Stop the presses!

[plonq]

Today is the cut-off for one of the key metrics I produce. The deadline is, and always has been the second Thursday of the month. This day was dictated by the group whose performance is being measured by these numbers. I contacted the business liaison this morning to confirm that they wanted the numbers run on schedule, and he said, "Yes, go ahead and run the metrics."

Now I should point out that all of the people who are out there massaging the numbers for their department are using the same software tool as I am to generate the monthly figures. There are three clearly-marked buttons in the application for generating reports for Yesterday, Last Week, and Last Month. Maybe I made them too cryptic with names like that, and should have labelled the last one "Press this button to see the same numbers that plonq will be sending to the executives for their monthly scorecard." Yet every month when I run the figures, at least one of the divisions gets caught totally by surprise when they see the numbers.

This month it was Montreal who panicked. They fired up the editor tool and made some frantic changes that they should have done at some point in, say, the past thirteen days! They begged me to re-issue the numbers. Claim it was a mistake. Tell them it was a rounding error. Blame Satan.

Since the VPs are mostly interested in our Quarterly and Year-To-Date numbers, I re-ran the report to see if the edits made enough of a difference to be worth re-stating the numbers on the scorecard. The figure I produce comes from dividing number A (which is fairly small) into number B (which is fairly large). The changes they made effectively removed 6 from the numerator, which changed the ratio by about .0068%

They wanted me to re-state my scorecard for a difference of seven-thousandths of a percent.

Sure, why not? Lunch was good, and I was feeling charitable -- and these guys need all the help they can get. With rounding, it was actually enough to a barely perceptible change in our final metric. Somewhere out there is somebody who is looking at this figure and thinking, "Damn, we did 1/100% better than I was expecting!"

Comments

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

The department of Hellish numbers and Satanic Obsfucation approves of the data in this report, and testifies to its accuracy. All who read this report are summarily sentenced to either one month in hell, or a day as Plonq's assistant. If you've read this far then it's already too late. Pack up your soul moisturizer and prepare for the worst. There is no escape; there is only Zuul.

[plonq.livejournal.com]

As much as I would love to have an assistant, I don't think I could drink that much coffee in one day (because I'm way too protective of my work to let him or her actually touch it).

[plonq.livejournal.com]

Some days I swear Scott Adams had a hand in creating my company.