I used to think he was a futurist loonie, but I've come to appreciate Jon Udell as someone who thinks deeply about trends in technology, and I'm now an avid reader of his blog. He writes about blogging as a project management tool. It's something I've heard a lot of theoretical "boy, you know you could ..." talk about, but I haven't seen anyone who has actually done it. Does anyone here have experience with it, or know people who have?
--Nat
We share contacts, project approaches, problem fixes, development ideas, etc. etc. All in a system that is very very simple and easy to maintain.
We can attach emails (or various documents) to our notes, which are uploaded through a standard file dialog to give additional context. The logbooks are fully searchable.
We're supposed to use a Monstrous Problem Ticket/Change Request system for this, but sheesh, it would take at a minimum 3 minutes (vs. 10 seconds for an elog entry) to enter every little note (which couldn't really be cross referenced like elog log entries can - just enter HTML links!), nobody uses it right so you can't really track things with it, the administrator keeps changing the database and screen layout. *shudder* It's a real pain to use.
Thank God for simple solutions that do 90% of what you need. The FINAL TOTAL SYSTEM FOR TRACKING EVERYTHING fits about 40% of our needs and is just too painful to get serious use.
Anyway, we just started, but I'm very hopeful that it'll help us be more coordinated and productive.
Re:We started using elog logbooks in a small group
gnat on 2003-03-28T08:29:33
Very interesting! Thanks for sharing this. How many people are collaborating this way? Are you all in the same building?--Nat
Re:We started using elog logbooks in a small group
jordan on 2003-03-28T11:54:14
Like I said, we're a small group.
The 'pilot' is 2 people. We have adjoining cubicles. There is me and an associate who just started late last year, I've been here almost 5 years. I'm the the more experienced worker, not just here, but overall.
There's a lot to learn on this job. We do 2nd level help desk support troubleshooting for our customer base and development. My associate is trying to learn the ropes, but there's so much work to do that we can't work together on everything. He's taken over certain tasks that the guy he replaced was primarily responsible for, which keeps him busy.
So, I thought that if we documented all the tasks we do in a log like this, along with our approaches, we could look over each other
's shoulders virtually. This allows us to work on dual paths and also benefit from reviewing each others work in a convenient time-shifted fashion. I could review what he's doing to offer up my experience and he can review what I'm doing to get up to speed on those tasks that I perform.
The original logs involve the tasks of 2 people, but we're letting management in on it too. They'll be able to read and offer perspectives, as necessary.
Others in our larger group are interested in this trial and we may open this concept up in the future. If we do, I envision a group of 7 all sharing logs. eLog support separate logbooks served from the same server and I'm thinking making several logbooks that serve various overlapping groups share. Then, there is a larger group that involves an addition 5 people who are 2000 miles away.
One concern is that if top management finds out and realizes that we aren't using THE BIG PROBLEM TRACKING/CHANGE CONTROL TOOL that they'll stop us and make us use that instead. So, we're keeping it pretty quiet.
Well! I'm just posting it to the Internet! I'm fairly confident that nobody here reads use.perl.org... Except me!
This was before there were well-developed blogging tools (and the expectations that developed along with them).
Not really a blog though some entries have a clear blog feel (a lot of us spend a lot of time meeting people abroad -- W3C, DVB, TV Anytime, MPEG, DAB, etc... -- and we add entries about those very bloggishly. A lot of the ongoing research stuff is there, lots of crackfueled ideas that are either progressively worked into specs (at which point they drop off the Wiki and turn into a pointer to a more manageable & multidevice XML document -- you want those specs on the Zaurus
It's not always perfect, but it's much more manageable than mail. We're using calendar and drawing plugins (to TWiki) so that we can share research deadlines (ha!), meeting dates and draw ugly little schemas to explain our stuff.
We use it for some project tracking stuff like
