Spread to thin?

Today we had a two hour session to review the upcoming transition of the United States affiliates from their current USA based expense reporting system to the already existing global expense reporting system. We have a meeting of all of the financial controllers for the operating companies coming up at the end of March, and as we go through the detailed agenda of that presentation we recognize that we have a lot areas that being added to the list of "to-do's" but we have yet to start working through what some of these areas might entail. It has become apparently obvious that we are exeedingly understated for a rolled of this kind in terms of making sure we can cover all bases from a training/communication perspective. Furthermore, some of the head people on the project have different opinions on what direction we should go in terms of technical and application based choices. In addition, it seems that lot of different people/groups are trying to piggy back on the next phase of the gXRS rollout and it is causing a lot of tension and headaches for people on the implementation team for Asia Pacific and habitually for the United States. Some steps need to be taken to help alleviate the burden of work that will be associated with all of these different rollouts.

Job scare?

It's been awhile since I have posted. I have to get a better habit of documenting my day at work. It would prove to be a very useful tool. Anyway, today I had a conversation when I got to work with one of my colleagues. He informed me of an email that he received about one of the project groups we are affiliated with. Apparently there budget for this year has been cut almost in half. It is important, because this is a group that was promising us a tremendous amount of funding to accelerate the roll out of gXRS to the US so that it would included their Healthcare Compliance Module. Now they are pushing back, saying that they don't have the budget to justify what we are charging them to do the extra work. Initially, I thought perhaps my job (beyond this year) might be in jeopardy because of this new information. Luckily, it's not going to impact our groups plans and we are moving forward. What a relief! It does go to show you that a job is a very sacred thing, and no matter how secure you feel (even in company like J&J) there are always things that could impact your security. This is a "bad" time for the company because many of the affiliates are not performing as well has they have in the past. As a result, the organization as a whole is takin measures that they haven't had to in previous years. Only time will tell if this is a temporary phenomenon or a new trend. It does make me feel good that I am slightly insulated from the negative results because I am part of Corporate.

More to come.

Being too friendly

My coworker warned me early on that I should not be overly friendly when helping peopel with specific problems that could probably be solved if they bothered to take the time to figure it out themselves. Typically, this occurs with reporting issues on the eXRS and gXRS systems where we have provided certain employees with access to reporting tools. We also give some minor training and then send the employees off to do reporting on their own. In specific circumstances it becomes necessary to assist by creating custom reports, sometimes which take a significant amount of time. However, it seems that more and more the employees become dependent on my help and are constantly asking for help, even with issues that could be done on their end with only a modest amount of effort. It seems that many employees are just lazy, and if someone (namely me) is willing to do the work for them they are going to continue to vist that "well" until it is all dried up. This is not to suggest that I do not enjoy helping figure out reporting issues or working out bugs with the Cognos tool but I do no appreciate when an employee think that there is the most important one and deserves my immediate time and attention.

Okay enough complaining. Today is a little slow because we are still gearing up for the new rollout of Asia Pacific for gXRS. I know that the avalanche of work is on the horizon so I am trying to map out what my responsibitlies are going to be, at least as close as I can predict.

Vice Versa

Whenever I get an "urgent" request from someone for reporting information that they need, I take it seriously. I also hope that if I ever had a request for them they would take the initiative to find me an answer or at least respond in a timely manner. However, it seems more often than not people are always in rush when it comes to their own issues and when someone else asks a favor of them suddenly everything else becomes more important. I think the standard should be that I do something ASAP if its important and, vice versa, they should (at least try) do the same. This is especially true when I take a lot of time to finish a complex assignment for someone; get it to them ahead of schedule (at my own priorities demise); only to find out that they aren't in the office for the next few days. How could this have been that important if they aren't around to get my email anyway?

Of course, that same person inevitably comes back and immediately has corrections or changes they want done... and those too have be urgent and immediate. Its amazing!

I can't wait until we roll out the new reporting tool for gXRS. This will hopefully alleviate some of my frustrations (but certainly not all of them).

The MRC Business Unit Dilemma

Yesterday, I had a discussion with someone from the travel department that wanted to get aggregate data for different segments of the entire corporation. The way we have the information is at too low of level and needs to "rolled up" to match up with the breakouts that they used in previous reporting, specifically for hotel spend locally and globally. The problem is there is no consistent way that these smaller companies are grouped. Nobody seems to possess a document that sums it all up neat and clean. You would think a multi-billion dollar a year company would have the resources to handle something this critical. Alas, another time that there are mixed signals and poor communication between departments. It is certainly something that needs to be resolved on our end... this will be critical for the upcoming transation of the domestic reporting tool into the globalized version of the system.