I've been bad about blogging lately - there's been so much going on at work!

This weekend was spent rolling out new workflow forms for the department.  The department is a local department that receives work requests from across the country, and the workflows are online forms that are set up to have the required pieces of information from the field and are able to bounce from person to person through all of the steps that are required in order to process.

We have an in-house team that has created an amazingly powerful web portal tool that can accomplish this (amongst many other features).  Unfortunately, the tool has no test environment, and any change I make to a form affects all of the existing requests.  In addition, while I love the tool, it's also known to be very glitchy - so I never really know if what I've updated is going to work until it's already been changed.  It makes for a fun time.  The changes usually happen on a Sunday and I spend the rest of the week fielding complaints and questions, and trying to update all of the many automation and reporting tools to handle the change.

It is frusterating - this department is big on change, and is very data driven, at the same time as there is a struggle between needing to capture the right information vs someone having to take the time to provide it.  How do you increase your reporting abilities while decreasing the amount of effort required to fill out a form?  How do you balance what is required for the back end (a form going from point a to be) while still keeping the tool user friendly? 

It makes me realize how valuable CAP and project management skills are - yet I can't help thinking that I don't even have enough time to manage the technical aspects of a project, much less the people side.  It's something I hope the MIS degree will help me learn how to better manage.

3/4/2008 12:19:57 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)    Comments [1] Trackback