March 3, 2005
Dear Everyone:
Last year there was a project in the document management system to migrate several hundred thousand electronic drawings (floor plans, electrical schematics, that sort of drawing) from an earlier electronic filing system to the new one. My actual involvement in this particular project was to develop customized training for draftsmen, mechanical engineers, plumbers and the like. Most of these people would never do anything with the drawings other than to reference them as part of their work. They would not be “power users”, they would be “consumers” who only looked at the drawings.
There was a particular problem with the drawings that pertained to the “Martinez” facility. “Martinez” is a refinery. It also houses a technical center and laboratories. It is very specialized. So, naturally, its drawings are very specialized.
While all the other facilities file their drawings by the building, or by the project, “Martinez” files them by the year the drawing was first produced. “Martinez” goes back a lot of years. So if the maintenance crew needs to see the single-line electrical drawing for the second floor of building 10, they can’t just go to “building 10, second floor” to find it. They either have to know what year building 10 was originally built or find an index somewhere. And hope the index is up to date.
So, during the migration project last year, the project manager brought a group of people together for a “workshop”. The purpose of the workshop was to build a series of complex searches and then “save” them in a location where everyone would know to look for them.
That way, the maintenance crew could just look for a folder called “Building 10”. Inside that folder, they would find the search for “electrical”. All they would have to do is click on the saved search and the system would run the search and bring back all the drawings the crew might need.
Nifty idea, huh? In fact, they created over 700 of these searches.
And they worked, for a while. Then, suddenly, the searches all started coming back “No items found”. And yet, if you went into the system and built the complex search from scratch, it found numerous drawings. Clearly, something was wrong.
It took a while, but somebody finally realized what had happened. Back when the project manager and his workshop were building all those searches, the drawings were in a set of folders all stored under a folder called “AEC”. AEC stands for “Actual, Enjoyable and Constipated”.
But there’s another group called DEC (“Deliberate, Elongated and Conspiratorial"). Evidently, there’s a bit of “sibling rivalry” between the two groups. To forestall any complaints from one group having to use a folder named after the other group, a company manager ordered the folder renamed to “Facility Drawings”.
And that’s what broke the saved searches. They were dutifully going off looking for drawings under “AEC” and, of course, there weren’t any drawings there because that folder name no longer existed.
Oops.
Lately, I’ve been investigating what it might take to “fix” the “broken searches”. It is possible. You can drill down to one of these searches and check it out of the system to edit it. Change “AEC” to “Facility Drawings”. Save it and check it back in. Only trouble is, it takes about a minute to do one search. There are 700 of them.
If a person worked on that, and that only, they could probably finish in about a day and a half (at $95-$120/hour). If they didn’t go crazy first. There had to be a better (faster) way.
I knew I could export the searches from the system. I might be able to use Microsoft Word to do a “find and replace”, something MS Word does quite well. But then, how would I get the “fixed” searches back into the system?
You can import plenty of things, but not a search. There’s no way to tell the system, “This isn’t a document, it’s a search.” So I checked with the lead programmer to ask if there was another way to get the fixed searches back into the system, maybe a “bulk upload”? This is something they use when they have hundreds of documents to migrate into the system.
He checked into it and reported back that yes, they could use bulk upload to get the repaired searches back into the system.
That left how to repair the searches as quickly as possible. I tried the “find and replace” feature, but a technicality rendered it useless. Then I tried just using the “find” feature to locate the infamous “AEC” phrase and manually replacing it with “Facility Drawings”. I exported the 15 searches from “Building 53” to a file on my PC. Then I set a timer to 5 minutes and started working on the searches. When the timer went off, I had finished 11 searches.
Then I decided to try creating something called a “macro”. What’s a macro? It’s simply a recording of various computer commands. Sort of like a very simple program, a series of instructions for the computer to follow.
You may have seen this word if you use computers a lot. When you open an Excel spreadsheet, you might see a warning about “Disable or enable macros”. This is because a lot of nasty computer viruses have been created using the macro feature.
However, a macro can be used for peaceful purposes as well. I started a new macro and named it “George” after the manager whose decision to change a simple folder name had had such a far-reaching effect. And I made the keystroke combination to run the macro Ctrl-G (for George, and because it was not in use by Word.) I already had the first search opened in Word. I used the “find” feature, hit “escape” to close the “find” box. Then I typed over “AEC” with “Facility Drawings”. Ctrl-S to save the changes. Enter to accept the warning that this is a text file. Ctrl-F4 to close the file, but not Word. Then stop the recording.
My macro was now ready to test. I set the timer to 5 minutes. I opened the first search. Ctrl-G. Alt-F, Alt-O (to open a new file). Double-click on the next search. Repeat. And repeat. By the time I had repaired all 11 of the test searches, the timer had not counted all the way past 3. In other words, 11 searches repaired in less than 2 minutes.
Now we’re cooking with oil.
At a meeting this morning, I got the “go ahead” to repair all of the searches. I can probably fix them all on a Saturday afternoon while watching deferred viewing from the previous week.
In other news…
Last Sunday was the
Academy Awards
and “Jeannie” came down to join me to watch.
The “pre-show” started at
And I got a lot of old junk mail and stuff cleaned out of the living room. While I was upstairs at one point, “Jeannie” sat down and began organizing her eBay screen prints. She has been printing out examples of jewelry that she now owns and plans to put them together in a binder.
As I was coming downstairs and saw piles of papers spread all over the living room floor, I couldn’t help thinking: “Situation normal.”
Love, as always,
Pete
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