Your talk of terrible spreadsheets reminds me of how I've recently had to train a new manager on our Purchase Order system. New manager is very keen on "if we just standardize and streamline the process we can have the requestors do most of the purchasing process themselves and save a ton of processing time on our end" and that is not a bad impulse BUT!! as we try and find these process simplifications he is searching for it has been eye-opening for me to realize that the current process only moves as quickly as it does because I am intimately familiar with the horde of weird quirks and bugs in this software, and I just understand what the requestors want and then navigate the terrible system myself. If we try and create a standard process and force the requestors to take on more of the process themselves the end result is going to be chaos and unhappy requestors as they struggle with a complicated system in order to accomplish a simple task.
our payroll system has multiple steps in the payroll process where
- a box is checked by default
- if you leave the box checked, Everything Is Ruined
i feel bad for whoever replaces me because i have replaced half the payroll process with an elaborate system of daisychained spreadsheets allowing me to bypass our terrible software for as long as possible
i tried to get some of the other departments (ESPECIALLY one department in particular with the most byzantine payroll rules imaginable oh my god) to use a simple payroll spreadsheet that would autocalc everyone's hours. i even included a PDF i made with careful instructions, troubleshooting steps if things weren't working, weird exceptions the spreadsheet couldn't account for, etc. this would have saved everyone involved a RIDICULOUS amount of time compared to manually figuring out their hours, getting it wrong, and then having them corrected in pen by three different people (our auditor hates this and she is correct).
but the department head kept replacing my formulas with flat numbers and also kept using her other timesheet system alongside my spreadsheet. which meant instead of saving me time i had to go through the spreadsheet and make sure it matched the other timesheets they gave me and then call every time something didn't match to figure out what the fuck they did.
i'm also supposed to keep paper copies of everyone's leave accrual records and my predecessor did that by filling out printed out spreadsheets with a pencil and calculator. for every employee. in the entire organization.
in order to not do that i had to build a horrible spreadsheet with a function that does nothing but turn every sheet white (so it doesn't print) except for the last row, so that the final row gets tacked on to what i've already printed when i run all the sheets through the printer
it saves me hours and hours but also is The Dumbest Shit Imaginable and i think if anyone else had to use it they would be fucked the first time it broke
