3,005 rooms. 12 days.
One window.

The window

We were coming off the same kind of job at a sister property down the Strip: 5,383 door locks. That one ran long, between our own learning curve and supply delays, so this one was starting late.

The calendar didn't care. The weeks before Christmas were quiet enough to take rooms offline. New Year's would be slammed. After that came a short window, then CES and Super Bowl weekend. If the main tower didn't get done before Christmas, it wasn't getting done for months.

So everyone sat in a room: our team, front desk operations, housekeeping and hotel engineering. We worked it out together. If you do this, and you do this, and we do this, it fits. It only worked if every group held up its end.

Built on the jobs before it

This wasn't our first time. A couple of years earlier, on a TV and wifi installation at another big Las Vegas resort, we built the first version of our QA app. On the 5,383-lock job, we perfected the installation train. This one is where it all came together.

Weeks before: lock prep

Before the first door was touched, the crew unboxed every lock, assembled it, programmed it and tested it. Any lock that was bad out of the box got caught on a table in the back, not on a guest's door in the middle of a hallway.

Every morning

We set the schedule with the front desk ahead of time, so they knew which rooms were coming offline and when. Each morning, housekeeping took that day's rooms out of service and marked the doors with blue tape. Then the train rolled.

The installation train

One room after another, each car with one job:

1. Demo. The old lock comes off the door.
2. Prep. The door gets cleaned up, plus any extra drilling or filling.
3. Lock. A pre-tested lock goes on, then gets aligned, secured, tested and polished.
4. The caboose. New thermostats go in and pair wirelessly with the locks. The thermostats form a mesh network that the locks share to talk to the central system. A final QA check, and the room is ready.

Kylie, Tim's right hand, drove the train. Tim ran the planning, built the tracking app, worked QA, oversaw the thermostat crew, and handled troubleshooting at the back of the train.

The app that kept everyone in sync

• Installers texted it. A lock tech sent "101 done," and room 101 was logged. There was no app to learn and no form to fill out.
• QA worked from a tablet. Rooms appeared as they came ready. QA marked each one done, or held it out of order with a note on what needed fixing.
• The front desk watched it live. Instead of waiting for updates through the day, the desk could see in real time which rooms were back in service and which were held, and sell rooms accordingly.

How it turned out

The train did all 3,005 rooms in 12 working days, roughly 260 a day with a peak of 286, and finished on December 22. Everybody held up their end, and it fit.

The head of front desk operations told us that in all her time at the hotel, it was the smoothest in-room project she'd seen. And she'd seen a lot of them. Then she treated the entire crew to the hotel buffet. Crab legs, sushi, steak. We earned it.

After New Year's, a smaller crew went back and finished the resort's second tower, roughly 900 rooms, with boring efficiency.

It was the people

It worked because of the crew. Every person was doing the job they were best at, and Kylie kept the whole train moving. Getting the right people in the right seats was as much the job as the locks were.