Adjacent Works
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Independent software studio · Halifax, Nova Scotia

Adjacent Works

Most useful software does not replace the system a business already runs on. It sits next to it and handles one job that system was never going to do well.

Read the premise

Premise

The gap is rarely the system. It is what happens around it.

Adjacent Works builds focused tools that run alongside the software a business already depends on, rather than asking it to move.

A replacement is expensive to buy, slow to roll out, and risky to reverse. That cost is why so many real problems go unsolved: the fix is not worth a migration, so the workaround becomes permanent and somebody absorbs it by hand every week.

Working adjacent to a system changes that arithmetic. A narrow tool can read what is already there, do one job carefully, and be abandoned without consequence if it turns out to be the wrong idea. That is a much easier thing to try, and a much easier thing to be honest about.

Focus

Where small inconsistencies become expensive work.

General problem shapes the studio works on. They are not descriptions of, or claims about, any particular organization.

  1. Records that stop agreeing

    Two systems hold the same information and slowly drift apart. Finding the mismatches, and resolving them, becomes recurring manual work that nobody owns.

  2. Steps that live outside the system

    The official tool handles most of a process, and a spreadsheet, shared inbox, or folder of documents quietly handles the rest.

  3. Decisions with no durable record

    Approvals, exceptions, and overrides get made and then lost, so the question of what was decided and by whom has no straightforward answer later.

Method

Narrow the problem before widening the build.

  1. Start from the workflow

    Begin with the people, systems, and handoffs already in place, rather than with a product idea looking for a home.

  2. Find one costly failure

    Narrow to a single repeated miss, mismatch, or delay that is specific enough to describe and test.

  3. Check it with the people doing it

    Confirm the problem and its current workaround with the people who live with it before committing to a direction.

  4. Build the smallest useful thing

    Ship a narrow tool that fits beside the existing system, so trying it does not require a migration or a rollout.

An introductory conversation does not require confidential documents, account credentials, or sensitive financial information.

Status

The studio is new, and says so.

Nothing has shipped under the Adjacent Works name yet. This page will keep saying that until something has.

Work in progress starts as research into a specific workflow rather than as a product plan. Most of it will not survive that stage, which is the point of doing it in that order.

When there is something worth looking at, it will be described here plainly, including what it has not yet proven.