Are You a Tool or a Workspace?


It's easy to underestimate the benefits of a unified workspace. Here are some practical examples of how a workspace will synchronize your team and improve performance.


Scenario
What would a tool do?
What would a workspace do?
Project Manager has an important meeting with his boss to discuss the status of his project. PM spends hours before the meeting getting updates from team members. Despite his exercise in cat herding, PM answers half his boss' questions with "Let me get back to you on that" which is synonymous with "I don't have a clue." Meanwhile, the PM's boss is beginning to think that she could get better answers from a Magic 8-Ball. "Will this project fail?" It is decidedly so. Before the meeting, PM reviews his project health dashboard and some reports in workspace.com. Is the project on-time? Is it on budget? What's the effective billing rate? PM has all the answers to his boss' questions. The meeting ends with PM providing his boss with her own workspace.com account so they don't have to waste each other's time on status meetings.
Business Analyst wants to know if all of the requirements for the next release have been tested. Tester tells BA that she ran all the tests. BA concludes that if all the test cases have been run, then all requirements have been tested. Months later, after a lengthy investigation, it is found that the widget blew up because a requirement wasn't tested. While searching for a new job, BA takes comfort in knowing that he cannot be held personally liable in the impending lawsuit. BA runs a report in workspace.com. After a quick scan, he realizes one requirement is missing a test case and that two of the test cases are missing results. He updates the records, which automatically sends an email to Tester alerting her that there is still work to be done. In return, automatic alerts notify BA the moment that Tester is done with the additional work.
Tester is preparing to run a test cycle. Tester diligently begins testing, staying up all night to meet her deadline, but BA forgot to tell her that last minute changes to requirements necessitated rewriting all the test cases. Tester's last 24-hours on Earth have been completely wasted and she begins more fruitful pursuits like planning her revenge on BA. Tester received email alerts notifying her that requirements had been edited, so she has already made the changes to the test cases. Just to be sure, she runs a quick report that confirms that no requirement has been changed since each test case was last updated. Tester begins her work.
Developer is fixing the last defect 24 hours before a project's deadline and has some questions about the defect. Developer thinks it would be useful to see the original requirement that spawned a bug and the discussion that went into writing the requirement. He has no idea how to get this information and can't reach anyone because it's 3:00 AM. He opens his forth bottle of Jolt Cola, makes his best guess (which happens to be wrong), and keeps coding. Developer opens the defect in workspace.com and clicks the link to the original requirement. He reads the requirement and the comments attached to it. He chuckles to himself as he realizes that he thought the defect meant something else entirely and thinks about the chaos that would have ensued had he not checked the original requirement.

Recent Articles:

Case Study: A Better Way to Manage Enterprise Software Implementations

The UCI Medical Center, one of America's Top Hospitals, relied on workspace.com to successfully implement a $50 million healthcare information management system. The project involved 150 people, thousands of requirements and the integration of 50+ legacy systems.

TechRepublic Review of Workspace.com:

Justin James from TechRepublic says workspace.com (formerly called Lighthouse) "hits all of the right notes," and "deserves serious consideration by IT professionals." Read the review here.