Whiteboards, metrics and lessons learned from the Telegraph

I was recently invited to have a tour around the Telegraph's much vaunted Hub Office in London.

Very impressive it is too - not least for the hundreds (literally) of journalists that dwell in the space that used to be a trading floor.

The chap who took us round was also pleased to show the four massive projectors beaming various images onto a large white wall on one side of the space.

The images consisted of the telegraph.co.uk home page, a twitter feed (via monitter.com), some Reuters stuff and a tiny little section for the top stories of the day.

The lack of emphasis on that last element surprised me somewhat. I mean what's more important to your operation? Checking that the story you published 10 minutes ago is, yep, still published, or that large numbers of visitors are searching for news on a breaking subject?

At the risk of banging our own drum a bit our own metrics screen puts that to shame slightly.

Our digital whiteboard displays live traffic metrics and the team use this information to aid decision making when reacting to real-time events and user behaviour. If the whiteboard shows our users are searching, viewing or consuming a specific topic then we will focus our efforts to cater for that information need in greater detail.

And to borrow from Steve Trimble, it's also a bit of Distance Early Warning for any live issues. E.g. if an area of the site goes down it's very obvious from the flatline that appears on the screen.

On a personal note I'm pleased to say that the board has been beaming down record figures for much of March and we look to be on course to achieve a record-breaking six million pages viewed for this month. That's a big number in anyone's books, although to be fair the telegraph.co.uk do about fours times that (but with how many staff ... ?).

Metric Man out.