WORKING... FINALLY!
Is it possible to build a web application that really fits people needs? Of course you can: to know what people need you must ask them.
This is how the idea of WorkOutLoud - a new product built with ruby on rails - was born.
WorkOutLoud will share its construction process on the web with the users.
Do you want to know what WorkOutLoud is all about?
Do you want to know what WorkOutLoud is all about?
Dec 8, 2008
Rethinking WorkOutLoud
The main goal of WorkOutLoud is to allow people to work well, and that is continuously forcing me to think about how this application is going to be built, and what functions to include and what not. In the last few days I was able to spend some value time on thinking seriously on what I've already decided to include in the product first release, and that was not helping people to work well. Working well is a serious and tough goal to achieve.
Believe me, it's definitely one of the hardest things to do during your entire career. Sharing what you are working on, just to let others know and let you doing your job is hard.
After having spent a lot of time thinking about which is the minimum piece of information you have to share with others in order to achieve your primary goal, I understood you need at least two chunks of data:
a) what activity you are trying to accomplish
b) which project you are spending your time on
Some weeks ago I thought the first point was enough to leave other people happy, and let you work well. But now I know I was wrong. Knowing the project you are on, enable a rich amount of analysis and statistics, and people like your boss, you colleagues and your customers, love those stuff. The great thing about this approach is that with only these 2 small information, the system can achieve a huge amount of other data for you.
For example, you could get:
- Reports on people daily work activities
- Reports on total amount of hours spent on work activities
- Time reporting facilities
- Reports about how projects are proceeding
- Planning effectiveness: hours on the budget vs hours actually worked
- Estimate to complete information
and many others. You need to structure the idea of project, and assign it a budget (man-hours or man-days) if you want, and that's it.
I tried a first design of people daily report, and seems to work quite good:
In the next few days I'll be working on "re-thinking WorkOutLoud" a bit. There are some cool and simple functions to evaluate, stuff like "Suspending & Resuming tasks", "Signaling or appending open issues to a project".
