Nice People Thread Part 9 - and so it continues

Generali

PasturesNew wrote: »

What was the final test?

Can I sit in a room with the person for hour upon hour each day.

PasturesNew wrote: »

Why would you assume he'd be bored? Numbers are lovely..... it's nice to just sit and do data analysis for weeks on end to produce results.

I've had a lot of data analysis jobs using various databases and Excel.... love it.

Because most of the job is pretty workaday. There is a smaller amount that is analytical and a smaller amount still that involves some quite complex politics and understanding how our business works. It's quite a tough role to fill as we are after someone who's happy to do the boring bit most of the time but has the capability to step up quite a long way on demand.

SingleSue

I love numbers too, can sit for hours messing about with complex files which had 20 containers with all different charges and delivery addresses etc on them and getting them to balance up at the end...my colleagues used to pass the horrible files (as they called them) to me as they would get horribly confused and frustrated with them.

I called them the interesting files.....something I could really get my teeth into. I found the simple, quick files incredibly boring and unsatisfying.

PasturesNew

SingleSue wrote: »

...

Yes, but he'd find you too boring to sit with
You and me both ... let's go to the pub to talk about him

vivatifosi

SingleSue wrote: »

I love numbers too, can sit for hours messing about with complex files which had 20 containers with all different charges and delivery addresses etc on them and getting them to balance up at the end...my colleagues used to pass the horrible files (as they called them) to me as they would get horribly confused and frustrated with them.

I called them the interesting files.....something I could really get my teeth into. I found the simple, quick files incredibly boring and unsatisfying.

Maybe it is another NP trait alongside the whole Herts/Jewish/mushrooms things. I love data and seeing patterns in it. Trying to get this across to friends and colleagues is not always interesting. However, my sense is that there are a lot of NPs who also love playing with data.

Do you think your sons could live in Australia? Otherwise I think you should go work for Gen;)

Doozergirl

PasturesNew wrote: »

Here's a stupid anecdote from a job I did in recent years .. I went to a temp job interview to do some data analysis for the RBS/Lloyds group. Maybe I shouldn't name them .... but s0d it.

Each organisation had a way of measuring all staff's efforts - they'd each have a measurement by their manager of how well they'd performed and then their managers would do a report per dept on their staff improvement.

But - when the two orgs merged, they each used different scoring systems.

The job I had was to take the two results from the two organisations, use a way of converting one set of results into the other - then compare how each of the staff depts were doing to present to management as an overview.

Lloyds TSB call them balanced scorecards. Everyone from counter staff up has one and all departments and divisions had one for their sales targets.

I had my own geographical area to manage in insurance, but because there were only two of us that could use excel with any panache, we ended up producing the BSCs for the whole division from weekly data feeds from the underwriters. I didn't have to make anything up, but in terms of personal performance BSCs I can understand how people may have wanted to alter things - especially when the issue would have been that jobs were indeed on the line and they were comparing bank to bank.

Two months after LTSB aquited HBOS, everyone in my team but three of us lost their jobs. We took someone not long after from an HBOS business; my manager was managing someone who had apparantly been promoted into role on a much greater salary (protected) than her. HBOS grades were different, their jobs were different and their salaries different. I think, from an internal perspective, that apparantly true data may not have taken into account the nuances of the businesses being compared. In a few respects, it may not have been comparing apples with apples - they were entirely different businesses and huge ones at that.

LydiaJ

Generali wrote: »

I'm not going to spend half a day writing an Excel test paper, ever! If that makes the selection process unfair, too bad. Life's not fair.

Generali wrote: »

It's simply not worth the effort. A point that people often miss about business is that doing the very best is rarely worth it. Good enough is good enough 99% of the time.

What's been suggested amounts to creating a selection tool that can be used over and over again for future appointments, and which will enable the person doing the hiring to base their selection on something relevant rather than what boils down to not much more than a whim? And that's in order to appoint somebody who'll be doing important and responsible work and getting paid tens of thousands of pounds, or probably more if the appointment lasts any significant length of time? And in the business world that's not worth half a day of one person's effort?

Nothing was actually needed to convince me that my attitudes would never ever fit in the business world, but if I hadn't already been convinced, I would be now. In my world, spending significant amounts of time devising reliable and accurate ways of assessing how good people are at things they're supposed to be able to do is a huge part of the everyday work, so I suppose it just spills over into our view of selecting people for jobs too.

vivatifosi wrote: »

Maybe it is another NP trait alongside the whole Herts/Jewish/mushrooms things. I love data and seeing patterns in it. Trying to get this across to friends and colleagues is not always interesting. However, my sense is that there are a lot of NPs who also love playing with data.

I love data too. Especially when I can display it graphically.
I use excel a lot both at work and at home. My piece de resistance of excel programming even managed to get admiring comments from a friend who's a professional programmer, which, as a mere dabbler, I was pretty chuffed with.

michaels

No one was able to help on the toilet seat question so I'll try you lot on a data presentation queston instead.

WE display monthly expenditure data broken down by category in a pie chart as a quick way for users to see proportions. Occasionally for accounting reasons for some categories in some months expenditure may be negative. What is the best grapihical way to display the data?

lostinrates

Loo seat try the 'in your house' inc DIY forum michaels. There are some plumbing friendly peeps in there.

PasturesNew

LydiaJ wrote: »

And in the business world that's not worth half a day of one person's effort?

It's not representative of the business world's thinking .... I'd have found/set a test ... and made it good, fair and measurable.

As you say, it's a reusable benchmark,

Although, the trend in all sectors has been to select people "just like them" - whether that's by the councils expecting people to have experience/knowledge of their in-house software and procedures ... or small business' choosing on whether the person seems fun enough to go down the pub with them after work.

It seems it's no longer about whether you can do the job; it's more about being a performer, blagger and confidence trickster. Or, as I see in many workplaces, fitting into some identifiable gang, whether that's the handbag you carry or the clothes you wear or the area you live in.

PasturesNew

michaels wrote: »

WE display monthly expenditure data broken down by category in a pie chart as a quick way for users to see proportions. Occasionally for accounting reasons for some categories in some months expenditure may be negative. What is the best grapihical way to display the data?

I'd wonder whether creating two pie charts were meaningful... I'd keep it as it is and add a list underneath for "negatives this month".... although I'd actually question whether the information and a pie chart is meaningful at all.

Are you trying to rein in expenditure/keep track.... or pat yourselves on the back?

I'd want to know the purpose of keeping the data, what's the message ...and see if your current method just means you're reporting one thing, while hiding the underlying issues of wastage and overspending.

Proportions mean nothing. Especially not with one snapshot.