$450 Just to feel comfortable

I started to write this blog a while ago. I thought it was funny, but after trying to put any length into the entry I realized it was a one trick pony. Therefore, while I still find this subject amusing, I decided to cut this down to a mini entry.

The other night I stayed up and worked pretty late. I ended the day with a 13.5 hours in because I let myself get fixated on creating a pretty complicated excel workbook. The uses arrayed functions to count multiple conditioned rows to track items that we have in process. It is basically a dashboard on a single process thread of our project.

I got to thinking when I finished the next day that I spent 4.5 hours working on that workbook over two days. That means I have 4.5 billable hours into a single document; at a cost $100/hour the workbook cost my client $450 dollars. I find this very amusing. I find it amusing because the entire purpose for these modifications, to the document, is to help the customer feel more comfortable with the process. In the end this doesn’t expedite the work it just creates some overhead that gives management visibility.

Why am I putting any thought into this? Well I was just wondering how much money is spent in the corporate world to help management feel emotionally better? None of the above task helps to get the job done (I know I’ve mentioned that). I was also in a meeting today that wasted a few thousand dollars talking about how we could reorganize documents that don’t need to be reorganized. Now I’m all for planning and organization, but to be efficient you have to stop changing things and doing client handholding to do some actual work!