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Elph came across dry-erase paint and magnetic primer from Rust-Oleum. Coating a wall in these products creates a giant magnetic whiteboard that can be written on and erased like any other whiteboard. Of course IT had to try it.

I chose a wall in our front office roughtly 9ft x 12ft. A can of primer is allegedly enough to put three coats on a 7ft x 7ft space, and a can of paint is enough to do two coats. I disagree. Of course the space I painted was larger than that, so I used two cans of primer for three coats and three cans of paint for four coats. Four coats were neccessary since the paint is white and the primer is jet black (that’s the kicker). Using a foam roller instead of nap gave a nice smooth finish, and as the paint dries it becomes very glossy just like a normal whiteboard. It takes two days to fully dry; our wall should be ready to write on tomorrow.

Using a tip from Josh at the Creamery, which directed me to the resources at Bikely, I created the Tour de Food bike map based my intimate experience of cyling across the ZCoB.

January 2008

The Zing Spell Check Tool (SCT) has been in use for nearly 12 months now. It’s been installed on all ZCoB desktop computers - remotely installed on Windows computers using group policy in Active Directory - and has received lots of positive feedback. Writing and emailing in the MS Office suite (Word, Outlook, Excel, Entourage, etc.) is easier and more enjoyable because of all the ZCoB jargon and foodie terms included: no longer is Weinzweig or Binny’s unrecognized and marred by squiggly red underlines; prosciutto is no longer embarrassingly auto-corrected with prostitute.

When the Zing SCT was first rolled out it had more than 6,000 terms. Now, thanks to the SCT submission form on the Zingtranet, the total number of terms is over 8,000. When ZCoBbers find a word that they want included in the SCT, they log on to the Zingtranet, click the Spell Check Word Submission link, and enter a word or phrase. It’s then sent to me, spelling verified, and crosschecked against the existing word list. Updates for Zing SCT are issued quarterly.

I’ve done a bunch of reading about personal productivity in the last year or so with my primary source of inspiration being David Allen’s, Getting Things Done. I’ve been working with getting tasks out of my head and onto paper for over a year and have recently been going back to four pieces of information gleened from Merlin Mann’s 43folders.com blog.

Anatomy of a to do:

• it’s a physical action
• it can be accomplished in one sitting
• it supports valuable progress towards a recognizable goal
• I am the most appropriate person for the task

Keeping these in mind as I work on my various contextual pages of notes has been really helpful. You can read more at Merlin’s article Building a Smarter To-Do List, Part 1.

We love that the ZCob is using our online Helpdesk System to directly file service requests and trouble tickets. But what about the wide array of requests that come in by person or by phone? Enter: Talk > Type > Ticket. Your Zing Geeks type up those requests and enter them into our online Helpdesk System

Why is this better?

-All technical support problems (and answers!) are documented. This will enable us to see trends and let us refer to old tickets to help solve recurring issues.

-It helps us better communicate with each other. All members of the IT staff can contribute their solutions to issues that otherwise would not have been on their radar.

-It gives us a more accurate measure of our workload. By logging all issues, we have a clearer picture of the technical health of the organization and the productivity of our department. This will improve our resolution efficiency.

-Having the issues that we face in the Helpdesk System allows us to better measure the scope of our work for each of the businesses over time.

The IT department has a working project board that rocks in so many ways…

1. Every project that each of us is involved in is listed with a half sheet of paper showing percent complete and due date and other standard stuff but also includes compelling reasons, next action step, and extra mile. These sheets are tacked up in columns for each person in our office where everyone can see them.
2. The compelling reasons help us and others understand what the big picture is for the project.
3. The Next Action Step keeps us focused on moving ahead - we use a post-it so we can constantly keep the forms up-to-date with the very next thing that needs to happen.
4. The extra-mile is highlighted and has to be filled out before the project is complete!
5. We review the entire board every week to stay in touch with what everyone is doing.
6. The whole thing is on paper instead of computer - out of the box radical thinking for the IT Dept! And it works great! Quick and easy access to the information for not just us but anyone who walks into the office.
7. We love it so much we would be happy to train others in building their own.

Thinking about how the IT Dept can help the other businesses this holiday season… In years past it has been difficult to free up IT staff from the daily demands to do box packing and tray running and other things that would help the businesses. When we do it always feels like we’re not meeting folks needs with IT coverage.

So for this year we’re thinking that a service innovation is necessary. Tentatively named IT7, we’re thinking of offering IT staff coverage 7 days a week for the months of Nov and Dec.

With about 8 weeks to cover it would require each IT geek to come in for a weekend day twice during the month. We would have one person in for a full 8 hours on Saturday and Sunday. That person would be expected to be in the office working and monitoring phone and email and would include at least one ’round’ to each of the businesses sometime during the day.

The IT7 would not keep us from pitching in where needed around the businesses. Especially of interest for us would be focused events on specific dates.

Schedule:

• Sat 11/4: Joe and Billie, Sun 11/5: Brian and Billie
• Sat 11/11: Brian, Sun 11/12: Joe
• Sat 11/18: Elph and Billie, Sun 11/19: Craig and Billie
• Sat 11/25: Elph, Sun 11/26: Craig
• Sat 12/2: Brian, Sun 12/3: Craig
• Sat 12/9: Brian, Sun 12/10: Craig
• Sat 12/16: Joe, Sun 12/17: Joe
• Sat 12/23: Elph, Sun 12/24: Elph