UserPageMacLeod

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I am Connor MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod, and I am immortal.

I'm also a Principal Engineer at a medium-sized medical device manufacturer, and my general field is Mechanical Engineering. I've been administering, using, and promoting our company's internal Tiki since January 2024, but I'm just a power user, not an IT professional or software engineer.

Most of our project teams are currently using the TeamRoom database template that ships with Lotus Notes to manage their projects. This was the first real collaborative platform that was made available in our company, and I pioneered its application in our division in 2024. We began testing Tiki in 2024 as a knowledge-sharing platform that would cross all divisional boundaries in the corporation, and hopefully be more user-friendly than Lotus Notes (which many users absolutely hate).

While Tiki is catching on as slowly as the TeamRooms initially did, it has primarily been for more general topics that don't fit into any particular project. We've identified a number of reasons that our project managers have stuck with Notes, and I'm here to share that information from an end-user perspective.

Here's a list of other environmental characteristics to establish the context of my commentary.

• Global company, headquartered in the U.S., with R&D, manufacturing, sales, & marketing operations both in the U.S. and outside.
• Subject to strict government regulations in every market by the likes of FDA, Santé Canada, and so on.
• Primarily Microsoft infrastructure, including Office. (Resistance is futile.)
• Unified on Lotus Notes as our messaging & calendar system.
• Project schedules done as GANTT charts or PERT charts in MS Project.
• Homegrown documentation control system provides intranet access to all released procedures, engineering drawings, risk analyses, etc.
• Tiki was initiated and is still maintained as an external service, with only tangential involvement of internal IT.
• User base is still getting used to TeamRooms, after five years of exposure.
• Responses to Tiki range from small pockets of enthusiasm to small pockets of hostility, with wide swaths of apathy and/or confusion.

- MacLeod

There can be only one.


P.S. Désolé, mon français est trés mal.

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