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God I'm so tired of our project management solutions at work being so half-attempted. I work in specialty construction - we build museum exhibits. So as far back as I know, we've used ProjectPak for estimating everything but the AV for our jobs. It's honestly not that bad on the surface. Fairly well organized, but depending on the client's bid requirements, its a pain in the rear end, but that's nothing unsual. Sometimes they want their numbers divided in an insane way, that's part of it. Also, the way it spits out takeoff documents listing bids is a bit dense, but there's probably not really a good way to give that much information that isn't just a dense pile to read when you have a ton of line items for each sub-section. About 6 years ago, we tried moving to ShopPak, the companion program, for managing purchase orders, etc. In theory, this would allow PMs to see what's going on in the budget. It was janky as gently caress. Both programs were clearly written in the late 90s/early 2000s, and have been just life-supported with new features since then. My favorite is the "save" button on a purchase order being next to the "close everyting" button. About 3(?) years ago, our head of Project Management decides this sucks, and wants to find something better. She basically goes solo and works out something using Smartsheets. There's all sorts of ways to (in theory) be able to track things as they go through the shop. You can schedule labor for certain time periods, see when they overlap, and know if a department is over/under booked. Departments can mark things progress, and you can see if something is going sideways or is going to to miss an in-progress deadline so that you can make it work. This is brilliant - if you can get people to buy in and actually track the work, or if they aren't already overwhelmed with day-to-day fires to have the time to participate. On top of this, our purchasing system gets worse. Now, the default purchasing fillout page has so much loving labor to fill out, and it only can do one (!!) item request at a time. We've figured out a way around it for those of us who do a lot of purchasing, but christ its awkward. And given all that, its still not particularly fast. On top of all this, our AV department (with me) has to do another layer of work. We do our estimates in Excel, and then send it over to estimating, who basically copies the bottom line into their estimate or whatever. This estimate then acts as a budget document when we start the job, because we still don't have an easy way to total budgets being spent on our end. Also, if I do a credit card purchase on my company card, I have to log it 3 times. First, I put a purchase order in marked as 'already bought' with a reciept uploaded so that the receiving department knows what all should be in the box when it comes. Then, I have to go into the dumb excel sheet and highlight the order to code it as 'ordered' and update the cost since the estimate was rounded up a little during purchasing.Later, I mark it again when it is received. Then, at the end of the month, when credit card receipts are due, accounting asks me for the receipt for the order again, because they sure as hell aren't going to go to the purchase order and look at the job number and receipt that are already there... and I can't blame them, because I know how long it would take to comb the database and pull that info for like 20 people. It drives me nuts because it feels like for all the good intention, we haven't made real progress. I mean, the new system STILL has the problem that paid status and shipment status are part of the same column, which doesn't work because some vendors you pay first, some you pay after receiving, and some have split payments. We made this system!! It didn't have to be this way. At least I think it behaves a bit better in cross-talking with whatever software we're using for accounting.
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Nov 5, 2023 17:48
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The only effective and user friendly cost estimation tool is the one you spend half a day creating from scratch in excel and never ever allow anyone else to even look at it lest one of the load-bearing rube-goldbergian formulas break. Hth
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Nov 5, 2023 18:31
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When I interned as a estimation engineer 10+ years ago the company's ISO 9000 certified proposal costing process was an Excel sheet with load bearing macros and password protected cost basises which sounds horrifying in text but was actually fairly slick and put together over years by people who knew what they were doing in Excel and VB. They were replacing it with a custom app on a DB sort of solution while I was there and it was straight downgrades in features and UIX in many places with promises of "that can come later, lets just get off Excel please."
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Nov 5, 2023 19:10
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BigHead posted:This reminds me of one of my favorite bits of trivia: the American Kennel Society won't let more than 37 dogs of any given breed register with the same name. Why? Because they record the breed and name combinations on a specific form. If the dogs have the same breed and name they get a number. Like Golden Retriever Lowtax 12. The numbers are recorded in Roman numeral, and the spaces on the form can't fit XXXVIII. 
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Nov 5, 2023 19:43
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zedprime posted:When I interned as a estimation engineer 10+ years ago the company's ISO 9000 certified proposal costing process was an Excel sheet with load bearing macros and password protected cost basises which sounds horrifying in text but was actually fairly slick and put together over years by people who knew what they were doing in Excel and VB. Aside from 'it's excel and excel looks cheap and clunky' was there a need to move off excel? Some sort of rationalization?
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Nov 5, 2023 19:48
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Outrail posted:Aside from 'it's excel and excel looks cheap and clunky' was there a need to move off excel? Some sort of rationalization? quote:load bearing macros At a certain point, it can be more effort to maintain than just start fresh the right way. Much the same way I honestly wish the forums just got a complete rewrite instead of continuous renovation of a 20 year old version phpbb in TYOOL2023.
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Nov 5, 2023 19:51
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Outrail posted:Aside from 'it's excel and excel looks cheap and clunky' was there a need to move off excel? Some sort of rationalization?
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Nov 5, 2023 19:53
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Volmarias posted:At a certain point, it can be more effort to maintain than just start fresh the right way. yeah in my last job i worked in a project to move things from excel to an actual web portal and it helped a bunch the guy that was doing market research and whatnot. it helped that we did gradually over some months, so the guy could tell us when things were buggy on the website also seconded on the forums thing
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Nov 6, 2023 00:49
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Dumb poo poo your work does: lets just get off Excel please.
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Nov 6, 2023 00:53
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You can take my Excel sheets when you pry them from my cold, dead hands. 
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Nov 6, 2023 12:03
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Oh cool this tour thing I've been doing sometimes, and am translating pamphlets for, is going to stop coming to my area as of next month (source: I looked at the route schedule on the website). I better translate it asap and send the invoice before my middleman realizes it won't be needed.
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Nov 6, 2023 12:17
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Space Kablooey posted:also seconded on the forums thing I want to put in an anti-vote on this. Love my old codebase forums.
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Nov 6, 2023 12:29
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Sywert of Thieves posted:You can take my Excel sheets when you pry them from my cold, dead hands. This tbh, I've taken a previously 3 hour payroll and productivity process and changed it to a 15 minute process via Excel.
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Nov 6, 2023 12:47
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Volmarias posted:At a certain point, it can be more effort to maintain than just start fresh the right way. As a user broken by enshittification: eh, I'm scared of what would get changed If I was actually in charge of forum dev: burn it all to the ground and start fresh
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Nov 6, 2023 12:50
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The solution is obviously to migrate the forums codebase to Excel. In other words, make the macros codebearing 
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Nov 6, 2023 13:12
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Our operations all hinge on a single massive csv that can't be loaded into excel bc it's too big at this point and my entire time here I've been like 'heyyyy could we maybe import that into a database' and there's been so much push back, chief among them old men being like 'nooo sql scary. awk familiar and cozy' and I want to die
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Nov 6, 2023 13:38
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the previous lab I worked at had their ~1500 frozen human brain samples inventoried only by a printed out blank Excel workbook binder filled in by hand
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Nov 6, 2023 14:19
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Pyrtanis posted:This tbh, I've taken a previously 3 hour payroll and productivity process and changed it to a 15 minute process via Excel. I took an end of month process that took 3 accountants 4 days each to complete and changed it into an automated process in PowerBI. Excel has its place, but it's the accountants hammer and everything is a nail.
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Nov 6, 2023 14:26
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My boss from my previous employer "rage" resigned after there was another 30% RIF, and he apparently found out he was going to have to do actual work. He was completely antagonistic to the upper management, treated all but select employees like garbage, was pretty much afraid of any change, and kept waxing poetic for the days before the company got bought out. So in his ultimate act of sticking it to the man, he turned in his 2 week notice. He is now liking poo poo on LinkedIn that talk about great bosses fighting with management for his team. All he did when I was there was complain to uppers in meetings then take it the work and assign it to people. I really hope he pissed off enough former employees that he can't find a job for awhile.
MarxCarl fucked around with this message at 14:41 on Nov 6, 2023 |
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Nov 6, 2023 14:39
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As far as I can tell, our IT dept have blocked me from messaging an important partner on Teams. But I can still send and receive messages from people at our direct competitor. 
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Nov 6, 2023 16:35
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Outrail posted:Aside from 'it's excel and excel looks cheap and clunky' was there a need to move off excel? Some sort of rationalization? We use various excel spreadsheets for our estimates, and really my only complaint about it is there aren't any in-program checks for mistakes. For example, we have a tab for all the equipment we're buying. Plug in the equipment costs, hours per unit, etc. Well someone can plug all the info in, but if they forget to put in the equipment amount, none of it gets counted on the summary tab, so it gets left off the final number, oops. Otherwise, it's also a mess of a billion macros and formulas, and someone can still go in there and gently caress it all up. I guess essentially excel is not dummy proof.
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Nov 6, 2023 17:08
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Some supplier retired a critical system we rely on and the replacement can only be interacted with for any kind of bulk requests or changes by using an incredibly lovely and temperamental VBA script that lives inside an excel macro. It regularly just fails to do whatever and fucks things up, but we’re getting it in the neck from up above because the way it fails is completely silent and can be anywhere in the batch of commands we’ve processed through it for that run, so we don’t know it hasn’t worked unless one or more of whatever things we tried to do doesn’t end up happening (and someone actually bothers to tell us). We’re in the process of reverse engineering it to see if there’s a better way but lol come on we’re excel jockeys not software engineers how is this our job?
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Nov 6, 2023 17:20
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History Comes Inside! posted:We’re in the process of reverse engineering it to see if there’s a better way but lol come on we’re excel jockeys not software engineers how is this our job? This right here is why I like using Excel over something more complicated for the average user, or something proprietary. If I get hit by a bus I'd rather leave a tool in place that someone with enough time could break apart and make work again without having to spend thousands on a support contract in perpetuity. That said that's kind of my struggle right now. I want to come up with a better system for tracking my org's expenses since it's all tracked in a shared Excel workbook for ease-of-use, but it's prone to error and vulnerable to someone miskeying and wiping out info without realizing it. It's a non-profit so I'm not looking to be cutthroat about it, but on the other hand I do like job security and I like this org.
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Nov 6, 2023 18:14
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I may be biased since I'm a computer toucher but it feels like if a company that uses excel heavily and is also feeling the cracks on processes that uses it, it could be interesting to start building an internal dev team. Also I might be biased but that feels like the better solution than purchasing a ready made thing and trying to torture it into doing whatever the business needs to. For some reason it looks like no two businesses operate alike and that's why adapting existing solutions is a huge pain
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Nov 6, 2023 18:22
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We have an internal dev team for some of our systems, but in our industry for this particular system everyone uses some flavour of off the shelf solution because while it’s business critical it’s also a relatively solved problem and it doesn’t need to do anything proprietary. It just loving sucks rear end that it’s a huge step back from the system it replaced from the exact same supplier, which was a pain in the rear end in a different way but was at least a reliable pain in the rear end. 99% of users don’t even know it’s a different system because they only ever interact with the front end of it that stayed exactly the same, it’s just the backend that the people on the ops side of the company are responsible for that’s been replaced with this absolute dogshit. If you only wanna do one thing it’s fine to go in and just do it manually and live with the sluggish UI and slow responses, but we’re regularly looking to do anywhere from 50-200 actions at once and that could take literal hours instead of the 5 minutes it would take us on the old system or if we rely on the wonky macros.
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Nov 6, 2023 18:38
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I feel that situations where the people responsible for improving a software-dependent process are also the ones responsible for doing the software-dependent process inevitably result in one of two outcomes: either the process doesn't get improved or the process doesn't get done.
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Nov 6, 2023 18:38
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It depends what you’re using it for obviously, but there are advantages to a plain excel sheet. I’d probably commit murder for the ability to copy paste/fill down cells in netsuite. It’s routine for us to have 50+ item orders where the pricing for each line has to be changed. So for each line you have to pick the “custom” price option from a pull-down menu, and then manually type in the price. 50 times. For one order.
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Nov 6, 2023 19:26
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MGR: Hey, so, you know, a few people in Phoenix threw a hissy fit about having to come in an hour later due to their state not following DST. This pissed off their manager, so now he's trying to make the entire department come in on the exact same schedule. That exception I gave you to come in and leave an hour early on Mondays so you can go to your weekly appointment? It may be in jeopardy. Will let you know! ME: OK, boss. (Quietly prepares resume updates and for potential talk with HR).
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Nov 6, 2023 19:34
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SQL is great and data touchers should learn it. Databases are great - you can pull live data from them into Excel.
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Nov 6, 2023 19:47
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blackmet posted:MGR: Hey, so, you know, a few people in Phoenix threw a hissy fit about having to come in an hour later due to their state not following DST. This pissed off their manager, so now he's trying to make the entire department come in on the exact same schedule. That exception I gave you to come in and leave an hour early on Mondays so you can go to your weekly appointment? It may be in jeopardy. Will let you know!  Daylight Savings isn't new. What did they do last year? Our PHX team adjust their schedules every time. It's been happening for years with no complaints.
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Nov 6, 2023 20:16
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History Comes Inside! posted:an incredibly lovely and temperamental VBA script that lives inside an excel macro. History Comes Inside! posted:lol come on we’re excel jockeys not software engineers how is this our job? Uh...
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Nov 6, 2023 20:20
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I once saw a job add for a -Systems Engineer “Office 365”-. It made me imagine an actual excel jockey, but it was for IT. Never worked in an excel based office, but at one job there was a matlab script written by my predecessor that used excel's external api to generate a macro filled excel spreadsheet for data visualisation. It broke during some update of either of those softwares. Do those load bearing spreadsheet ever get broken by microsoft? Or have something like that VB videogame that broke if you tried to run it on a non US windows install?
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Nov 6, 2023 20:33
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VictualSquid posted:I once saw a job add for a -Systems Engineer “Office 365”-. It made me imagine an actual excel jockey, but it was for IT. Without getting too into detail, one of our core systems relies on an Excel macro that uses specific functions that work far slower on versions of Excel after 2007. They're auto generated sheets, I have no access to the software generating them, and "modifying the scripts before running the files through" has already been solidly denied by three successive managers even after I've been able to prove no negative effects to fixing it (everything we run through is saved publicly, so it's not easy to just do it anyway and not get caught). Our IT team is one incredibly overworked dude who has not fixed the sheet and will not fix it because it's "not important enough" despite an active and outstanding ticket for at least six years. I did the math one time and we're losing somewhere around 250 man-hours a year (in a small enough department that's significant) just to a single line of code.
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Nov 6, 2023 20:47
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Microsoft is insanely focused on maintaining backwards compatibility in excel for exactly those use cases, iirc there's some error around a specific leap year that is bespoke programmed in to continue to maintain backwards compatibility, and that wasn't even originally their bug. It was from some other program they wanted people to be able to easily convert to excel.
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Nov 6, 2023 20:48
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SkyeAuroline posted:Without getting too into detail, one of our core systems relies on an Excel macro that uses specific functions that work far slower on versions of Excel after 2007. They're auto generated sheets, I have no access to the software generating them, and "modifying the scripts before running the files through" has already been solidly denied by three successive managers even after I've been able to prove no negative effects to fixing it (everything we run through is saved publicly, so it's not easy to just do it anyway and not get caught). Our IT team is one incredibly overworked dude who has not fixed the sheet and will not fix it because it's "not important enough" despite an active and outstanding ticket for at least six years. Sounds like you should consider asking your IT guy if this bottle of 18 year Laphroaig might improve his opinion
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Nov 6, 2023 20:52
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Volmarias posted:Sounds like you should consider asking your IT guy if this bottle of 18 year Laphroaig might improve his opinion Fully remote, refuses to even come in for mandatory office events, leverages the fact he refuses to teach anyone anything he does and most of our documentation is missing or outdated to keep from getting let go. I've seen him one time in the past three years. I tried. My bribe was not large enough.
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Nov 6, 2023 20:54
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reignonyourparade posted:Microsoft is insanely focused on maintaining backwards compatibility in excel for exactly those use cases, iirc there's some error around a specific leap year that is bespoke programmed in to continue to maintain backwards compatibility, and that wasn't even originally their bug. It was from some other program they wanted people to be able to easily convert to excel. It's originally from Lotus 1-2-3 yeah. It, and Excel, treat 1900 as a leap year when it shouldn't: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/excel/wrongly-assumes-1900-is-leap-year
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Nov 6, 2023 20:55
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Volmarias posted:Uh... Having to work with VBA script is not in the job description for most excel monkeys because it’s basically a programming language.
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Nov 6, 2023 21:04
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Zero One posted:
I have no idea what they did last year in this group. I know my old group would push both the hotline and processing team forward. There were a couple of exceptions on the processing side, but we generally put those people in charge of some manual workflows so they would have a reason to be there early. My manager doesn't care as long as you cover your 2-2.5 hour hotline shift and work is basically getting done. He actually comes in and leaves an hour early himself, and said it was OK to match his schedule when I first joined. I chose to match the rest of the teams schedule anyway because I figured out pretty quickly that a lot of my training was taking place in the late afternoon, but asked to stay on the earlier shift on Mondays due to my weekly therapy appointment. He was fine with it. Now...it may be an issue.
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Nov 6, 2023 21:43
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Johnny Truant posted:the previous lab I worked at had their ~1500 frozen human brain samples inventoried only by a printed out blank Excel workbook binder filled in by hand
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Nov 6, 2023 21:59
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