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Friday, June 27, 2014

Entrenchment

Irba reports on Information Technology, or the lack of ability to change the way things are done at his workplace:
I got a request for some programming help, to automate a calculation for a report that management requires on a weekly basis.
Apparently, a manager has been opening a series of emails daily, each containing a pdf report that had 4 pertinent fields, these were re-typed into a spreadsheet.
At first I wondered if these were selected reports. No, they said, this was a complete batch of reports on set of files within a single directory tree.
I suggested that they go back to the source originating the reports and ask for a summary report. They said no we cannot do that.
I then asked if this was a confirmation audit report on what was actually processed, and if so, should they not be getting the numbers from a post-processing count of produced pieces. They said no we cannot do that.
So I wrote a program that counts up the files and contents, and puts it into a csv file, which they can open and copy into the spreadsheet,
I basically duplicated the counts from the original reports, using the original data and the same method of counting.
It is saving 1.5 hours a day.
A manager was spending an hour and a half copying data by hand every day? Where are your minions when you need them?

2 comments:

  1. We transmit a dataset to World HQ every week. In addition, we print out hard copy of a subset thereof, which they request for "verification." The fact that it's from exactly the same dataset, and therefore will always match, doesn't yet seem to have occurred to them.

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  2. [Big Corp.] accountancy department has hundreds of spreadsheets, no version management, no audit trail for them, no test suites, no log trails. I sometimes wonder who manages these guys :-(

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