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Jan. 26th, 2004 11:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
saint_monkeyperformance review today, probably a raise as a result of it, and perhaps talk of schedule change and permanence of this programming position.
in that direction, my new job is strange. i'm off the phone and programming, moving slowly towards completion on the project they gave me... it involved a sort of blah "this is what we would like" (integration of excel files stored on a lotus notes mail database, with data from an access database, and performance data pulled from a nortel symposium server running little canned Crystal Reports.) but there is no word of when i'll move to days, or when i'll take on the far more interesting and difficult job of genning all thier numbers (that is still being done by the command center. they run a crystal report, then they take the printed output and enter it into excel spreadsheets manually. i've tried to show them how simply exporting the output as a FILE to excel would save them some time, but the answer is "it needs to be in THIS format." attempts to explain that formatting is superficial and easily accomplished in seconds with the simplest of vba macros, or even a user with a brain and about a half an hour, gets me static. "why you tryin to CHANGE things holmes?" and then they go back to their tedious data entry. i even tried writing the macro, running it, and genning the report and handing it to them, and they still continued to transcribe the data into their kludged version by hand.) i'm hoping that my work with the quality team will show the command center that i can work the kung-fu i promised. i'm almost done there. it has taken two months, and most of that has been learning to fuse the pieces they have already together. the real issue is how stuck in a rut they are. i could make all this stuff talk to each other, but they won't let me. for example, Lotus Notes can be queried from excel, but i need to download an OBDC driver to reference it, but the work firewall prohibits the download. I've asked for permission to lift the restriction, but no dice. they are afraid of viruses, and the obdc driver is in an executable. (stoopid, since i can download all the .xla, .xls, and .vbs files i want.) i guess it's better anyway, since i'd have to distribute and install the driver to each end user if i wrote a VBA solution. i guess i could do that in an add-in if necessary. another good example is the access database. it is archaic, with records from 2001 to the present stored on it, in a single giant table of seventy thousand records PLUS, with more than forty fields for each record. just opening it takes a while, and genning the canned report they want takes around twenty minutes, if you let access do it. they won't let me split the database into smaller tables or even archive parts of it off. they are afraid i will break the database, and then they won't be able to run the report at all. fortunately, i found that using an ADO call in excel will let me use SQL to query the data from the access database without opening it at all. i can run the query, reformat the data and print the report they want in about twenty seconds. Another problem is lack of a standard. they showed me a directory with about three hundred excel files in it, once a month, they open all these files, copy a template page into the file, look at what area of the call center they worked in, and copy a "standard" into certain cell ranges. for example: if this is a directory represntative, they need to answer 60 calls per hour. Since each file has a title, and the title included where each person worked, it was easy. if cell c3.text = "directory" then cph = 60 else cph = 14 end if. but a single supervisor wrote in, saying that the data on the new sheet was incorrect. so they don't trust my macro. i told them that the macro made NO NEW DATA, simply created the new sheet, and updated the three lines based on data that already lived in the workbook. when i opened the books in question, i found that the original book showed directory in c3... so i called the supe. "Oh, i use a different standard, MY reps only have to have 45 calls per hour. i think 60 is too high." that may be, but you should tell quality that so they don't blame my macro. or maybe you should change the damn excel file yourself instead of calling to complain about something that YOU changed, and making quality think that i can't do what i say i can. I told quality about the problem, but end result ... they still do the sheets by hand since my macro "can't be trusted." i have to test my results against their results to get in their good graces once more, but i have to wait till february so that they can do the next batch by hand. grr.
in that direction, my new job is strange. i'm off the phone and programming, moving slowly towards completion on the project they gave me... it involved a sort of blah "this is what we would like" (integration of excel files stored on a lotus notes mail database, with data from an access database, and performance data pulled from a nortel symposium server running little canned Crystal Reports.) but there is no word of when i'll move to days, or when i'll take on the far more interesting and difficult job of genning all thier numbers (that is still being done by the command center. they run a crystal report, then they take the printed output and enter it into excel spreadsheets manually. i've tried to show them how simply exporting the output as a FILE to excel would save them some time, but the answer is "it needs to be in THIS format." attempts to explain that formatting is superficial and easily accomplished in seconds with the simplest of vba macros, or even a user with a brain and about a half an hour, gets me static. "why you tryin to CHANGE things holmes?" and then they go back to their tedious data entry. i even tried writing the macro, running it, and genning the report and handing it to them, and they still continued to transcribe the data into their kludged version by hand.) i'm hoping that my work with the quality team will show the command center that i can work the kung-fu i promised. i'm almost done there. it has taken two months, and most of that has been learning to fuse the pieces they have already together. the real issue is how stuck in a rut they are. i could make all this stuff talk to each other, but they won't let me. for example, Lotus Notes can be queried from excel, but i need to download an OBDC driver to reference it, but the work firewall prohibits the download. I've asked for permission to lift the restriction, but no dice. they are afraid of viruses, and the obdc driver is in an executable. (stoopid, since i can download all the .xla, .xls, and .vbs files i want.) i guess it's better anyway, since i'd have to distribute and install the driver to each end user if i wrote a VBA solution. i guess i could do that in an add-in if necessary. another good example is the access database. it is archaic, with records from 2001 to the present stored on it, in a single giant table of seventy thousand records PLUS, with more than forty fields for each record. just opening it takes a while, and genning the canned report they want takes around twenty minutes, if you let access do it. they won't let me split the database into smaller tables or even archive parts of it off. they are afraid i will break the database, and then they won't be able to run the report at all. fortunately, i found that using an ADO call in excel will let me use SQL to query the data from the access database without opening it at all. i can run the query, reformat the data and print the report they want in about twenty seconds. Another problem is lack of a standard. they showed me a directory with about three hundred excel files in it, once a month, they open all these files, copy a template page into the file, look at what area of the call center they worked in, and copy a "standard" into certain cell ranges. for example: if this is a directory represntative, they need to answer 60 calls per hour. Since each file has a title, and the title included where each person worked, it was easy. if cell c3.text = "directory" then cph = 60 else cph = 14 end if. but a single supervisor wrote in, saying that the data on the new sheet was incorrect. so they don't trust my macro. i told them that the macro made NO NEW DATA, simply created the new sheet, and updated the three lines based on data that already lived in the workbook. when i opened the books in question, i found that the original book showed directory in c3... so i called the supe. "Oh, i use a different standard, MY reps only have to have 45 calls per hour. i think 60 is too high." that may be, but you should tell quality that so they don't blame my macro. or maybe you should change the damn excel file yourself instead of calling to complain about something that YOU changed, and making quality think that i can't do what i say i can. I told quality about the problem, but end result ... they still do the sheets by hand since my macro "can't be trusted." i have to test my results against their results to get in their good graces once more, but i have to wait till february so that they can do the next batch by hand. grr.
