August 14, 1992
Dear Everyone:
This week has been very q-u-i-e-t (never say the
word out loud or the gremlins will hear you and make all the phones ring
at once), partly because several people are off on vacation and the
manager has disappeared on us, and partly in comparison to last week's
"Drop-Everything-and-Take-Care-of-This" Crisis du Jour.
Last week's crisis dealt with the Corporate Staff
Study (Records Management is part of Administration and Services, which
is part of “Domination”, which is part of Corporate Staff).
The Study is to determine which
jobs to keep and which to axe. That's
pretty much it, in a nutshell.
There is an outside consulting firm which is going
to produce a Survey next Monday to help determine what's essential,
what's necessary and what's luxury. These
are the same people who recommended to Company USA that they cut 8500
jobs, which they are in the process of doing right now.
This does not bode well for those
of us who might fall into the "luxury" category.
Last week's Crisis pertain to this Survey.
We found out Tuesday afternoon
that we had until 9:00 AM Friday (which really meant by Thursday night)
to come up with: How much money
we spent in 1991; what we spend it on; and who we would charge it back
to if we charged-back, which we don't do now, but which we undoubtedly
will do in the future, if we still exist after The Study.
Part 1 was easy. How
much did we spend in 1991? $1,200,000.
That was a given. “Crow”, our
manager, gave it to us. That's
not to say that he gave us the money; he gave us the figure.
It's part of a manager’s job to
know how much money he's already spent.
Part 2 was a little more difficult.
“Crow” and the other
manager-types on the Study Sub-Team for Admin & Services (this is where
he's disappeared to) had already come up with what they thought would be
the major breakdowns, like Retention Schedule Development, Active Files
Consultation and the like. It was
our job to refine the terminology and come up with percentages.
For instance, what percent of the total cost of all
the people in Records Management (including salaries, rent, benefits,
travel, etc.) was spent on developing Retention Schedules?
What percent went towards our
computer systems, including the time I spend keeping them going?
This wasn't so easy, although I had an edge over
most of my co-workers. I saw the
handwriting on the wall a couple of years ago and started keeping a
daily job log. Nothing fancy,
just a graph with broad categories across the top, like Destruction,
Schedules, Computer, and the times, in 15-minute increments, down the
side. Mostly for my own
information and for those times when a manager suddenly asks, "just how
many hours per week are we spending on (fill-in-the-blank)?"
Once we had the terminology and percentages, then
we had to do Part 3: How much of
the $1.2 million would have been charged back to whom?
In other words:
How much of the total time you
spent working on Retention Schedules last year was spent on any one
particular customer?
(Hey, no problem! I
have those figures right here in my purse.
Look at it this way:
How much time did you spend in
1991, washing your hair?)
We started working on Part 3 Thursday morning at
10:00. (Actually, that's when we
got together for the meeting. I'd
been working on compiling figures since the day before.)
We ordered pizza in for lunch.
And we kept churning out
mostly-imaginary numbers until about 7:00.
Needless to say, this bumped all other projects
onto the back burners. I finally
got back together with my little Destruction Process Improvement Team
yesterday. Last week's scheduled
meeting was called on account of Crisis.
On the plus side, this gave our customers another
week to complete and send back the surveys that we had sent out just
before I went on vacation. Out of
86 sent out, at least 51 have come back.
That's a response rate of 59+%. Since
the other Records Management Team (the one working on improving Active
Files Consultation) claimed that their response rate (43.5%) was "very
high", I guess ours can be considered "very,
very high".
Which just goes to show the value
of plugging little "Ziggy"
cartoons into your survey.
Not that we expect to see any cute cartoons in the
Study Survey, which will come out next Monday.
Since responding is mandatory,
they expect the rate to be 100%. When
the CEO tells you to fill out a Survey, you do it.
Movie review: “Jeannie”
and I went last week to see
Whispers
in the Dark. A so-so
murder mystery with a psychiatrist who
doesn't have an affair with
her patient. Instead, she begins
to suspect that she's having an affair with her patient's boyfriend.
Then, she begins to suspect that
she's having an affair with her patient's murderer.
It's all rather slow and dull (at
one point, “Jeannie” leaned over and asked when’s our next haircut
appointment) until the last 10 minutes, at which point the movie
proceeds to bring new depth and meaning to the word
ludicrous. People were
rolling in the aisles, they were laughing so hard.
Except for that, it's not with
the price of the popcorn. Save
your money.
Love, as always,
Pete
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