

That’s when they approached us, and we ran up a StartUp project to transition them onto ServiceM8. We also tackled the form fatigue problem. 

With their input we developed a custom Job Safety Analysis that ticked all the boxes while making sure it wouldn’t take more than one or two minutes for their staff to complete, addressing previous objections to completing JSA’s while simultaneously improving their compliance. 

The brief also called for completed forms to be simple to read, only surfacing the necessary information. Being in the field and on the tools themselves meant they wanted to be alerted if other staff completed any high risk assessments, but they didn’t want to wade through pages of a document full of redundant questions and blank fields.

The Solution Design

This form was all about the user experience (UX) and efficiency. Question logic was needed skip over any irrelevant hazards or controls. Wherever possible, we provided pre-set answers to reduce manual typing effort, while also providing options manually define new risks and controls if they needed to.

We went the extra step to reduce guesswork when it came to the Risk Matrix, with the staff only needing to decide on the probability of something happening, and its seriousness should it happen. We built question logic that would ‘calculate’ and automatically populate the form with the correct risk result.

We also used advanced Word merge field codes to embed the document template with all the possible answers, but in a way that only the relevant answers would populate into the form. This made for reading completed forms easy and efficient.

We also took a bold lead with layout and design, rejecting the usual formats and created an easy to read one-pager. This increased to three pages when we added the worker signature and the informational page. But at its heart, this is a one-page report.  

Complexity

While the finished Advanced JSA form looks deceptively simple on the surface, beneath that simplicity is a whole bunch of complexity to make that magic happen.

This form took several weeks and over 60 development hours to get it to where it is today. In other words, if we were to build this form again from scratch, at our normal rates we would be looking at $7,500 plus taxes in cost. Of course we didn’t price the form that way, and we’ve been recouping our costs through selling it via the ServiceM8 Form Store.

Making modifications to this form might be a simple or complex request, depending on what is being asked. Superficial changes like colour or layout would be relatively simple. Substantive changes  would include modifying questions and answers given the re-coding that would need to happen. 

Availability

Because of its high utility and value, we decided to include this form as part of our StartUp Plus and StartUp Advanced projects. And since early 2022 we’ve made it available for anyone to purchase and download through the ServiceM8 Form Store.