The Panic Status Board

You should have an internal dashboard, even if you're not absurdly artsy Mac developers who can afford a flatscreen monitor to showcase it to anybody in the office. You can have v1.0 ground out in an hour or two -- take your MVC framework of choice, make a single page behind authentication, set that as your homepage or etc -- and it will pay dividends for the rest of your business' life.<p>It is absolutely absurd how much extra value-producing work you'll get done if tasks which routinely take you 10 minutes take 5 minutes and tasks which routinely take you 2 minutes just don't happen.<p>If you need some inspiration on what to put on it, I have an article on the topic somewhere... Here we go. <a href="http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/02/09/dashboard-design-for-metrics-savvy-software-companies/" rel="nofollow">http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/02/09/dashboard-design-for-met...</a>

Panic's blog is just so beautifully designed. Scroll down to the comment form.

I like the idea of having a big number to represent your "score."<p>Once I was on a team using Flyspray and one of our developers hacked it to display a real-time score. He had some convoluted algorithm that took into account percent completed, criticals, and priority. Everybody started working the number, trying to get it higher. It was great and become quite competitive. We'd even talk about our score with marketing and clients. The only problem followed a beta test when the client opened a ton of fixes. The number sank like stone. Not a big problem though. The developer tweaked his algorithm and bingo. . . our score was soon back where it belonged.

Last.fm has (or had) something similar and quite sexy as well: <a href="http://blog.last.fm/2008/08/01/quality-control" rel="nofollow">http://blog.last.fm/2008/08/01/quality-control</a>

Nice attention to detail: note how the censored text is pixelated _in perspective_ ;)

That is a $2500 monitor. If you were wondering.

We made an internal one early January, 2010.<p>Here's a mockup of it:<p><a href="http://www.massiveblue.com/clients/carbonmade/pulse/" rel="nofollow">http://www.massiveblue.com/clients/carbonmade/pulse/</a><p>Note: The figures are bogus.

The guys at Robocat (developed Outside for the iPhone) have a similar tool for tracking sales. They developed an internal only iPhone app that you shake to update the total sales of Outside - clever play on Shake your money maker.<p>I'm always interested to get glimpses into these internal status pages / apps,

In a similar vein but meant to be public: <a href="http://culturedcode.com/status/" rel="nofollow">http://culturedcode.com/status/</a>

Eston Bond did something similar with the dashboard for this home automation system called Sarai: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/eston/3805310805/" rel="nofollow">http://www.flickr.com/photos/eston/3805310805/</a><p>Very nice all in one interface with time, appointments, news, and weather. I really like this idea...

The Open Source Lab has been working on the 2nd revision of our dashboard software that we use within our network operations center, and outside our server room.<p><a href="http://trac.osuosl.org/touchscreen" rel="nofollow">http://trac.osuosl.org/touchscreen</a>

The bigco I work for has three monitors showing primary sales and login numbers in real time. In the scale of thousands of employees, the simple metrics serve to keep a basic level of group connectivity to the top-level objectives.

This is really interesting. I'm about 1 month into my public beta now and I find myself constantly remoting into my servers and manually checking if everything still works. Already it's a notable drain on my productivity.

I love everything about this. The bus times, the little icons of every employee but especially the ticker of twitter updates about Panic. Definitely inspiring for the developers.