CHAPTER 145 PROJECT MANAGER. 1980
When the final curtain dropped at Mercy Catholic Medical Center upon my performance, Sue and a few others who had worked for me came to my office to say goodbye. They gave me the cup pictured, which is still in use. I was appreciative they felt that way, but I never did. I always thought I was a pretty poor boss. I never liked telling people what to do or disciplining those who went astray. I felt I was too softhearted to be a boss. (Laurel, my oldest daughter, tells me this same cup was given to the boss in the TV show, The Office. She thinks I got it from some gift shop.)
boss ever. I am not alone in that opinion. I think nearly all who ever worked under him felt that way and he had over two hundred people reporting to him. Oh, I’m sure you could find someone somewhere that disagrees, but there are always those who find fault even in perfection, not that I’m claiming Walt Whittaker was perfect. I’d be hard pressed to name his flaws, however.
Oh, I suppose his preference for yellow walls perhaps. Walt suffered from red-green color blindness. The color he saw best was yellow, so he insisted all our office walls were painted that color. I was also warned about his driving. He tended to get the traffic light order mixed up.
I had two great bosses at Atlantic Richfield, John Murray and Don Jones, and I would have two more in the future, Dave Ernst (the first time around) and Lisa Butler, but there will be more about them later in this opus. Probably the only bad thing about having a great boss is you don’t want to leave them and that can prove a handicap, but more about that later also.
There were several things that made Walt so great. He wasn’t a micro-manager always looking over your shoulder. He told me when he hired someone he expected they would do their job and he shouldn’t have to be telling them what to do. He gave me autotomy to run my projects, as long as I kept him abreast of their progress. I never had him second guess me. Sometimes he questioned your plans, but he always let you give your reasons and more than most of the time he would let you do it your way. If he did ever pull rank and want things different you were expected to get on board. Once a decision was made everyone should support it. He would always listen to your suggestions and ideas, and he didn’t mind if your disagreed with him. He did not want yes men around him.
I not only was beginning a long relationship with a wonderful boss, I was starting the best job one could wish for (except maybe the paperboy job I had in Downingtown when I was 14). My official title was Operations, Methods and Project Manager for the Deposit Services and Data Preparation Divisions of Wilmington Trust Company. No one knew exactly what that title meant or what I was to do.
This could have been a problem, but instead proved to be very advantages. Walt had only recently taken over the management of the Data Preparation Division. The former head, named Bill Pryor, had just retired. Before he left he had begun looking at equipment to replace the keypunch unit. Walt felt that was a good place for me to begin.
contracts to purchase new keypunch machines from Sperry Rand to replace WTC’s old IBM versions. My task was just configuring how the new stuff would fit on the floor and coordinate the delivery and installation. Pretty easy start. But I was also asked to look into streamlining and automating our Retail Lockbox Unit. Ah, now there was a problem. What in the world was a Lockbox, I wondered?
My familiarity with the term involved that big thing that looked like a padlock that Real Estate Agents put over doorknobs when a house was for sale. You know, they hung there and had a compartment inside where the house keys were stowed so when the Agent brought a prospect around he could get into the house. He or she had a key to this contraption that opened the compartment and allow he or she to remove the home keys. Somehow when they said Retail Lockbox I didn’t think they were referring to these devices.
I had a lot of learning to do.
I had been down the road of missing signposts before. When I started my job at Olson Brothers, the egg breaker, if you recall there was no one there to teach me. The person who I replaced was gone, the man who hired me was gone, the man who was to be the new boss was away. You talk about learning on the job? That was really learning on the job.
But that job did have a history. It had a description. There were some people around who had some idea of what the position was. This job was different. It was a new job and no one there had a clue what it was supposed to be and what my duties were. I had to make it up as I went along. I had kept my workbook from the Systems Analysis class at Camden County Community College. There were a number of sheets in that workbook for the case exercises. I turned to them, modified them somewhat and these became the framework I built the project manager position upon. Probably the most important thing in there was a scheduling sheet. The next important tool was flowcharting.
I had even saved my flowcharting template. I even had my RPG Debugging Template, which contained a sample logic flow diagram. It pays to be a packrat, who never throws away things. Suddenly all those jobs and mix of schools came together. Over the course of my having this position I even got to employee my old art training.
The Retail Lockbox was a fair sized project. I had to analyze the work itself because I knew nothing about what it was. The product consisted of processing transactions for a variety of companies, the power company and the telephone company among others. You received payments and charges and had to get these is the customer’s accounts. It was much like the accounts receivable job I had at Atlantic, except nothing was automated.You received the physical checks and bills of each company.
Once I understood the work, I had to investigate available vendors of equipment, visit them, try the machines. I had to do a cost feasibility of one system versus another and develop justification reports to go to senior management to get approval for what I recommended.
Without getting into the weeds of the thing and boring everyone, I will just say I brought the project on board successfully and once in place it generated an incredible return on the investment. Our profit margin on this service became almost obscene, a fact that became very graphic when I did a follow up audit of the system to show senior management its success and potential. I mean this literally. I used a line graph to illustrate the differences between the old labor intense operation to the new automated system as well as the profit to expense and where break points would occur in expansion. I did not realize until I did my presentation that some of my graph lines formed the image of an erect male penis.
Eventually the enormous margins of our current operation put greed in the hearts of senior management. They did decide to expand the operation and it became a center to process other banks’ credit cards as well. This was possible because the state government had changed the regulations on credit cards and issuers, so now even if a bank was in Utah, it could base the credit card operation in Delaware and have no limit on the interest charged. In other words, usury laws went out the window. A bank didn’t even have to have a brick and mortar presence in Delaware, as long as they used a local processor, which was going to be us.
It is a funny thing how businesses can find a way to skirt regulation. Delaware has long taken advantage by having very liberal business regulations. There had been a long standing bit of bragging that more companies were incorporated in Delaware that anywhere. Half of all public-traded companies and 60% of the Fortune 500 companies incorporated in Delaware. There were jokes about all the empty offices existing here. These are the official residency address required, but most had no staff, just an empty desk, a telephone and an address
Anyway, we did begin lining up several giant out of state banks for
our lockbox business. This would eventually prove foolish, but I’ll come back to why later. Myself, I was off to a great start and I even got daring. I was given the Bulk File Conversion as a project.
Our bank, like many others, filed our customers’ items by account number. (The old revolving fire cabinets on the left) Something banks were starting to do was change to a bulk file system. Bank statements were sent out over the course of a month in cycles, meaning some statements went out on say the 5th of each month, then others went out on the 6th and so forth. Cycles had been assigned customers when they opened their account originally not by some criteria such as alphabetic by name. Each customer was then stored in large revolving files in account number order. Clerks would have a pull list from a list of checks for those accounts within a statement cycle about to me mailed. They would have to go through the files looking for the specific account number and pull all the items to be included with the statement.
statements for a particular cycle were to be mailed all the items in that bulk were simply pulled and sent to the sorters to go to the proper statement. This cut down on a lot of labor time. However, every bank who converted to this system did it over the period of a month, until all the cycles had been run.
I suggested we do the whole conversion over one weekend. Impossible, I was told. Nobody does that.
Well, we did. It took a good deal of planning on my part, but on that weekend I had everything ready and we used three staging areas. It was pretty cool. No other bank had tried this, but we managed it and it all went smoothly. On the left are my plans, schedules and flowcharts for the bulk filing conversion.
All the file trays and new cabinets were ordered, received and staged before the conversion began. On the right is a stack of the new trays in staging area one with my oldest child, Laurel, standing in front of them.
this. All the items would be in trays by cycle. There would be no sorting through thousands of accounts. The workers would simply pull the trays for a cycle and be off with them. Great labor saver. On the left I am getting all the new files finalized to receive the new cycled trays as they came from the sorter.
We had everyone in that day, all with assigned tasks and areas. People who would pull the items, people to transport the trays here and there and people to stack and verify at the end after the sorters had done their job.
I had to have maintenance build ramps over the steps to facilitate the movement of the tray carts.
No comments:
Post a Comment