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, service groups, and the engineers alongside them.
TCS replaces email as the primary way a team talks 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 decisions go to get lost, buried in threads only whoever was CC’d can see. TCS takes over as the main channel for talking about the work itself. The conversation happens on the work item, in front of everyone it concerns, and the decision stays attached to the reasons behind it. Requests can still show up by email. The actual back-and-forth moves here.
People go on leave. They change roles, or leave the company entirely. When work moves to someone new, the history and the conversation move with it, so continuity doesn’t depend on what one person remembered to forward.
One team calls it issues. Another calls it referrals, work orders, or cases. TCS uses whatever your team already calls its own work.
People outside the team can send work in and track what happens to it. The team decides what to accept and what to ask for up front. Whatever conversation needs to stay internal, stays internal.
Every team sets up the fields, steps, and categories that match how it actually works. Whatever a team doesn’t need gets switched off instead of sitting there empty. On top of that, each person arranges their own screens.
Start by setting TCS up to match how your team already works: same statuses, same words, same handful of steps. There’s no migration project, no forced redesign, and no cutover weekend to plan around. Later, when a team wants more, like an extra approval step, sizing and sprints, sub-issues, or an on-call rotation, a team admin can turn it on for that team alone, whenever they’re ready. Nothing already in the system has to be re-entered or paused while that happens.
The searches your team relies on get saved, shared, and re-run in one click, so nobody rebuilds the same question from scratch every week.
Some teams just want a ranked list. Others want time-boxed iterations, sizing, larger pieces broken into smaller ones, and a clear picture of what lands when. Each team turns on exactly as much of that as it wants, and the reporting follows along.
Anything you can see can leave as a spreadsheet in whatever 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 takes one click, not a support ticket.
Teams working under GxP have to be able to say exactly who changed what, and when. Every change gets written to a history that only ever grows, never gets rewritten: who did it, when, and what moved. Administrative access shows up in that same history too.
Where a step needs sign-off, the signer re-enters their password at the moment of signing and states what the signature means: approved, reviewed, released. The signature is shown on the record for good, and no one can edit or delete it. TCS is built to support FDA 21 CFR Part 11 and EU Annex 11 controls. Validating your own configuration stays with you, and we supply a support pack to help.
Work rarely starts in one place. Requests come in from outside the team, files can stay in your own storage, and any integration with the systems you already depend on gets scoped with you rather than assumed.
Why the name
It's usually not a features problem. It's that the software was designed for one kind of team and then sold to everyone else. The words are wrong, half the fields are irrelevant, and the part you actually need is three menus deep.
So the choices TCS hands to each team aren't settings for their own sake. They're what lets one system stay 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'd 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.