But all that was about to change. I'd been pulled into a crisis working group. FD, in a panic as usual, had not read the memo properly from HR begging for some "peopleware to facilitate a fast-track restoration of the timeline and a return to tracking the core objectives of Project Lazarus". Fortunately, I'm fluent in HR. (They're such sensitive lasses on the fifth floor – and it does pay to speak their native tongue, if you get my drift...) Digging into the memo I discovered that what they were actually looking for was someone who understands Microsoft Access. Access? That's just Excel where you can't see most of the data for most of the time, right? Apparently that's what FD Tit 2 thought, too, hence my presence. Anyway, as it was summer and things in finance were quiet and as there are only so many ways you can unnerve the audit juniors, off I went. In any case, Lazarus's project manager was holed up in much swankier offices. Air conditioning in July? Sold!
When will I learn? I don't think I've ever witnessed anything go quite so pear-shaped, so quickly. The minute I was shown into to those deeply carpeted offices, the project manager staggered towards me on the verge of tears. You can imagine how I reacted to that – where are those lovely HR ladies with the tissues and the padded shoulders to cry on when you need them?! It turned out they were tears of joy: I was, apparently, the Access Saviour. It was only when he sat me down in front of his laptop and tried to explain the problem that I realised I might have been over-hyped by FD – my Microsoft John the Baptist would be losing his head over this one, alright.
When I tried to explain as gently as possible that there had been some mix up, and that as far as I was concerned, Access was my flexible friend from the eighties, the tears of joy threatened to turn to tears of rage. In a desperate bid to stop the waterworks, I agreed to give it my best shot. Project Lazarus is, well, it's "confidential" (which means unpopular, unsuccessful, or both). The point is that this guy wasn't a project manager at all – he was an accountant.
So, naturally, he was bright and hard working. He had been put in charge of this poisoned chalice several months ago and in a moment of madness had decided the best way to manage it was to write his own project management system in Access. (The way some of the wonks in logistics bang on about Microsoft Project, you'd have thought he might have got the message. But still...) It was, he now cheerfully admitted, the biggest mistake of his life. A five-minute poke around in Access was enough to convince me, a total amateur outside Excel, that it was not designed for this sort of job at all. Lazarus was a big project with 15 separate streams. For each project stream, management had set five milestones. To reach each of those milestones, there was a minimum of five major actions – which had to be documented, recorded and tracked. And beneath those five major actions there was a stream of between 20 and 30 tasks, all with their own separate bits of the database (not to mention the task dependencies). We're talking exponential complexity – for a guy who's barely got his head around macros, let alone Visual Basic. It made my most nightmarish Excel workbook – the one I use for our FX trading and my accumulators during the flat season – look like Spot's Busy Week... audio version.
He'd given up running the project, of course. Instead, he spent all his time trying to get the database to work - hence the desperate memo that brought me in. For a fleeting second I wondered whether an Excel worksheet could take over the task but I didn't suggest it – that would have meant doing it, too. Ah, but there's more to my kitbag than spreadsheets. Regular readers will know I've got the mojo when it comes to office politics, too. So I suggested we buy ourselves some time. A few beautifully crafted memos (in Word) to the right people later, and Lazarus was given a few months’ grace. After that we Googled "free project management software". Oh, the wonders of the open source movement – not even the IT department knows what we're up to (and thanks to the email monitoring software, they know almost as much scuttlebutt as the HR ladies!).
So now we're beginning to turn things
round. I haven't looked at an Excel spreadsheet for days. Every time I see
FD, I tell him how well it's going and
how I may request a permanent transfer. Well – got to give him something
to fret about.