Looking back is something which can be fun, painful or downright dull. The latter is how I find writing my monthly report at work. Whereas, I really enjoying writing up articles for my two personal blogs, when I have a moment.
The first thought I have when writing this regular report is 'What the heck did I do at the beginning of this month?' It seems such a long time ago and I find it hard to recall what I was thinking at the time and why I was thinking that. I know, it's only a matter of weeks ago but so much has happened, particularly now as our business goes through a massive change.
In fact, my lack of monthly reporting was noted by my manager in my annual review. She knows I am busy but it is difficult for everyone to see what's happening day by day, espcially as so much is carried out through email and through the systems we use.
This had to change. This is how I changed it.
As I wrote at the top, I really enjoy blogging and I have been practicing this creative art for three or four years on business, technology and motorcycling topics. It is now far easier to write posts than it was when I first started to blog.
So, I decided to use that skill to write my monthly report each day. I write short posts after meetings, messages and discussions with everyone I work with using the 'blog post' feature in Microsoft Word.
I then publish each post to my personal blog on our SharePoint system with a category for the activity. The posts are published internally immediately so I am careful that I write sensitively and objectively.
Next, through the administration settings in my SharePoint site, I export all of the posts I have written over the month into an Excel spreadsheet. This makes them easy to filter and sort. I, then, edit the posts to make them as succinct as I can and add in the actions I took for each post. It's easy, effective and surpising just how much easier it is to read than when it is in a Word document.
SharePoint
is one of Microsoft's best products for digital citizen in a corproate environment these days. It helps keep you to keep organised and to keep everyone as informed in your team as they want to be.The only challenge is that, for most of my colleagues, they have no idea of the capabilities that they have at their disposal to be organised. SharePoint is excellent and it is good to be able to use my enthusiasm for blogging in my job.
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