In addition to my continuous work on the second medical site, I called Sam and discussed alternative ways to display the data he collects. It is important that I understand the intricacies of the data his department collects in order to discuss ways to improve the website. Sometimes I get carried away and focus mainly on the technical side of completing a project, when I really need to understand the reasons behind what I am doing and the content that I’m working with. Because the director hadn’t visited the site in a few weeks he forgot how one of the KPIs is calculated. He asked me for the calculation, which I was able to produce, but I felt I didn’t have the best knowledge of how to explain it to him. I realized that I really have to know the content I’m working with and why it’s important to the client.

For example, on the first medical site, I was having trouble figuring out a way to put a certain calculation that determined whether a milestone was met into SharePoint that required reference to today’s date. I kept trying to think of ways to calculate the current date, and because I wasn’t thinking of ways to manipulate the way the data was calculated, I kept hitting a road block. Mark suggested I change the way the formula calculated the milestone by breaking it up into two separate formulas that make no reference to the current date thus arriving at a solution that was as close as possible to the intended goal.

My goal after talking with Sam and working on the two medical sites this week is to have a more intimate knowledge of the content I’m working with in order to work around technological restrictions and discover alternate, and sometimes more creative ways at arriving at the intended result. Also, by understanding the content more, I’ll be able to better discuss information management with clients.

In the coming week I will wrap up work on the two medical websites.

I spent most of the day updating the medical website dashboards to reflect Sam’s needs to break up one particular KPI into multiple KPIs. I broke “Efficiency” of medical writers up by document type. By breaking this KPI into multiple KPIs, Sam can monitor the writing efficiency for each document type. There is now greater accountability, because Sam can contact specific people who plan to write certain document types in the future and determine whether they need to promote more efficient writing processes.