Process improvement

I’m fairly tolerant to repetitive tasks, but at some point, process improvement kicks in. The beauty of boring routines like ‘select – check – cut – click – paste – repeat’ is that they allow the mind to wander. My wandering mind tends to take a look at what I’m doing – What am I doing? –  and can’t help asking: Can this be done better?

This time around, having got bored of marrying invoice data to order data, it spawned an Access database. No more than a few invoices arrived every week or two, and the processing didn’t even take much time. But it was so inefficient. The unwieldy spreadsheet demanded far more fields to be filled than strictly necessary. Every once in a while, an invoice referred to an unknown order. And the annual re-invoicing process always was a bit of a puzzle, not to speak of the budgeting process.

Once the corner of creating a database had been turned, a whole landscape of new use cases offered itself. The streamlined process of entering orders somehow begged for budget forecasts. This, in turn, suggested change requests, to be based on analysis of JIRA items [*]. Once change requests were captured, the list of application releases could be connected. 

And all these data sets yielded lots of analysis options. We now could calculate development speed over time and compare budgeted cost to actual cost per change request.
The summary makes it look like an ambitious project. Had it been presented to me like that, a project competing for budget, I probably would have advised against it. “Don’t underestimate the effort. Aren’t there more pressing needs?”

But it simply came about organically. The work processes were mine anyway, I just gradually improved them. Time investment was limited. Cost was negligible. Benefits abounded. More and better analytical data made the client happy. More engagement and less boredom made me happy. Win-win.

[*] JIRA is an open-source database widely used to capture bugs and potential improvements to software systems.
I’m fairly tolerant to repetitive tasks, but at some point, process improvement kicks in. The beauty of boring routines like ‘select – check – cut – click – paste – repeat’ is that they allow the mind to wander. My wandering mind tends to take a look at what I’m doing – What am I doing? –  and can’t help asking: Can this be done better?

This time around, having got bored of marrying invoice data to order data, it spawned an Access database. No more than a few invoices arrived every week or two, and the processing didn’t even take much time. But it was *so* inefficient. The unwieldy spreadsheet demanded far more fields to be filled than strictly necessary. Every once in a while, an invoice referred to an unknown order. And the annual re-invoicing process always was a bit of a puzzle, not to speak of the budgeting process.

Once the corner of creating a database had been turned, a whole landscape of new use cases offered itself. The streamlined process of entering orders somehow begged for budget forecasts. This, in turn, suggested change requests, to be based on analysis of JIRA items [*]. Once change requests were captured, the list of application releases could be connected. 

And all these data sets yielded lots of analysis options. We now could calculate development speed over time and compare budgeted cost to actual cost per change request.

The summary makes it look like an ambitious project. Had it been presented to me like that, a project competing for budget, I probably would have advised against it. “Don’t underestimate the effort. Aren’t there more pressing needs?”

But it simply came about organically. The work processes were mine anyway, I just gradually improved them. Time investment was limited. Cost was negligible. Benefits abounded. More and better analytical data made the client happy. More engagement and less boredom made me happy. Win-win.

[*] JIRA is an open-source database widely used to capture bugs and potential improvements to software systems.

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