For all of you who are expecting some sort of racist, bigoted, misanthropic, politically incorrect rant, I'm sorry to say I'm gonna disappoint you. Instead, I'm gonna talk about accounting. So this may bore you. But, if you work for a bureaucracy, you may find this interesting.
TCIDNN (The Company I Dare Not Name) has been given a clean bill of health. Our books are in order. And, I know one of the reasons is SHTS. For those of you who came in late, SHTS is our Stupid Hourly Tracking System. I discussed SHTS in more detail in my here.
Here's another bit of review. TCIDNN is made up of several organizations. I happen to work for MPOOTCIDNN (My Particular Organization Of TCIDNN). Also MPOOTCIDNN is made up of business units. So, to be more precise, I work for MBUOMPOOTCIDNN (My Business Unit Of MPOOTCIDNN). I am in tech support. I am a systems programmer, which means I install and maintain operating systems (by these, I mean operating systems that actually work, unlike the abominations Microsoft has inflicted upon us) that MBUOMPOOTCIDNN uses to provide services for customers. We have a good accounting system. You won't hear, 'I say Smedley, we seem to be missing $4 billion. You haven't seen it anywhere have you?' 'Geez boss, I looked under every desk. Can't find it anywhere.'
Tech support is overhead. We do not produce any revenue. We support people who do. And we have two types of customers we support:
Understanding all this is relatively easy if you just think of money as beans. The money that we get from external customers is made up of green beans. The money we get from internal customers is made up of white beans.
The way tech support used to work, was we were given a bunch of white beans from the main bean jar. This was our budget and we used it to fund all the hardware and software. Then, we tried to figger out how much each of our supporting segments used of our resources and they paid us in beans. If the segment supported external customers, we got green beans. If the segment supported internal customers, we got white beans. Naturally, green beans are better than white beans, 'cause green beans are real money. We put all of our beans back in the main bean jar. If we put more in than we took out, that was profit.
Remember, the budget is made up of white beans. When budgets are approved, everyone gets to go to the main bean jar and pull out the number of white beans corresponding to their budgets. Tech support was very efficient, and we never used all of our white beans (even though we could have). As a result, we saved white beans every year, and our second and third line managers probably got bonuses. Even so, they decided tech support was gonna cut costs and they came up with a real good way to do it.
Tech support wasn't gonna be able to get any white beans for hardware and software. This was now the responsibility of the segments (Our internal customers who actually provide services to our external customers. The segments actually make money.). And this is the sneaky part. They would not give the segments enough white beans to fund the required up to date hardware unless the segments pooled their white beans, but there was not a process for pooling white beans! Beautiful! There would be white beans left over. So, we would not be up to date, but we would save a lot of white beans.
Now, the next thing they would have to figger out is what is everybody doing. Remember, people have to get paid, so you have to have beans for that also. Once again, since tech support is overhead, everyone has to pay tech support in beans. That's where SHTS comes in. Everytime I do a job for someone, I have to code it in SHTS. SHTS keeps track of beans, and, depending on how I code my SHTS, determines how beans flow through the system. Now the segment managers can look at SHTS reports and see what parts of the segments they manage are using the most beans in tech support costs.
The entire system, therefore, depends upon accurate SHTS reporting. Ah, there's the rub. One of my jobs is to install the base system that eventually all of our users are gonna be using. I asked my manager how I was supposed to allocate my SHTS time since what I was doing was affecting everyone. He gave me a typical bullshit manager non-answer. Have you ever tried to nail jello to a wall? They must teach this shit in manager school. Oh yeah, they do. I have a blog about that. So, we are basing business decisions and bean flow on the numbers that I have to make up by guessing at usage of my base system. I also do some work tied directly to particular projects and there is no problem there.
After I build my base system, it is turned over to some other programmers, who make it into our common platform. They have the same problem I do. They have to pull allocation numbers out of the air and guess the usage of the various segments.
We've been doing this since the start of the year and now the segment managers are griping because they don't think their beans are going where they think they should be going. And now our EPS (Empty Polo Shirt) manager has said that we need to be more granular in our SHTS reporting. And we have replied, 'And how will we do that? We asked you about that in January?'
I just love it when a manager looks at you and you can tell that the thought gears in his head have totally locked up. You can almost see the smoke start rising from his head. And guess what the solution is? We have to assign a PM (Project Manager) to it.
Please. Please. Please. Do not assign the MPM (Meeting PM) to it. His solution to every problem is, and I quote 'We will have to call a meeting on that'. And it is not just one meeting. It is countless meetings. I think the fix is, our users get tired of all the meetings and decide to live with the problem. The MPM is the apple of my manager's eye because he makes problems go away.
When I moved into my current job four years ago, I worked for the internal segment. My systems were always at later releases than the systems used to support the external segments so they transferred me to full time tech support with the understanding that 50% of my time would be spent in supporting the internal segment. I asked the manager of the internal segment yesterday if he would like me to upgrade his systems. He said he couldn't afford it. He couldn't spend the white beans on me. As a result, I have had a lot of spare time lately. Fortunately, I got a new system in today and can start installing it and making up SHTS numbers.
I can't really decide which is more fun and which requires the most creativity: Installing the system or making up the SHTS numbers.
Let the beans flow.
Posted by denny at July 10, 2002 09:28 PM