The dumbest part of every job

After some time working as a Project Manager in a big international corporation and cooperating with the biggest clients I finally decided to write about the most annoying, time consuming, generating tremendous amount of costs and just the most hideously stupid part of my job (and not only mine) - tracking and reporting. 

Few days ago our client from one of the biggest automotive company in the world asked us to prepare a report for last year. Generally, we are localizing and translating all kind of stuff. So we had to sum up how many words we translated last year. Seems not so complicated, right? Yeah, it wasn’t but I had to open exactly 139 excel documents and it was just me who was responsible for 1/12 of the projects!!

Can you just imagine how much time me and my colleagues lost?

Let’s sum this up to make it even more understandable. I spent almost 3 hours on this, my colleagues probably the same. There are 7 people in my team, so 7x3 gives 21 hours (two and a half days) of unproductive work. It was only to give a number of words we translated last year…Of course the client paid for this. It also effected our morale - it is rather not ambitious and challenging. 

It is so funny, because we talk a lot about innovation, business process automation, super hyper new solutions etc. My company is of the biggest in the sector, we translate majority things you use all the time and we still track data in excel (our clients do exactly the same) and we still waste so much time to pull all the information when needed.