Today I began rolling out the transparency thoughts to the managers on my team. One of the things that caused concern was the in out board idea. I had to explain a few things concerning my concept for the in out board:

It's not micromanagement: The goal isn't to micro manage the technician's time nor is it to prove when someone worked. It's about enhancing our customer's trust and allowing them to understand the ebb and flow of our daily work. I made a mistake in the way I brought it to the team, but I was very quickly able to see my error.

Free technical solutions don't exist:  I spent two hours on New Year's Day looking for what the web had to offer. It broke out into two camps: 1) Workstation based applications that require an installation to view the in out board. 2) Web based applications that required a subscription fee. Now, I'm all for making money, but all I need is something simple to update the status of someone. 

Wiki based technology won't work: I laid out a table in our wiki for tracking folks, but it's a pain to modify. If you have ever done tables in a wiki you know my pain. You have to edit the page, scroll down to what you want to change, change it and the save the page. If someone else is making a change to their status at the same time you have to start over. The key is to make updating your location and status easy.

I am amazed in this Web 2.0 world that no one has thrown together a quick application to make this happen.

Our next tact is to see if we can corral the IM away messages. This would help with the one click process we're looking for. If that fails we may look at a simply coded page that allows people to enter a form to update their entry, but that seems so Web 1.0.  

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