Sterlling Whitehead maintains a blog called All Things Sterling.
This post can help you understand the huge power of using a simple service like TrackDailyGoals for easily implementing transparency. There’s also the added bonus of easy project management completion and goal tracking at the same time.
The Point
The real but unnoticed benefit for the government and contractors is the public openness of TrackDailyGoals.
An article on Web Worker Daily makes this brilliant point: publicly posting your goals for the day on Twitter may motivate you to complete them. At the end of (or throughout) the day, you post the goals you’ve completed. All you have to do is post your information to the hashtag #dailygoals on Twitter and TrackDailyGoals measures the goals over time.
Never mind the project management impact of easily posting your completed goals (which gets around using annoying project management software) or even the tracking ability on the TrackDailyGoals website.
The real but unnoticed benefit for the government and contractors is the public openness of TrackDailyGoals. If the public wants to know what is going on with a specific government agency or worker, it can check TrackDailyGoals. This really applies the idea that sunlight is the best disinfectant. (Especially in the contracting world, where our reputation is ruined by a relatively small number of corrupt people).
Issues to Resolve
Yes, I understand there is classified information you can’t post and talk about on Twitter. That’s legitimate. But publicly posting in 140 characters things like “(1) phone calls (2) meet clients (3) paperwork” isn’t harmful in most circumstances. It is also a good point that vagueness in posts can make specific project management tasks difficult to track. However, this is a good start.
P.S. It is my understanding that Google uses a solution like TrackDailyGoals for project management, but uses email instead. We could be onto something here.
Would you like to see TrackDailyGoals or something like it implemented in your agency?
I like the concept because it provides focus for one’s day and lets others understand what they are doing as well.