#VCOM today - 5: Interfacing with colleagues and management

Many people with various characters. Sometimes they have quite different expectations on how they want to receive information. 

How do you meet these expectations? Would you agree, that it is still often Excel or Word which is the tool to summarize data and to prepare reports for management? And is it the lunch break when you and your colleagues exchange tasks - hopefully not forgetting 50% of them by the time the break ends? Please, don't understand me wrong. Especially in the past months, it has become obvious to all of us, how important lunch and coffee breaks with colleagues are for staying up to date and for being a team. Nevertheless, we should establish a working culture where important communication is transparent and available to everyone who needs to have access to this information. 

Today I would like to give you examples of how you can use the VCOM as your O&M tool for interfacing with colleagues in your team but also with management. 

Lets start with the colleagues in your team. Lets assume you are the team leader of an O&M team and one of your colleagues is leaving for holidays. There are two options now. You set up a meeting for 3 hours to hand over the open tasks one by one. Or your colleague, who is leaving for holidays, simply transfers the open tasks and tickets to you. The advantage? You save 3 hours of your valuable time and no information gets lost between you and your colleague. Everyone knows the game and the outcome.

Better to do it like that! The person leaving for holidays can link tickets to you, so that you have a clear picture of the actual status, the history and the tasks. 

Picture: link a ticket to a person in charge

For the planned activities and preventive maintenance actions, it is even easier if they can be found in a common O&M team calendar and not in the individual Outlook calendars. When you use the calendar in the VCOM, you will be reminded if there is a task and there is no risk to miss a task when a colleague is ill or on holidays. Therefore you can easily add the portlet "Calendar items" to your ticket system dashboard for example.

Picture: Calendar for planned activities

Picture: Portlet with planned activities

Next example: Your management is asking for monthly portfolio reports to track the overall performance of the portfolio. What usually happens is this:  

You, as the O&M manager, open several different portals (this is the first mistake by the way ;-)) and you start with copy/pasting data manually in Excel sheets or Word templates. Okay, lets be serious. It is not possible to avoid this all the time. But most of the time. At least it should be the goal. And before spending hours every month to create reports manually, speak to management and try to define a reporting structure and KPIs that can be easily created automatically. Maybe they are okay with one KPI less and you having time for managing a 2% bigger portfolio without asking for more resources - could it be a win-win situation? 

One possibility to interface with management can be found in the portfolio reporting section of the VCOM. Portfolio reports can easily be defined by yourself with a drag and drop menu. If you do it once, you will be able to create new templates within a few minutes.  

Picture: Generation of a Portfolio Report

Picture: Portfolio Report - drag & drop content specification

A tip on how you can automate processes and report generation as much as possible: Use the e-mail sending option and send reports for defined periods of time to selected recipients - fully automated.

Picture: Automatic report sharing

What benefits will you immediately have by interfacing with colleagues via a tool like the VCOM?

• Increased transparency
• Easy transfer from one colleague to another  
• Automated reporting to management
• In a nutshell: Less mistakes and missed tasks and a more professional and less time-consuming reporting 

#Nerdtalk: Screens and Video Walls

When internal communication is discussed, I am often asked how the importance of a high quality O&M service can be made "visible" internally. Especially for O&M teams within a large company and large groups, this is getting more and more important. As human beings, we all are typically interested in what colleagues do. So, why don't you show your colleagues what you do? Create interest! 

It can be so easy to make people feel involved and engaged. A screen in the entrance hall is one option with fascinating effects. This is an example of a utility showing their activities in solar PV. 

Or, when you think big - even video walls are installed to impress.

Picture: Control Centre of Raising Power