Most of us are list makers. Shopping lists. To-do lists. Wish lists. Honey do’s.

Back in the 90’s I managed a team of network administrators and network engineers. They were good at what they did, but not so good at remembering what to do and in keeping me up to date on their progress. I did what any technically inclined CIO would do - I whipped out Excel and created a template for a status reporting tool. But this was no ordinary status report. It had six or seven columns and about 4,000 lines of VBA code I wrote over a few evenings. That VBA code created a floating “Status Report” menu, brought in some cool status icons (Done, Not Started Yet, Blocked, Won’t Do, On Track, Slipping, etc.) and linked in hidden worksheets containing departments, employees, network engineers, cost centers, etc. to feed combo boxes in the main status report sheet.

My network engineers found that using this tool wasn’t too burdensome and even kind of fun. It was a really easy, visual tool for quickly updating status. They would send their sheets to me at the end of each week and I had some tools to filter them quickly to look for tasks that were blocking or slipping. It really helped keep the team cranking and me in the know.

As useful as the tool was, there were problems with this approach to solving problems:

* Not everyone can write VBA code
* The solution was very specific
* Collating the sheets from the engineers was painful
* Adding new tasks was a manual chore

Excel alone didn’t solve my problem. It was the combination of Excel with VBA that worked for me because my background prepared me to code. The universe of people with problems is much bigger than the universe of people who can code.

We’re creating blist to solve this and many other kinds of problems in an easy, powerful, flexible and generalized way. When blist launches, anyone can easily recreate my status report tool without any coding, without having to create status icons, without having to link data from other sheets, without having to collate and reconcile changes.

The blist vision is a culmination of a dozen real pain points and real solutions for all kinds of real people. We’ll be telling more of these stories in the future.