Formula for Hilarity!

So one of the things I get to do today is figure out what the FY03 capital budgets is for one of the local business units that encompasses several locations besides this one. I used to do this annually (duh) back when that was my job, but I’ve been out of the loop on it for at least one full business cycle, during which many of the players have changed. Since the guy who was in charge of it — and had, ostensibly, begun the job already — resigned last week, that leaves me in charge of …

(a) Figuring out where he had the files stashed on this. On his network home drive? On one of the network IT drives (full of twisting-turning file directories, all looking alike)? On his PC?

Bingo — but not just on his PC but in a briefcase replicated from elsewhere on his PC through some oddball combination of Novell and Windows utilities.

(b) Figure out how he was storing the data. I always used some godawful complex set of spreadsheets so that the Powers that Be could group, regroup, break out, and resort the data long about six different axes. This took a lot of work to set up, but save even more work when, inevitably, the Powers that Be asked for planned purchases sorted by the third vowel of the manufacturer’s president’s name (“if it were dark on Tuesdays!”).

Alas, no such luck. Instead, my successor was putting it all into an Access database, which actually makes a tremendous amount of sense (since it could then be queried on anything), but, alas, the job was incomplete and there was no key as to which tables, queries and reports did what.

So, export the main table to a spreadsheet. Bleah.

(c) Figure out which offices have not yet provided their info. Uh, well, maybe most of them have, but now I have to figure out if the info from the e-mail attachments matches what’s in the database. Dun the non-reporting offices to provide whatever is missing.

(d) Provide a detailed report to the business unit management. By COB. Be prepared to answer questions.

Keen!