Tuesday, July 24, 2007

New initiative at work - iPAD

Hi,

I have taken this new initiative at work iPAD to make Project Activity Documentation easy. Basically, I have been handling the audits of our team and had got several comments from the quality team over the documentation of team's activities. The team is supposed to maintain an activity log, peer review records, Minutes of meetings, delivery mails, appreciation mails, Issue Register, Weekly status reports and what not. Each of the above has a prescribed format and whenever an activity happens at work you need to save a file in the prescribed format at a particular location. I myself had faced a lot of problems trying to save these files. So I had decided to create one excel sheet with each activity log as a tab so that you can fill in all the data at one place (you can give it a geek tag - data integration but this is more from the enduser perspective - the enduser's headache gets reduced a lot as he/she just has to keep one sheet open all the time and fill in data whenever an activity happens in his/her project).

Since this sheet is a log of various activities that happen in the project, I decided to call it PAD (Project Activity Documentation). It also sounds like a notepad, so gives an intuitive feel as to what it is meant for. And then suddenly I got the idea of naming it iPAD or myPAD (inspired from google's iGoogle, Apple's iPod and MSN's myMSN, Yahoo's myYahoo etc) and then we agreed upon the name iPAD since i would stand for Integrations which is our team name. So finally I have created an excel sheet template with 7 tabs and named it iPAD (Integrations Project Activity Documentation). I see some initial success in using it. Earlier, it would require some n reminders before getting the teammates to fill in various sheets. Now, everyone keeps their own iPAD sheet open and fills in the required data. Hope this carries on well and yeah I am really going to boast about it in any interviews I face later in my career. I personally am very satisfied with the initiative.

2 comments:

Bobo (Gaurav Sharma) said...

Good show Srini Man...
The Integrations BAs are proud of you...

Bobo (Gaurav Sharma) said...

Good job Srini Man...
The Integrations BAs are proud of you...