Call for Management and Reporting System/Process ideas

Frank Arrigo just announced our new team structure, so far it's been great fun being part of the big family.

One challenge Frank has given me as part of our career discussion recently is:

"I would like to have Anna assist in putting some structure and process in the management reporting needed for the expanded Technical Evangelism team and look forward to her contribution there"

Yikes - help anyone?

I must admit I did once upon a time manage a group of 12 research scientists at the CSIRO, and regarding reporting for the group - I did it by brute force - ie. gathered their monthly reports, and manually produced what's required reporting for my management a level above. Boy was that hard (and not so interesting) work!

Is there a smarter way of doing this? so that everyone in the team is empowered with more autonomy? and individuals can lead various inititatives at different times, and taking on portions of the reporting responsibilities? this system should ideally also enable more visibility across the team, with most up to date reporting data, hence more meaningful collaboration between all members can naturally happen?

Ah! what's this box that I'm using as footrest? a box of USB/Optical Mouse in the most fashinable colour black? Maybe that's a nice goodie to tempt you all to send me your brilliant/wacky/cool ideas and help me do my work? :-)

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 30, 2006
  There you go - use the community to do your work.
  
  i like it
  
  and nice incentive too
• Anonymous
  March 30, 2006
  Hi Anna,
  
  A call for help from you is something I cannot ignore. Everything else is brushed aside, here goes:
  
  First, I would do a bit of modelling around “management reporting” and “Technical Evangelism” - get together a few abstract entities and operations. No need to use the words like “Objects” or “Use Cases”, just two dozen of noun and verb phrases will be enough – 15 min of work.
  
  Then I would interpret a task as one of the standard tasks, like:
  - Customer Relationship Management (my first choice, that's how I am managing similar activities)
  - Project/Task/Resource Management
  - Wiki
  - Content Management
  - etc
  
  So you would end up with a very common system, and a very uncommon, although effective way of using it.
  
  Hope I haven't confused you.
  
  Alex
• Anonymous
  April 02, 2006
  thx Alex, that's a cool idea! I like this back to the basics approach. I'm off doing some modelling right now...
  a black USB/Optical mouse is on its way...