Some ramblings about how wasteful some software can be if used ineffectively.
I had started the job as a new site director and after a few days was presented with a mountain of documents to sign. One of the documents was a 20 page list of employees together with the overtime that they had clocked up in the last month. I asked why it was my job to approve the overtime as it had all taken place in the past. I was told that it was always the site directors job to approve this for payroll. I planned to change the process, hopefully to take myself myself out of the approval process.
As part of the discovery, I did an audit trail of the process. The team leader for each section of the shop floor tallied up the overtime of their people and that was all collated into one big spreadsheet. The spreadsheet was printed out and signed by the production manager. Then it was passed over to the HR department and one person had the job of reentering all the data, line by line into Microsoft Access, a three hour job every month. I asked why didn’t they just import the data into Access. The answer was they didn’t know how to. Perhaps more importantly why are we entering data twice in two separate systems. Why didn’t they just enter the data into Access in the first place?
Because there was only one Access licence, but everyone else had Excel, so they used Excel.
Excel is one of the most overused pieces of software in business today. What was originally designed for simple book bookkeeping tasks has developed into solutions that can do more or less anything you want. Excel’s power is also its weakness.
But it’s not just Excel. Employees are given a huge number of tools to work with, just on communication alone employees may have Email, Phone, Teams, Teams chat, Teams call, Zoom, Slack, WhatsApp, Workplace, Workplace chat and whatever else is the popular local Instant Messaging tool.
How can people efficiently communicate within an organization to get things done if they have a dozen different ways of communicating with people?
Research has shown that the average knowledge worker toggles between apps 1,200 times over the course of the day. That’s four hours a week, 10% of their time, spent hitting Alt-Tab or making a few clicks of the mouse. Large companies now deploy 187 apps on average, what’s worse, nearly one-third of them are redundant or add little value.
Using the example of excel again, I see so often, that program and project management teams in large organizations are forced to use tools like Excel because the organization will not invest in the right tools to do the job. Some of the project management collaboration software available nowadays is excellent. Time and time again, we see project managers that use project management software to create dashboards and GANTT chants and it looks great. But they revert to e-mail to communicate with team members rather than using the collaboration side of the software that is designed to save time and work in real time. Then, we see cases of businesses that start to use project management software but then stop using it because they say it didn’t work. Of course, it works. If it didn’t work no one would buy it and it would not get rave reviews. The problem is the people will not invest the time in training to learn how to use the tools effectively and put that learning into practice.
https://www.straitstimes.com/business/invest/when-productivity-is-hit-by-too-many-apps
