Get approvals on design decisions to gain company resources

Rebecca consolidates the information from the wiki

Throughout the development phase, Rebecca's team will be writing many technical reports. The focus of the first technical report is to breakdown the advantages and disadvantages of pursuing rubber or an elastomer as the material used to create the soft ergonomic handles. Before additional resources, such as money for tooling and equipment will be directed toward this project, this report will need to receive the proper approvals. This report needs to be routed for approvals to the following people:

• Dmitri Yannatos-Development manager
• Jim Lender-Plant manager
• Simone Dray-Marketing manager

Rebecca is not concerned about her report being approved. Bill has worked extensively with other process engineers at the plant to author as a department the manufacturing section of the report. Rebecca has kept her manager and other development peers in the loop as well. Dan provided the raw data from his competitive analysis in the wiki, so Rebecca knows that her initial designs (regardless of material selection) are coinciding well with what the market is expecting. Also, this project is such a high priority that all three managers have been keeping an eye on the wiki content to see how effectively she is leading the cross-departmental team toward the goals of the company and not the respective departments.

Rebecca creates a document in the library. She adds information from the wiki into the report and posts comments to wiki pages for areas where she has questions. Since she is also getting other technical information that she needs from content stored in libraries in other places, she subscribes to these areas so that she can use a feed reader to stay up to speed with the latest content. She adds the feed reader to the place as a new page by clicking Customize > Components > Feed Reader.

While creating her report, Rebecca realizes that a template should be created that captures the typical report format at Power Renovations to standardize the process. She talks to Dmitri, her manager, and he agrees that a common format would help management evaluate projects and locate information faster. Rebecca creates a report template that contains the following:

• Company logo
• Fields to list the names of the author and other report contributors
• Date
• Report number
• Summary
• Background
• Financial Justification
• Experimental Details
• Results
• Conclusions

In order for this template to be used, Rebecca creates a document type named ErgoLine report. With this document type, she enables version options on team content and adds Dmitri, Jim, and Simone as approvers of this document.

As Rebecca works on her draft, she decides to add organizational structure to her library. Dan, the marketing representative, is already working on an important report that will soon be added to the library and the team will have other reports, presentations, and information that will need to be stored. Dan also wants to use the library to manage the project's life cycle, technical literature for sales representatives, customer support information, and customer feedback. Bill wants to use the library to store historical data and approved drawings. To help locate content later across different departments, Rebecca creates categories to organize this information further. She knows that folders will still need to be created as well, but for the time being, she will let individual team members add folders to the library as needed. She creates the following categories in the library:

• Design review criteria
• Experimental trials
• Manufacturing instructions
• Marketing information
• Process settings and data
• Technical reports

Once the report is approved, Rebecca plans to assign her report named Material selection for ergonomic handles to the Technical reports category.

Rebecca sends her report out for approval

Rebecca sends her document out for approval, and her report gets approved. The team decides to use an elastomer to create the soft handles. Now the team will go into full development where they evaluate various elastomers for the handles. During this phase of the project, prototypes will need to be made, tested by the quality department, and evaluated by customers. In addition, Rebecca and Dan will begin the negotiations on what criteria the prototypes should be measured against.

How does the walk-through change if the team uses Lotus Quickr, services for IBM^® Lotus^® Domino^®?

• Rebecca creates a form containing the report structure that she is seeking. Rebecca sends this form to the team to write the technical report together. She stores this form in the Material Selection folder.