Since I last blogged about it, the monitor has become a bit of an office staple. It has now moved to be on our pod of desks which makes sense as it mostly relates to information about the system we support and is the thing we use regularly to check how it’s holding together and if there’s anything we should be checking (numbers turn red if there is a backlog somewhere).

The consultancy team now want their own version, and have given me a list of suggestions, requests and bizarre visualisations that they’d like to see. I’ve already made a start on this. At the moment it is just another screen of numbers but I need to have those calculating accurately as a starting point before attempting to make it pretty.

Wowzers

We’ve been having a record breaking few weeks - first we smashed through our daily best ever record, then we broke the monthly best ever total as well. On both occasions, I realised that we were getting close to record breaking performances, and was able to make, test and deploy quick changes to highlight the fact and celebrate our successes. It doesn’t do anything amazing at the moment, the numbers just change colour to gold and an Argyll appropriate message get’s displayed (“Wowzers!” is a fairly standard office exclamation) but I have plenty of ideas up my sleeve.

Other additions since I last blogged about it are a set of numbers at the top left that don’t really mean much to me but that apparently do to management, and a map. The map shows the locations of the orders being currently worked on. It has no real purpose other than adding a bit of pretty. But I like it being there and it makes the numbers have a bit of context. I’d love to make more of the map, maybe making something more physical, a bit like the displays you used to get at seaside resorts where you pressed a button and a lamp/series of lamps lit up. One day maybe.

We had a visit from one of the big bosses the other week, and when it came to explaining what our team actually does, the monitor ended up being one of the things we spoke about. Almost everything else we do is behind the scenes, internal tools and automation and, whilst essential to the running of the business, isn’t very visual. So the monitor gave us something to point at and explain.

Nice to know that it has other uses beyond just being the system equivalent of a hospital bedside monitor.