Like that time that someone reformatted a spreadsheet that transformed  a week-long team task into a short project for one person.

So what happened?

Once a year, a pile of documents had to be distributed to a list of different people, but different people needed different parts of the documents, and in different formats. 

The administrator had established a whole system. Chapters were printed out and stacked on the floor. Coworkers were enlisted and given printouts and clipboards and very specific instructions. The boardroom turned into a distribution centre. The whole thing took up a great deal of space, and a great many person-hours, and more than a little interpersonal frustration.

The person coordinating it was very good at most parts of her job (primarily administering the database, the task she had been hired for) and her long experience meant she was largely left to her own devices. But her Microsoft Office training had been many years before, and although there are established best practices for tasks like this, she didn’t know them. And nobody was supervising her who knew anything about admin either. So it makes sense how the situation transpired, and it worked  well enough so nobody thought to question it.

But then one year she had to take medical leave just before the big distribution project. The task of dividing and sorting and distributing the chapters fell to the rest of us, which is when I found out what she had been doing. 

I knew that Excel could help with operational functions like this. So I put the list of recipients across the top, the list of chapters down the left, and an X in every cell where a chapter needed to go. Then it was a simple matter to sort the list by recipient and, one by one, print off only the chapters that they needed. 

This is not the first nor the last time I have used a spreadsheet to untangle operational problems ranging from the cringey to the truly thorny. Stay tuned for more items in the series.