Messes

Yeah, so somewhere in this mess of entries this entry was written, or at least started, and at the time it was being written in real time and where we were in that real time space lead me to think about how we sometimes stumble into business organizational messes (organizational psychology is a whole world of messes) without realizing it (I used to live there and somehow survived) in spite of the human penchant for focusing on the monsters they create in the vast unknown that drive them to choose to do some monstrous things to each other in this known world.

What?

I started the new job yesterday even before the hiring paperwork went into their hands and explored the software they want me to learn and teach to others and more importantly, convince the others to actually use the software properly after they tried to get the others to use the software for two years. I did learn, after I finally had a bit of time with their database, that I was hired as a Data Analyst. Looking up the average salary I see I am well below it even if I reach the goals they set for their staff in two months.

Friday I discovered the biggest obstacle. The guy I am supposed to answer to arrived late and interrupted my exploration of the software to "train" me in the software even though during the interview he admitted he barely knows how to use the software. He proved he did not know how to use it by talking for four hours and did not teach me as much as I learned in less that thirty minutes on my own.

The owner explained to me that he did not hire me to do data entry and wanted me to look at the big picture, while this guy wanted me to count lines of customers by hand because he couldn't figure out how to run a report or use any other means to count the customers. The biggest problem this company has is a lack of vision of a process to reach their goals. This guy, who apparently failed for some time, does not seem to realize I was hired to do it. He wants me to do it in the way that lead to his failures. He then left at 3pm for the day and I explored the software and created a pivot table in Excel that produced the answer to the first question both of them asked.

Then we come to the process obstacle. One of the fundamental laws of data management is garbage in, garbage out.

With the participants in the data gathering not cooperating for the last two years, the data is completely unreliable so the numbers I am generating are just as unreliable no matter how well I manipulate them to meet the owner's needs.

I sense I will be repeating simple questions a lot in this job.

Probably in these entries too.

Narf. :)