— April 13, 2011 —
By Tobin Harris
Now that we’re in the new office, we’re taking the opportunity to sort a few bits and bobs out. The first is the information radiator, a tool which helps us feel the heart beat of the company.
Chris and I are huge fans of information radiators. The concept is simple. Put up a big screen in your office and make it show critical project information, visible to the team at all times.
The team can see what’s in the production pipeline, and where it is. We’ve got a 27” screen, but a 60” screen would be much better :)
Tracking Up To 300 Work Items
We’re typically working on 10-20 projects at once, across 8.5 man team, tracking up to 300 items of work (called stories).
The first screen we’ve developed shows the status of our work items in columns, from left to right. Since we develop software, our statuses are
- Backlog (work scheduled)
- Started
- Finished (ready for Quality Assurance)
- Delivered (sent to customer for review)
- Done (customer gives the thumbs up, woohoo!)
The more items on the right, the better. That’s the “done” column.
More Screens
We’re developing more screens to show on the information radiator too. Our current screens are custom made to mine information from our project management system - Pivotal Tracker. We are also looking to connect to our CRM system (Highrise) to visualise sales statistics. I’ll be implementing this soon, with the help of Lee, so watch this space!
Commercial Projects
We’re currently rolling out similar tools at a Yorkshire NHS trust, in 3 separate departments. These tools will allow the lab staff to see their 3000 specimens and cases moving between various stages of their process. It will then help them spot bottlenecks and problems, and take steps to correct them.
Our workflow visualisation tools can display information to any business system, so if you’re interested in getting an information radiator for your business, give us a call.
iPad and Mobile Information Tools
Engine Room Apps is primarily a mobile studio, so of course we’re playing with bringing critical project information to ourselves on the move. Chris already has an ace working iPad app prototype which lets us view the state of all projects in the long term. It’s really funky. Again, we’ll post about that soon.
