Lull Period

The past 3 weeks were slightly nightmarish. From the second week of January, all the different departments had to submit their staff cost details to me for consolidation. This is the first year such role is undertaken by Finance. Previously, it was done by HR.

Putting aside that this was an extremely manual process where information resided in various departments and systems, the ‘lack-of-sincerity’ submissions exacerbated the consolidation. As the submission included both Finance (cost and revenue) and HR (headcounts) information, we have stated upfront that it should be a joint submission from Finance and HR. By joint submission, we did not expect separate inputs put together. By joint submission, we would expect combined efforts to put together and review the submission.

All the problems started because everyone was late in their submission. I only had a week to put together all the submissions to roll up a total Group’s view. This itself was already a tedious process as I had to do an excel consolidation of the information. Before this information could be consolidated, I had to check for any errors in submission. If the errors were in the numbers as I did not participate in each department’s budget moderation exercise. Yet, I managed to spot many errors because the errors made were simply blatantly staring in my face. These errors reflect the sloppy efforts of the preparers – total numbers across different sheets in the same file do not tie and some of the numbers within the same sheet do not add up. Once I made known the errors to the preparers, I even had to face tirade from them for ‘designing’ such a complicated spreadsheet. Then, some of the errors resurfaced even in their second or third submissions. Such to-and-fro-ing resulted in time wasted.

Needless to say, I could not roll-up the information during normal office hours and had to burn midnight and weekend oil to get the presentation pack on time for meeting with CEO and CFO.

The nightmare continued when my boss wanted more analysis. I acknowledged that her concerns and questions were valid and useful. However, being thoroughly exhausted by the whole consolidation process, I did not have time to ‘understand’ the numbers. My whole time was devoted to ensuring the numbers consolidated accurately. Hence, I felt more defeated and demoralized. At that moment of folly, I bleakly thought my boss was adding oil to fire. There were more than once when I felt like giving up and dreaded going to work to face the incessant errors in the staff cost numbers.

It was only this week when at least their second submissions did not contain so many apparent errors that I have managed to ‘enjoy’ the process more and try to analyse and understand the numbers. This is the part I like about my job.

When I was consolidating the numbers, I only felt like a number cruncher who was rolling up numbers. I am not exactly the most meticulous person in the world. When there is time constraints and high volume of numbers to consolidate, I tend to make mistakes. Being relatively new to this, I cannot even do a high-level sanity check to determine if the numbers look reasonable. Such intensive excel linking and summation also puts me off to the extent that the notion of moving on crosses my mind.

Yes, you are right. I am lousy. It is unbelievable that I get defeated by such a small set-back. Ah Peng reminded me that we cannot love all parts of our job, regardless of which job. There bound to be some aspects which we may not enjoy as much. If we take a run every time we encounter such situations then we will forever be on the move.

On hindsight and talking more openly to my boss, I tried to be more positive about this whole incident. Reflecting on what had happened, I believed I should learn from this experience.
Perhaps I should not be so harsh to myself and my boss. I knew I had tried my best. It was not as if I was doing nothing. Since this was the first attempt for such a large-scale consolidation, I should be happy with my own effort instead of only focusing on my failures.
If I were more positive and composed, I could have resolved things more effectively instead of unnerving everyone.
Although my boss spoke to me more critically in the last 3 weeks than she had for the last one year, I believed it was also because she was stressed by the whole exercise. I was partly responsible for dragging her into this ‘tornado’. My big-big-big boss ‘volunteered’ me to assist her in this exercise. Being my boss, she had stepped in to guide me and supported me. If she had not asked me to do so much, clearance with my big-big-big boss would not have been so smooth and we would have ended up doing more within a shorter period of time.

Now that I had understood some of the different requirement, I believed that I would be better prepared if I had to undertake this task again. It was not as daunting or even revolting as I first thought. Although this exercise has not come to an end, I hope I can bear in mind some of the lessons learnt and continue to improve this exercise for everyone.

Lastly, I am not an angel. I felt guilty of the bad vibes and pitfalls that I have committed over this exercise, but I hope I will not repeat them again. Sharing some of the advices that my boss has told me, some of the lull periods in work can still create learning opportunities. These learning may not necessarily be technical skills, but they could be other skills or even learning about the people you work with. Such learning will definitely be useful in making you work better in your next job.