Comment by doorhammer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by doorhammer | Hacker News Reader

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I think the example is apt enough for the situation of "repetitive tasks which humans are terrible".

I agree that additional more complex examples might be interesting, though.

It seems that there's always going to be a sliding scale, depending on how complex the task is. Some software will provide fairly straight-forward mechanisms for performing some tasks (such as find and replace) and some things will end up being potentially more difficult (maybe, say, find and replace with a regex).

In an office setting I think there's a good case here for having someone that's IT/programming/automation savvy working with people to improve their day to day process.

I've actually done that before at my job, in an informal capacity. I occasionally go sit with the folks on the operations side of the business so I can learn more about what they do, and more effectively build things for them, and often times I end up telling them a lot of tricks in excel, or word, or whatever else, that make there job easier. In a few cases I've managed to create quick tools for them that substantially reduce their workload with minimal effort on my part. In a strict cost-benefit analysis, it's probably not worth my time, but it pays a lot in inter-department relations. Of course, my working environment allows for that, but I mostly mean it as an anecdotal example of what I'm talking about. ymmv.

IT departments in most organizations devote themselves almost exclusively to preventing their users from causing inadvertent damage, and not enough time on enabling them to use the tools provided. Most IT organizations would benefit from sending staff out to work with users, see how they work and identify ways to help them better wield the laptops and software with which they've been provided, instead of hiding behind ticket systems.

Thats a great idea. I worked in IT for a few years and in any company above a certain size there is a sort of balkanization. Each department will just want to claim that any issue is "not our fault. We've performed perfectly!" Rather then everyone working together towards a common goal. The IT staff certainly have knowledge and understanding of the system they maintain + general computer use knowledge that comes from doing 'computery' tasks all day. By seeing how the users operate and sharing the appropriate techniques the users could get a productivity and wellbeing boost and the IT department might end up with less tickets and silly questions from clueless users.

In my experience in IT, as you are going from place to place in the office people would try to 'grab' you to help with something. I always acquiesced to this and would always see if I could share any techniques that would help the user in general based on the workflow I was seeing.

Yeah, I agree. This wouldn't work in most companies because that's just not the culture, but like you said, I think there's definite value in it.

You also have to deal with people perceiving your optimizations as a threat to their job security.

I see it as a form of process improvement, but instead of analyzing inter-employee/department processes, you're analyzing the processes and individual goes through.

Ticketing systems are a pain in the ass. I get the point of them, and I think they can be really valuable, but they so quickly become bureaucracy for the sake of bureaucracy.

My team is pretty free to decide how we do things right now, and we're considering adopting some form of issue tracking so we can get a better idea internally what's going on, but we're wary of it becoming ticket hell. More than likely the ticket will only ever be referenced inside the team and we'll just try to use it as a way to make sure we're collectively not losing track of things.

Some years ago, I looked in on a friend in another department, whom I found stressed out by the tedious job of removing malformed telephone numbers from spreadsheets. I took over her chair, pulled the spreadsheet in to Access, ran a couple of queries, and re-exported. In a couple of minute this did what would have been fifteen minutes or half an hour of work. I then saved the queries, wrote down the steps, and walked her through it again.

We should do more of this stuff, you are correct. The proper question, and maybe after the New Year we can send out a survey asking it, is What tedious and repetitive tasks are getting in the way of your real work?

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