Workflow Analysis. It's even got a beautiful name.
Last week we are asked to fill out a voluminous excel spreadsheet about EVERY task we received/performed in the week with such useful information as, 'Authority Required to Perform the Task' and, 'The Average Time that Any Single Person Would Take To Carry Out the Task'. Leaving alone the fact that the latter is not really a sentence that makes any sense it was arduous and basically pointless. And I had to wonder, who the hell is going to read these?
Of course the guy up the tree who asked for them can't read them because he'd have to read a big Excel spreadsheet for every person in the tree under him. With an average branching factor of about 8 locally on our organisation chart that makes about 512 (83) for the earliest guy it could be for (I don't know who its for but I know its not for my boss or his boss), obviously the numbers grow exponentially for every step up from there (although in other parts of the organisation both vertically and horizontally branching factor is typically a lot lower than 8).
Anyway you don't have to worry about Francesco Ciao (CEO) having to read more than 12,000 spreadsheets because it turns out that's not how it's going to work. In fact the boss is going to have to go through the 10 or so he gets from his direct report and amalgamate them (and so on up the tree? I don't know.) So this whole thing was just an exercise in getting raw material for our department's über-spreadsheet -- even more pointless than I first imagined. I'm glad mine was sarky, random and incomplete now.
