I took a one year contract at a medium sized utility undergoing a restructure, to project managing some billing projects.
Due to turf wars, and reasons I don't fully understand, I was sat in a operations team who did billing data entry, customer queries, mass billing problem solving and and small scale system projects and data transitions. The team themselves were quite skilled at their jobs, was the IT department nearby, but their supervisor, let's call her The Luddite, was not.
For some reason, on top of my main project I was given a daily operational task. I thought, the only reason I would be given this task would be to improve the process. It was a boring manual upload of various XML billing files to the printer, checking samples, authorising printing, and various manual audit checks and data-entered reports to line managers make sure all was within SLAs. This took between two and four hours *per day* depending on problems. After a few days, I started feeling like that guy in Office Space. I started making mistakes as my brain shit down.
Using VBA/Excel (the only scripting tool I had access to) over the next few weeks, I spent about 50 hours coding to to automate populating check totals and reports, and sending them out using Outlook scripts. Pretty mild stuff. No procedures were changed, just automated to make them quicker. All the check totals were available to check visually in the same files in the same way, which I continued to check visually as a backup. The process was down to less than half an hour per day, with little scope for error. I tested it extensively and was confident it was robust, The code was clear and well annotated for anyone in IT to look over to maintain if required. So the payback for time saved over time spent was average say 2 hours/day saved vs 50 hours spent = 25 days, zero other cost. Not bad for a daily process that would go for the forseeable future. Not bad (I thought).
Enter The Luddite.
Summary of conversation: Me: [Expecting thanks for automating mind-numbing process] Luddite: "Who authorised you to do this?" Me: "No-one. I haven't changed any procedures, checks, or manual controls, I automated data entry and report generation with free tools." [me thinking: why not ask who 'authorised me' to use a keyboard shortcut as opposed to the mouse to cut and paste data?]. Luddite: "We've had situations in the past where people have automated things and screwed things up. We don't want to do it" Me: please refer to my comment above.
Not satisfied, I gave her a one hour training session on how I had automated it and what to do, she took it over personally to make sure it wasn't causing any errors while I was on leave.
The irony is, I didn't actually report to this idiot, she hadn't read my employment contract (despite asking her to when she gave it to me - she assured me it was 'standard').
So insecure was she about me automating processes, one time, after I went upstairs to ask IT guys about an issue (I was having some problem using the the XML objects in VBA), she would go upstairs to ask them what I'd asked them, come back down, having misunderstood the problem I was trying to solve, berate me for not knowing it already, while I politely tried to explain that I do what she was berating me for not knowing every day, I was trying to do it smarter with scripting.
After six months of this, I went ballistic, and I told everyone from HR to a new appointed senior manager in charge of the division how she was retarding efficiency and forcing her staff to needlessly do mind-numbing manual processes needlessly. They all agreed with me, I was transferred to a dedicated business analyst team with a new manager, which was great. However, I still had to talk The Luddite as I was still on the same billing projects. The first time I tried to ask one of her staff a question in my new role, The Luddite complained to a senior manager and threatened to 'escalate' if I didn't 'apologise'. She got promoted. I left soon after.
Still scratching my head struggling to find a moral to this story. Looking back, my only regret is I stuck it out for eight months rather than quitting after two days.
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A recent personal experience with automation.
I took a one year contract at a medium sized utility undergoing a restructure, to project managing some billing projects.
Due to turf wars, and reasons I don't fully understand, I was sat in a operations team who did billing data entry, customer queries, mass billing problem solving and and small scale system projects and data transitions. The team themselves were quite skilled at their jobs, was the IT department nearby, but their supervisor, let's call her The Luddite, was not.
For some reason, on top of my main project I was given a daily operational task. I thought, the only reason I would be given this task would be to improve the process. It was a boring manual upload of various XML billing files to the printer, checking samples, authorising printing, and various manual audit checks and data-entered reports to line managers make sure all was within SLAs. This took between two and four hours *per day* depending on problems. After a few days, I started feeling like that guy in Office Space. I started making mistakes as my brain shit down.
Using VBA/Excel (the only scripting tool I had access to) over the next few weeks, I spent about 50 hours coding to to automate populating check totals and reports, and sending them out using Outlook scripts. Pretty mild stuff. No procedures were changed, just automated to make them quicker. All the check totals were available to check visually in the same files in the same way, which I continued to check visually as a backup. The process was down to less than half an hour per day, with little scope for error. I tested it extensively and was confident it was robust, The code was clear and well annotated for anyone in IT to look over to maintain if required. So the payback for time saved over time spent was average say 2 hours/day saved vs 50 hours spent = 25 days, zero other cost. Not bad for a daily process that would go for the forseeable future. Not bad (I thought).
Enter The Luddite.
Summary of conversation:
Me: [Expecting thanks for automating mind-numbing process]
Luddite: "Who authorised you to do this?"
Me: "No-one. I haven't changed any procedures, checks, or manual controls, I automated data entry and report generation with free tools."
[me thinking: why not ask who 'authorised me' to use a keyboard shortcut as opposed to the mouse to cut and paste data?].
Luddite: "We've had situations in the past where people have automated things and screwed things up. We don't want to do it"
Me: please refer to my comment above.
Not satisfied, I gave her a one hour training session on how I had automated it and what to do, she took it over personally to make sure it wasn't causing any errors while I was on leave.
The irony is, I didn't actually report to this idiot, she hadn't read my employment contract (despite asking her to when she gave it to me - she assured me it was 'standard').
So insecure was she about me automating processes, one time, after I went upstairs to ask IT guys about an issue (I was having some problem using the the XML objects in VBA), she would go upstairs to ask them what I'd asked them, come back down, having misunderstood the problem I was trying to solve, berate me for not knowing it already, while I politely tried to explain that I do what she was berating me for not knowing every day, I was trying to do it smarter with scripting.
After six months of this, I went ballistic, and I told everyone from HR to a new appointed senior manager in charge of the division how she was retarding efficiency and forcing her staff to needlessly do mind-numbing manual processes needlessly. They all agreed with me, I was transferred to a dedicated business analyst team with a new manager, which was great. However, I still had to talk The Luddite as I was still on the same billing projects. The first time I tried to ask one of her staff a question in my new role, The Luddite complained to a senior manager and threatened to 'escalate' if I didn't 'apologise'. She got promoted. I left soon after.
Still scratching my head struggling to find a moral to this story. Looking back, my only regret is I stuck it out for eight months rather than quitting after two days.