The Tuesday before
By 9:15 AM on a typical Tuesday, the operations manager at Metro Print had already opened the job tracker three times. Two design proofs were stalled — one waiting on a client reply from last Thursday, another sitting in the approval queue since Monday. Nobody had followed up on either.
Meanwhile, a $34,000 channel letter replacement was marked "in progress" but the install crew hadn't received the PO. The office manager found out at 2 PM when the installer called asking where the materials were. By then, the vendor had a two-day lead time and the job was going to miss its deadline.
This wasn't a crisis. This was every week. The information existed in three different systems and nobody had time to cross-check all of it before something slipped.
Weeks 1–2: Intern mode
Peggy spent the first two weeks reading — emails, job records, invoices, approval histories. She didn't suggest anything. She didn't send anything. She just watched.
By the end of week one, the team had mostly forgotten she was there. The office manager checked the activity log out of curiosity and saw that Peggy had already mapped 847 business records across the four sites. "She's been busier than any intern we've had," she told the owner.
The owner's reaction: "Let's see if she actually catches anything useful."
Weeks 3–4: Coach mode
Monday morning, week three. The operations manager opened her morning briefing and saw something new: Peggy had flagged three design proofs that had been waiting more than 48 hours with no client response. Each one had a draft follow-up email ready to review.
She approved all three. Two clients responded the same day.
By week four, Peggy caught a $7,800 job that was about to move to production without a signed permit application. The office manager had been tracking permits in a separate spreadsheet that nobody else could see. Peggy had learned about the requirement from an email thread two weeks earlier.
"She already knew," the office manager said. "I didn't teach her that — she picked it up from the email chain."
Weeks 5–8: Earning trust
The operations manager was the first to move Peggy to production mode for stalled-proof follow-ups. After four weeks of approving every suggestion and only editing two, she trusted the drafts to go out on their own.
The installer coordinator followed a week later — Peggy's PO reminders had caught five near-misses in three weeks, and he was tired of approving the same correct suggestion every time.
By week eight, three of the four daily users were running in production mode for at least some task types. The office manager stayed in coach mode for anything involving money over $10,000 — her rule, and Peggy respected it.