Usable Software LLC · Massachusetts
We build TCS — the Team Coordination System — for groups whose work has never fit the tools built for software bugs: clinical and GxP-regulated teams, operations, support desks, and the engineers alongside them.
TCS is built to replace email as the primary way a team communicates about its work — the discussion lives on the work itself, not in anyone's inbox.
The product
TCS keeps track of work: what needs doing, who is doing it, what was said about it, and what happened in the end. Every team gets its own setup, and every organization's work stays its own.
The design starts from how a team already works rather than from a process it is asked to adopt. That is the whole idea, and it is the reason the company is called what it is.
Today TCS runs in any browser and installs like an app. A version for iPhone and iPad is in progress.
Email is where team work goes to disappear: decisions buried in threads, the full story visible only to whoever was CC’d. TCS is built to take email’s place as the primary channel for communication about the work — the conversation happens on the work item itself, in front of everyone it concerns, with the decision and the reasons kept alongside what was decided. Requests can still arrive by email; the working conversation moves here.
People go on leave, change roles, leave the company. When work moves to someone new, everything moves with it — the history, the conversation, the reasons — so continuity does not depend on what one person remembered to forward.
One team tracks issues. The next tracks referrals, work orders, or cases. The system uses whatever your team already calls its work.
People outside the team can send work in and follow what happens to it. The team decides what to accept and what to ask for up front — and conversation the team needs to keep to itself stays inside the team.
Every team sets up the fields, steps, and categories that match how it actually works. What a team does not need is switched off, not left sitting there empty — and each person arranges their own screens on top of that.
Start by setting TCS up to match how your team already works — the same statuses, the same words, the same handful of steps. No migration project, no forced redesign, no cutover weekend. Later, when a team is ready for more — one more approval step, sizing and sprints, sub-issues, an on-call rotation — a team admin turns it on, for that team alone, whenever they decide to. Nothing already in the system has to be re-entered, re-mapped, or paused while it happens.
Searches your team relies on are saved, shared, and re-run in one click, so the same question does not get rebuilt from scratch every week.
Some teams want a simple ranked list. Others want time-boxed iterations, sizing, larger pieces broken into smaller ones, and a picture of what lands when. Each team turns on exactly as much of that as it wants — and the reporting follows.
Anything you can see can leave as a spreadsheet in the columns your team defines, land directly in the tools you already use, or print as a clean document. Your data is yours; getting it out is one click, not a support ticket.
Teams working under GxP have to be able to say who changed what, and when. Every change is written to a history that is added to and never rewritten — the person, the time, and what moved — and administrative access appears in that same history.
Work rarely starts in one place. Requests come in from outside the team, files can stay in your own storage, and integration with the systems your work already depends on is scoped with you rather than assumed.
Why the name
Not because it lacks features — because it was designed for one kind of team and then sold to everyone else. The words are wrong, half the fields are irrelevant, and the parts you need are three menus deep.
So the choices TCS hands to each team are not settings for their own sake. They are how one system stays readable to a nurse, a dispatcher, and a developer at the same time.
Built for
Keeping your work yours
One organization's work should never surface in another's, and the mistakes that would make that happen are designed out rather than watched for.
Get in touch
If your team is tracking work in a spreadsheet, a shared inbox, or a tool that was never meant for it, we would like to hear how it actually runs today — including what it has to stay in step with, and what your quality group needs to see.