I have built a number of solutions to keep people informed when the workforce is dispersed, meetings are difficult or impossible, and the participants’ availability during the working day is sporadic and unpredictable. A constraint on these implementations is that, for information security reasons, “sterile corridors” have to be maintained between streams of information which are on an “only those with a need to know” basis, and those which require larger groups or everyone to be in the know. A second complication lay in the nature of the workflow, for which the best analogy is the marketing/implementation kind of workflow. By this I mean that the users go through a phase of informal discussion, followed by team assignments (not necessarily from the discussion group) and a formal reporting cycle if the “case” or project is approved and funded. Finally, a number of independent organizations participate, each with their own constraints on who can know what.
Having scoured the earth (sorry - the internet) for solutions and finding none, here is where we have ended up using EE, bearing in mind that even after 2 years of experimentation, successful usage and incremental development, we still have a work in progress.
1 For informal, general communications we use open forums. For secure informal communications, we use fine-structured access control to “hidden” forums. We stick to forums rather than email and/or telephone in order to maintain a structured record that can be audited.
2 We use EE augmented with quite a bit of custom PHP to implement the project-tracking side. A good example of the kind of thing may be gleaned from the accompanying PDF, which is a flowchart of one of the projects which is orientated to managing certain kinds of casework - meaning work requiring formal interaction between case-workers and their “clients” interspersed with management decision making and reporting. This part of the system keeps everything to do with the “case” under the banner of a unique case identifier. Specifically, each case record contains and manages:
- A case description
- A record of case team members and their roles (both of which may change over time without removing participants from the formal record.)
- A record of project-related “events” which can be reports, meeting minutes, management decisions etc.
- A record of all other documents, both offline and online, related to the project
- A link to the forum thread which led up to the project or case. The forum thread is not necessarily closed because of the perceived need for ongoing informal discussions, but the formal part of the system also allows for comments.
While the illustration (accompanying PDF) is specific to managing case work, the general scheme also works for other systems we have implemented, including work done by a roofing contractor and the resultant communications with customers and workmen, and a system for scheduling and tracking a training/consulting operation.
An interesting feature of these implementations is that that the clients want a way of generating a knowledge base to capture improved methods and procedures, to generate “learned papers” for eventual publication or to generate policy and other (for example) training or reference documents. While not fully implemented yet, the plan is to use the EE WIKI as the basis for this - problem seems to be getting authors to find the time.
As to ensuring that everyone (who needs to be) is in the correct loop, we make extensive (meaning rigorously enforced) use of email notifications.
As to ensuring that entries and updates are made, in our case the organizations’ funding sources (customers) seem to have the required incentive.
There is a more complete flash presentation of the case work setup, but the download takes quite a bit of time.
There is also a rather ugly demo - cobblers’ children and all that