No python today, but a wish…

Many years ago, I worked at Digital with a PHENOMENAL team. Truly, one of those “peak work experiences”.

One of the cool things we had (this was the early 90’s) was a projector hooked up to the terminal in the conference room, and we would “work on the walls” during our group meeting.

A memory I carry with me to this day was our action tracker, just as simple thing, which was built on top of a simple database table with a spreadsheet-type interface (VAX Teamdata) in which we could capture our action items.

Basically a one-liner with info such as:

• date created
• DRI (“designated responsible individual”)
• what to be done – deliverable is implicit in clear description
• by when (date)
• status – e.g. open, blocked, waiting, on-hold, done, cancelled
• wait, here’s an update to status:
  • defined (initial state)
  • in-progress
  • complete
  • waiting (typically on someone else, use comments)
  • deferred (or withdrawn)
  • withdrawn
  • BLOCKED
• requestor — who’s asking for the work, or the primary beneficiary, who can be consulted about the action
• outcome

A quick recap after a few days thinking about this:

• ID (#)
• WHO
• DUE (date in form of END BY this date)
• STATUS (see above)
• WHAT (meat of the request)
• FOR (who)
• CLOSED (date)
• RESULTS (or COMMENTS)

One fancy enhancement that comes to mind is also a field for:

• notes – comment(s) about status and/or progress    What’d be cool here is for this to be a timestamped log or audit of the action item.

I miss this simplicity, and in my new job, I need to have something that can quickly create and update such a record/records.  Getting way too swamped with action items and missed promises.

SO!  How about we create this in Python?

Right – and I want it accessible over the web.