When I worked as a Management Information Specialist at a major regional bank, I was asked to be able to link several spreadsheets together and maximize their effectiveness in documenting loan portfolio results. I had become the Lotus "guru" in the Consumer Lending Department - if someone had a burning Lotus question, I could help answer it. In fact, at various points I would attend the Bank Personal Computer (PC) Users Group meeting downtown to learn more about spreadsheet capability. At one point, we had to hire a one-day trainer to come to our office just outside the city and train me on advanced spreadsheet techniques, since I had outgrown all the training resources available to me. There was no more expertise left in the office to train me, while I was expected to utilize the software to greater potential!
The epitome of this need was when my manager called me from his California hotel room at 9:30 AM EST (meaning 6:30 AM West Coast Time) to determine economic projections for the bank by running different interest rate calculation scenarios linking several different spreadsheet files. He wanted to know more about loan portfolios, based on certain assumptions like interest rates and loan amount balances, and remained by the phone while I provided him numerical answers. This became so complex that I had trouble following what I was doing! Perhaps I was pioneering what the software could do! "Couldn´t there have been any lead time before to accomplish this task?" I asked myself. I questioned to myself how much real value I was contributing at that time.
In another position, I was sorting a list of accepted proposals for an upcoming conference using Excel, while sending out multiple emails.
The key was to appropriately link through a mail merge a standard letter, fields in an attached spreadsheet file, and email distribution, intended to save tedium and time.
Try as I might, inevitably something went wrong whenever I tried to work it out perfectly! I then practically had to "back track" my efforts, requiring even more time and effort! This inevitably led to use of the phone (and not just "automation") to further clarify proposal status to the recipients, particularly when they contacted me out of frustration and disappointment (particularly if a proposal was erroneously indicated as "unaccepted"). At least some of them must have been reading their emails! In essence, this use of technology did not save very much time; there appeared to be no real substitute for live human communication at some point to communicate acceptance status of panel proposals.
While in the same position as Program Coordinator, I utilized commonly used association database software to capture presenter and member information for the national conference. It was so tedious to use, with so many pop-up boxes, that my eyes and head got sore, not to mention how many times my mind wandered and I felt frustrated.
One would think that such a widely used database would be more user-friendly. Or was I really trained well enough on it?
