Automation

[rowyn]

My department has a task that has required a person to spend a few hours every week pressing a button, waiting for the computer to process it for 30 seconds to a couple of minutes, and then pressing the next button. Repeat 76 times or so.

We have been trying to get the system folks to automate the button pushing. For a year. I kinda thought this was a job for a batch file. They apparently feel otherwise. It got booted around for a while.

Last week, they came back with their final offer: "we'll spend dozens of hours coding it so specific pieces of data are available in another system. Then you can spend dozens of hours rebuilding all your absurdly complicated reports in a way that wil not quite mimic their current form in the new system. That allows scheduling."

I whinged at bard_bloom about this. Bard pointed out that automating the reports should take like 50 lines of VBA code. If you do it badly. I whinged more.

My boss told me to write up all the details of all the data that we need so we could start the hundred-hour process system support wanted us to embark on, that they claimed was the only option.

I looked at this. I though, I bet it would take less time to figure out how to code the automation in VBA than it will to tell them everything we need, never mind the rest.

Three hours of searching, coding, and experimenting later, I have my proof-of-concept. Heh. I can do this after all!

...

I should've done this two years ago. -_-

Comments

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

Yay, you rock and you rule!

[rowyn]

I just needed someone to tell me "a solution exists involving tools you have" so that I would actually look for how to do it. -_-

[level-head.livejournal.com]

Excellent!

And there is a free utility out there called AutoHotKey which also is quite good at that sort of automation. I use it quite a bit now: After typing my signature line for so many years, now it's quick. And I use it in various programs, and add to it for specific projects. Easy, nice, and potent. And no cost.

===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle

[rowyn]

Hee, I should see if I can get IT to install that for me at work (we can't install anything ourselves, sigh.) I need a hot key for "Please let me know. Thanks!"

[level-head.livejournal.com]

By the way, I completed a very time-sensitive project this morning with a $1.5 million client proposal at stake. And the federal website the proposal got uploaded to broke, spewing Javascript errors all over the place and revealing details of code, system, version and access that were never intended to be seen by users (and would be of great use to hackers).

It's a busy site: more than 400 proposals were uploaded between Friday night and Monday morning, and who knows how many of them got damaged by the problem. After some hours, we worked though the issues and the upload was pronounced bully before the deadline. But it was tense for a bit.

This relatively straightforward system used by every proposal-writing and research writing scientist in the country (and all their institutions) is prone to break, a lot, despite a huge development and maintenance budget. I've put together systems with 1,500 screens and 400 database tables (with 10,000 separate columns) that never had such fragility. On less than 1% of their budget.

This is part of what taxpayers are buying; the federal government agencies don't even have your employer's motivation to keep costs down and make things work, as modest as that motivation can seem to be. In fact, your attitude of wanting to make things work, and the skill to do it, would be considered rather dangerous.

But I like it!

===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle

Yeah, but private industry is incompetent too.

[jorrocks-j.livejournal.com]

I've been dealing with USAJobs, which to be fair sucks a lot less than it did even two years ago. Still sucks though.

But then its private equivalent is Taleo. And Taleo is like the Kim Kardashian of recruiting software: it doesn't work and everybody hates it but somehow, you just can't avoid it.

Re: Yeah, but private industry is incompetent too.

[level-head.livejournal.com]

Private industry can get large, and when it does so, it can start to take on the attributes of a government. Specifically, a bureaucracy, where the preservation of turf and the resistance to threats to the bureaucracy become more important than the overall effectiveness of the work.

Robert Heinlein once described a committee as "a creature with six or more legs and no brain." But a bureaucracy is more "many bellies and no brain" as its appetite must be figured into the equation.

I ran a company for decades that reached the "multi-hundred employees" level. It was difficult to avoid the bureaucratic effect, though I think I was largely successful at that. Well, thinking back, there was one caveat. One part of this, the larger part, I grew from scratch starting in 1976. (I still have an image created for the company by Lady Rowyn for the company's 28th anniversary.) The second part of the company I acquired — and that was a poisonous, bureaucratic bunch of corporate politicians that I had to get rid of quickly. I thought I could reform them, but that would have been a new career and we had work to do.

Companies that get successful must fight these effects. It is tough. Big successful companies did not get that way by acting the way they do now! I admire CEOs like Jack Welch who could keep a good spirit going in a hundred-thousand-employee company.

===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle

[rowyn]

Well, bear in mind I did spend two years whinging "why won't someone do it for me?" first. :/

[level-head.livejournal.com]

I've seen you tackle other things in the meantime. And there's a good reason your co-workers consider you the go-to person for this stuff.

===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Sorry, it's too late. They've already started the process.

[rowyn]

Ha, they can't start until I send them a list of things to include. So there!

[iron-fox21.livejournal.com]

Excellent. Good stuff.

Sounds like Support is protecting jobs.

[jorrocks-j.livejournal.com]

Which I suppose is what you'd want them to do if you worked in Support: you'd want them to protect your job.

Understand, then, that Support may see your proposal as a threat--not to its power or dignity but to its members' ability to pay their mortgages. People who are defending their livelihoods can get quite upset about any perceived threat.

I would recommend going directly to your boss or other mentor, showing them your work and then asking "so what's the political possibility of actually doing this?" This will get you brownie points for both your technical AND business skills.

Good luck!

Nope, actually, they're just incompetent

[rowyn]

I went to my boss about doing it My Way first, and one of the reasons we don't want to do Their Way is that we know they will refuse to update & maintain their half of the project (and said as much on the conference call: "tell us everything you will ever want now, because we won't touch it again afterwards"). They don't want to make work for themselves. -_-

Re: Sounds like Support is protecting jobs.

[level-head.livejournal.com]

You and I are thinking in similar ways about the bureaucracy of such situations, it seems. The US federal executive branch, as of last year, was more than 42 times the size of the legislative branch (2,663,000 exec branch versus 63,000 people in legislative and judicial combined) and issues more than 90% of the legislation in the form of regulations.

Those executive branch regulation writers are indeed very jealous of their continuing ability to pay mortgages, and a fair number of those regulations are to keep the regulatory bureaucracy in place and needed. What's the political possibility of reducing this structure? Small, I'd say. (It has been surprisingly stable over 50 years while the military is about half its size from 50 years ago.)

And even in companies, such as one fairly small franchise operation I sat on the board of years ago, can have a five-person department fiercely resistant to any threat to the department, while at the same time being utterly unconcerned about a threat to the company. This is the sort of human nature that can be helped by a positive company culture, but that takes a lot of work and is rare to find in practice. I was very fortunate, but I have worked for the federal government and knew how bad it could get if not headed off.

And it's tough to fight from underneath, though you can often benefit from the effort one way or another.

===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle