Gail is another co-worker in your office. You've known Gail for a few years and you know that Gail is a very talented person. From time to time she is shared out with other offices in the company to support them on projects. It's a nice day and you and Gail take your lunches out into the park-like area just down the street from the office. There you and she discuss the data problem…
Gail: I've been thinking about this and I still haven't come up with any approach that we haven't already discussed as a group.
Gail pauses for a few moments.
But I did hear you and Wally talking the other day about using Excel as a way of storing the information and I did want to bring up an experience I had before with Excel and working with a group.
You: Ok. Was this a good experience or a bad experience?
Gail: Well, I'll let you judge that. About a year ago I don't know if you remember but I went down to the 2nd floor and was working with May's group helping them out with getting all of that information together for that thing they were dealing with. They were a little short handed and since I've worked in that type of office before Molly sent be down to help.
Well, we weren’t just working with names, phone numbers, etc. on customers. We were working with all types of budget and statistical information. But we had to keep all of this information in some type of system where we could all get access to the information we needed from our desks. Some of the work was done just by one person but some of the work we all pitched in and gathered and put into the system.
The system that we used was Excel. The IT group had setup an area where we all had access to this one shared directory. Since we were working together as a team we laid out some ground rules when it came to these files:
- the master copy of the files was to be kept on the shared directory.
- on the "front page" of each of the Excel files we listed who was responsible for the information in that file, that way we would know who to ask if the numbers seemed different than what we expected
- the information was cross-linked so verify your source link before you cross-connect the data sets
- Johnny is the expert in Excel and if you have any question ask before you do it
A simple set of rules and we figured that everything else would be fine. We were worried that the information we were getting from the "outside" sources
Gail lowers her voice
you know what I mean.
wasn't right and that was part of why we were all gathered together to do this review. Anyway, within a few weeks we noticed all types of issues that were coming up.
Gail pauses to take a drink
We were told that the IT group would handle the backups so we didn't have to worry. Well… one of the problems we had was one Monday morning I go in to open up a file that I had been working on just before I had left late on Friday and the file wasn't there. I know that I had saved the file when I made my changes. And it's not like the file just hadn't been updated it wasn't even in the place where I had put it. Actually that sub-folder did have a couple of files there and they were all missing. The sub-folder was there but it was empty.
So, I went over to Johnny since he knows a lot about IT and was the main "ok what happened here" guy whenever something happened that involved the computers in that office. He said that he didn't know what could have caused the files to go missing but that he would get the IT people to just restore the files. He said that the IT people were backing up the files every night so I should be able to just keep working right where I left off from when I walked out of the office Friday.
deep breath
Well, it wasn't so easy. It seemed that the files were deleted and no one seemed to know how before the Friday night backups. So when the backup happened it just backed-up what was there. And since the files weren't there there was no backup. I don't understand why they didn't keep a copy of the files from the previous week but apparently the way they were doing the backups every night they only keep three nights worth of backups. So, they had the files from Sunday, Saturday, and Friday in their backups. Now, why they were doing backups on Saturday or Sunday when no one was working weekends I have no idea. But the bottom line is that we had to recreate all of the information that had been in those files because we couldn't get a backed-up up copy.
You: You are right, you never know what goes on in those IT people's heads when they do their stuff.
Gail: Well, that wasn't the only problem we had. Actually once we knew that was the way they were doing backups we had people start making copies of the files every Friday night just to make sure they would be there Monday when they came back in. I know that's what I started doing. But we also had problems where people started to see some strange results when we started to produce some reports. When we started to track down the problems we started having issues where people couldn't explain what happened where data was changed. For example Lonnie kept having a problem where the data seemed to be changing once entered. I think that it was Simpson who kept messing with the data. I noticed that he seemed to be working late just before each time the data seemed to be changed. We never proved it but that's my opinion. And Johnny said there was no way to know who changed what in the files. Even if the IT people could say that he was in there the system didn't track what happened while he had the file open. He could have just been reviewing the information or making cross-links to work he was doing.
You: Ok. Is that all of the problems you faced?
Gail: Well, these were the main ones. I mean it was a last minute, drop everything to get done project and we really didn't have the time to learn a new software package or even get something specially built just to let us do this work. So the impact on the rest of the support services was minimal, from my point of view.
You: Would you recommend we use Excel for our information? I mean we are just tracking names, phone numbers, etc. It's not like we are collecting and processing budget data or anything.
Gail: Well… I know we aren't working with the same critically important information but the information is important to use when we need to find out who would be the best people or what options we would have if, for example, we wanted to hire a model to stand next to a horse for that ad shot we did last week. Without some type of system to not only track who we've worked with but what type of rate or even relationship we have with them is key to our getting our work done in a timely manner. I think Molly is right in that we do need something to help us out. I mean, I can't believe we even tried to get that photographer who did the stills of the racing cars for us. I mean, you can't convince me that every shot can be taken with his one single camera and single lens. I can buy a better camera at Best Buy for goodness sakes.
After calming Gail down you try and get an answer to the "is this an approach you should recommend" question.
Gail: In my opinion yes, it can work, but only with everyone working together on this with strictly enforced guidelines. I still think one of the problems with missing data is from time to time people would make copies of the files to their local systems and then copy those back to the shared directory. Well, when someone else was working on the file after you made your copy but before you your new one back up there then those changes would be gone, overwritten when you did your copy back up.
Now you can go ahead and look at a summary of lessons learned from your Gail interview.
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