Is adding "I know you saw it" a Bridge Too Far?
- May 11, 2020
- 6 replies
- 785 views
A while back, Workfront introduced the Report Usage view, as below, which has several cool columns in it, including Last Viewed By: Name, Last Viewed Date, Last 10 Viewers, and Views this Month / Quarter / Year. As I recall, the main usecase was to help decide which Reports are (still) in use, so that those that are not could be periodically purged.
Last week, though, I had a thought provoking conversation with the PMO leaders at one of our clients, in which we discussed the idea of taking the concept of report auditing even further. In particular, I proposed -- half jokingly -- that every time a person ran the Project Status Report for a project, we could log a note (using the API) that they'd done so, and even fish that fact out and present the "Last Viewed Date" on the report itself (e.g. under the Sponsor's name, and the Project Manager's name, etc.). After a rather long pause, we realized that -- whether we went as far as formally reporting that "viewing audit" information, it could be very useful for the Project Manager (at least) to know who saw what, when...particularly on the external (reviewer license) stakeholder side. Imagine waiting on a client to get back to you on something, but systematically knowing when (and how often) they've looked at a particular Project report. Spooky, but powerful. Of course, as one colleague pointed out, "just because they saw it, doesn't mean they GET it..." but that's a different issue.
So! Although I was tempted to make this a poll question, I'm actually more interested in hearing some opinions, for those who'll venture theirs:
Is adding this "I know you saw it" viewing audit logic a Bridge Too Far?
Regards,
Doug