You've worked with Wally Franks for a few years. He's an all-around good guy. You feel that Wally is about as familiar with computers as the rest of the office staff. You know that Wally has worked in a number of other offices in the company and in other companies over the years. So, one day the two of you are sitting over by his desk and you start your interview.
Wally: Now that I've been thinking about this I remember going through all of this one other time.
You: Yea? I don't remember us (waving your hand around the office area) ever doing this before.
Wally: Oh, well, I remember back when I was working at Duncan Cow's (it was an advertising agency) and we wanted to keep track of people who would come in and help us out with photo shoots, props, lights, costumes, etc. We all sat around the table and tried to come up with a way to keep all of the information on these people in some type of order. This all came about because Shelly was the main person who used to contact all of these people. Whenever anyone wanted to get something done they would just yell out "hey Shelly!" and bam! she would be able to rattle off the information about who would be the right person to call for that type of light, or to get that type of model in for that look.
Well, then one day Shelly just didn't come into work anymore. We found out later that she had gotten a better offer from another company and just took it. I know they offered her a lot more money and all.
Wally gets a far off look for a minute.
Anyway, we had the contact information for just about everyone we had used for years in invoices and through correspondence so we had the information but it wasn't in quote real accessible end quote (Wally makes the quote symbols with his hands).
You: Yea? Great. So what did you all come up with?
Wally: Well, what we ended up with is a new Shelly.
You give Wally a quizzical look.
What I mean is that Neville Frank ended up getting all of the data together and he ended up passing the information out to the rest of the people who needed it. I don't mean that as if he was hording it or anything, it's just that he collected all of it and he kept the information up to date. If anyone found a new contact or ended up with new information for an existing contact then they would tell Neville.
You: Ok. So, how did he store the information and how did he give it to you all?
Wally: I'm getting to that, I'm getting to that.
You see, Neville liked to use the program Microsoft Excel. I think that might have been because he used to do so much budget work, from time to time helping out the front office and all. So, what he did was he setup a file for each of the main jobs that people would do for us. Like he had one file that listed all of the people who could come in with trained animals for photo and video shoots. And another file for the people who did graphics design work for us. The way he setup the information in each of the files is, well, you know that in Excel you have a way of putting information in tabs. Well, he made a separate tab for each company or person. He didn't really do anything special with the cells or formatting the information using any special formulas and such.
You: Ok. So what did you do when Neville wasn't there? Did you go to his computer and look the information up? What if he was on the phone and you couldn't access his computer?
Wally: Well, he did the collection of the information but if you yelled over and asked Neville what the phone number for someone or what rate we used when working with this other person it is more than likely that he'd yell back "look it up yourself!"
You see, Neville would put the files out on a directory that all of us had access to. So if anyone wanted to go look up anything they would click on an icon that the Information Technology (IT) group put on our desktop and it would bring up a list of all of the files that Neville kept for us.
Now, some people would copy the files to their PC's so they could have their own copy. I know at least one person who did that. It seemed that Ron always ended up going in and keeping all of the key files open on his PC. So whenever Neville or any of the rest of the people wanted to go in and do anything with the files they would get an error saying that the file was locked. After a few weeks of this everyone started getting on to Ron about this. So Ron started to making copies of the files on his machine and then everyone else was happy.
You: Huh. Ok. I guess I can understand why people might be upset.
Wally: Well, also Ron started going in and formatting the information so that way he could print it out. I'm not 100% sure just why Ron wanted printed copies. I never saw him actually use his printed copies, but I know he spent a good bit of time formatting the information just so it would look a certain way.
You: Great. So that worked for you all there? What do you think about us doing that here? Don't we have the same type of collection of data?
Wally: Well, you see. In some ways it worked for most of the people. Some of the people in the office never really got the hang of looking up the information. They would either keep some hand written notes on places they often contacted or they would ask someone else if they could find out what they were looking for. It's not that they couldn't understand Excel. It's just that for them it was more of a problem than a helper. But I think you'll always have that. One of the things that we had there and I'm not sure if anyone here would want to be the Neville for us here to collect and enter all of the information in Excel. I think it might work but we should talk to everyone else. For some reason I think that some of these people want something other than just using Excel to store the info on our customers.
Wally shrugs
You: Thanks Wally. I'll keep looking to see what other options are out there.
You get up to walk away
Wally: Also, remember that the IT people will need to make sure that there are backups to those files. It's easy for someone to get into the files looking for information and they end up reformatting or mixing all of the information when all they wanted to do was a sort. We lost about a weeks worth of information once. Neville was so mad when that happened.
Wally turns back to his computer.
Now you can go ahead and look at a summary of lessons learned from your Wally interview.
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