Lab notes goes live

Today I took the executive decision to just hang out some of our lab notes on work we are performing. I am not entirely sure how it will pan out, but I am hoping that you will be joining us in conversation in the labs.

I have been wondering for a while how I should best present the 'Lab' conversations we are having here at Folknology. More often than not we can get quite deep into the tools, technologies and practicalities around the subjects we like to blog. It may mean getting your hands a little dirty, don't expect polish and shine, it will be like traditional lab notes jotted as they are so to speak...

To kick off the Lab notes chaos (see 'Lab notes' on the right) I will upload the first trilogy over the next few days. Like all good trilogies this will be made of 4 parts ; The past, the present, the near future and over the horizon, focused around the reinvention of that beloved financial hacking tool the spreadsheet, I am calling this 'The Spreadsheet is dead long live the spreadsheet'. Although I won't do the spreadsheet history any justice as I will be purely focussing on using the spreadsheet in it's modern web format. And like all good business geeks I will be scratching my own itch, a smb issue that needs solving. After donning my Lab coat I feel that I am really entering Finance two point Ohhhhhhhh my gawd please don't extend that meme any further...

It's been a while since I waxed lyrically on web spreadsheets and Ultra Deep Linking concept, I think the time is right to revisit those ideas as they become reality.

Here is the abstract for the labs excercise :
Our business (and some others that we work with) provide services to other businesses. Thus this issue surrounds service provision, in particular the managing of work done on various projects etc.. Often for full blown projects we would use project management tools like BaseCamp an excellent tool by the way. But often we are concurrently involved in both ongoing services provision, revision and support of existing business, a great deal of which has to be invoiced in order for the business and staff to continue performing! Although it is fairly easy (hmmm did I really say that) to get participants to use tools like Basecamp to register contribution to a project (time, responsibility,communication etc..), it is often difficult to capture such information for the other smaller and incremental contributions, without turning to nasty practices such as Micro-Management, which we hate. It would also be extrwemely difficult to implement MM given that contributors are even in the same geography or even timezones.

Thus our mission, which we have decided to accepted, is to solve this capture conumdrum and enumerate it in a manner suitable for our invoicing/account department to be able to handle, that is it must end up spreadsheet like or else we fail... To read the first part of this trilogy follow part 1

*Update Apologies I have now corrected the link to part 1!

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