Role Call
Keeping track of job responsibilities in a remote company is hard. This makes it much easier.The Challenge
After reading Frederic Laloux's "Reinventing Organizations" and realizing our "tealness" at CauseLabs, I personally realized that I (first and foremost) needed a tool to keep track of the roles that everyone in the organization played and what commitments everyone had made to one another. It seemed like a pretty useful tool for others, too. Thus, Role Call was born.
Role Call attempts to keep track of all projects and roles that individuals are involved in. Furthermore, it allows organizations to follow the "teal" workflow for modifying and updating roles through a governance meeting format.
Learnings
- There were a number of questions that I wanted to answer with this project: who is consistently the busiest? Who has availability coming forward? Who serves in too many roles? Too few? Too many projects? Too few? Who has the largest knowledge spread? I was given insight into some of these, but ultimately it served as an effective way to keep everyone at the company on the same page regarding responsibilities.
- Conceptually, the ephiphany came when we realized that at CauseLabs, roles were tied to people and projects. That is, an individual may play one or several roles on one project, but different roles on another. This helped us alleviate the common problem of small organizations: that individuals often played multiple roles, but now we could have clarity how they played those roles, and the commitments they maintained.
- Role Call uses the Pusher service to provide real-time updates of questions and answers during a governance meeting. With one individual set as the meeting "scribe", every other meeting participant will get updates as the scribe submits them with details on what's happening in the meeting. This was also my first foray into D3 and SVG, utilized to draw a directed-force graph of role relationships at the company. (Whether this was useful is up for debate.)
Source code is not currently available.
Technologies
- HTML5
- CSS3
- PHP 7
- JavaScript (ES5, ES2015)
- jQuery
- Laravel 5.3
- Vue.js
- Twitter Bootstrap
- MySQL 5.7
- Gulp
- Webpack
- Adaptive Design
- Pusher API
- Composer
- Laravel Spark
Duration
About 16 months
(2015 to 2017)
