How a no-show sign-up sheet at the tutoring center became my APM story

I worked the front desk at my university's tutoring center, mostly checking students in. The recurring pain was no-shows: students booked slots on a paper sheet, forgot, and tutors sat idle while other students got turned away. I didn't build a system. What I actually did was start jotting down, on my own, how many booked students never showed during my shifts, because I was curious. After about three weeks I had a rough count and brought it to the center's coordinator, saying it looked like a meaningful chunk of slots were being wasted. I suggested we simply text a same-day reminder, since we already collected phone numbers. The coordinator liked it and had a work-study student send manual reminder texts on a trial basis. On the shifts where reminders went out, fewer slots sat empty based on the coordinator's own count, though it was a small sample and I said so. My contribution was noticing, quantifying it loosely, and proposing a cheap experiment, not running the whole thing.