The paperless office (now with 46% more paper)

This post is about the event which I had been worrying about a lot for a long time but I am now fairly confident is never going to occur (which, amoungst other things, I promised to elucidate further on last Thursday) (possibly not as exciting as I made it sound).

As eluded to in a number of previous posts and as work friends will already know, my employer has decided to embrace the 21st century and is moving towards e-planning and the paperless office. Which is fine. In theory. (Usual inevitable caveats here about parts getting withdrawn depending on events).

Now lots of people are involved but pretty much me and Andy have been tasked with the roll out of this thing on the floor - so how it works and how it gets customised and it gets used.

I was nervous about this to start off with and the more and more I have worked on it, the more and more I have worried that it is going to go horribly wrong. This is on account of planning being a quasi-legal paper based system and removing the paper makes it a logistical nightmare as you have to map out all the different types of paper that come through and the bizarre and crazy things these bits of paper say and what you do with them. Which takes time. However I am also rather worried that woefully insufficient cash has been thrown at this to make it work.

As time has gone on the faster and faster we have had to develop this thing and the longer and longer it appears it is going to take to do so. Supposedly we were going to have had the draft system in place to test in about 1 months time from now. Which is a terrifyingly short time scale knowing that (1) I still have to learn what I am doing (take about 2 months) and (2) I am going to have to actually do it (say about 4 months).

However, I have now seen the best of the best (with the same operating system), care of our friends down in Torquay. And well, lets just say that their e-planning paperless office generates 46% more paperwork. Yes that’s right folks, more paperwork (but now with a jazzy statistic so you can monitor it). So the best of the best have had a net increase in paper after developing it for six months whilst we have to go totally paperless in one month!

Suffice to say that with this as a comparison there is absolutely no chance whatsoever that the truly paperless office is going to be achieved quite so soon regardless of what instructions from the management are. It just ain't going to happen. Which makes me a hell of a lot more relaxed about it as now, however it pans out, I should have some room to think, and make sure it gets done right and might maybe work, perhaps.

Also I don’t have to worry so much about this curious process, which for various reasons was turning out to be the simplest (?) way of doing things:

Receive an email > print the email > scan the email back into the computer > print acknowledgement letter and send it by post.