One such task is the “Report”. Most IT consulting companies make reports about work they perform on a customer’s site – some make reports based on network health – and some just make notes on what they may have seen at a location. Over my years of writing reports for CWL, they have gone from being named “Activity Report”, “Service Log, and finally “Service Activity Report”. This is generally a necessary evil so the customer is informed of the kind of work that was performed – you might think of it as making sure the customer is aware of what they pay for. The problem with reports, is getting them finished in a timely manner, accurately and concisely.
The challenge was met in a number of ways over the years – anything from writing the report at a customer’s office while working there, to running a reporting tool while remotely connecting an internal server. All of these reporting methods lacked the ability to report on service in real-time – causing accuracy of the reports to suffer. Then, I got ahold of a Blackberry and had an idea.
At the time, it was kind of an epiphany – I would use the Blackberry to create and send an email to a reports@ email address (I created a reports@mydomain.com). These reports were simply just the customer name and actions I took while at the customer’s location. The person handling the accounting could then simply log into the reports@ email account and attach these reports to an invoice.
This was great – I would use the blackberry to write reports in (somewhat) real-time as I performing the work. The report would be (in most cases) finished by the time I left the client. This wasn’t enough though – while looking for shortcut keys for the blackberry, I had another idea.
On the blackberry, there are a number of AutoText shortcut combinations you can use to expand a field while typing. One such popular shortcut is “mypin” which will translate into something like “pin:00900000”. Other shortcuts would help me attach more valuable details to reports. I would use the “LD” shortcut to start a report and use “LT” to start a line of a report. The typical report would look like this:
Thu, Jan 28, 20109:35:07 AM
– text of entry9:35:13 AM
– text of entry9:35:20 AM
– text of entry(X Hours)
That simple addition would allow me to expand on timing information as well as adding multiple dates of work to a report. When I decided to write it in reverse chronology, I was able to solve the problem of constant scrolling inside of a the message. If you have a long report – it can be a real pain tying to constantly save that. With that – had a way to make real-time reports, and have them done when I left the client. Great, but still not exactly where I wanted to be.
Often, I would make a report anticipating more work on a another day; when the day came I either created a new report or forgot about the previous report. This would lead to the possible loss of a report because the blackberry doesn’t keep drafts on top it’s message list. If I wasn’t keeping track, these messages would be buried and potentially lost forever. I needed to find a better, and safer way to report – after some thought – I came up with the calendar.
Using the Blackberry calendar with the Google sync utility I was already synchronizing reports with the Google’s Apps. I decided to add calendar entries for upcoming customer work (planning) and then turning the calendar entry into “Report: Customer Name” when I started to do the work. The best part was that Blackberry shortcuts work when you’re typing in the notes of a calendar. Perfect, no reports would be lost this way since Accounting can just search on Google for “Report:” in the calendar app.
This is where I am now with Blackberry technology and reports – the Blackberry was certainly never intended to perform this type of work – but it has worked well in this unconventional way. This is the promise of technology – the power of a useful tool can be morphed into any sort of thing – limited only by what a user can imagine. What can you use the technology you have for? Do you run a consulting company? How do you write you’re reports?