Every job I’ve had came with the same headache. Keeping track of documents.
As a PM, it was submissions and approvals. In warranty, it was NCRs, FRACAS and RAMS. Now, on the operator side, it’s NCRs and correspondence again, plus design documents.
Part of it is personal. My memory is good, but I’m careless with tracking. Things slip past me. So I build systems to catch what I’d miss.
In the PM days, everything important moved by formal letter, and some of it had to be closed out. The agreed list of documents needing approval was one of those. Follow the letter numbers and you could trace each one. Letter A submitted a document. Letter B was the reply, and it told you whether that document was approved.
VBA was blocked for security, so I built it with formulas. I have one rule for tools like this. If entering data is a hassle, people stop using it. Every letter, in or out, went on one log sheet, one line each. Excel sorted out the rest. The incoming and outgoing sheets, each document’s status and a dashboard all updated from that log. The graph was the one part I never managed to automate. I updated it by hand.
When a manager asked for a status update, most people dug through old emails and updated the list line by line. It could take hours, sometimes a day or two. With the tool, I only needed the letter numbers. Ten or fifteen minutes. Later I logged each letter as it came in, and the graph took under five minutes.
My nickname back then translates badly into English. The polite version is “Excel formula maniac.” My team leader liked the tool enough to have the other PMs on our team use it.
Later, in the PMO, I spent six months with the IT team trying to move it onto our SAP-based ERP. They were far better at building systems than I was. What they couldn’t easily feel was what annoyed the people entering the data. Then the PMO was dissolved, and I was back to Excel.
In Canada, on the warranty side, I did the same for FRACAS and RAMS. That’s where it always stopped. I knew what the tool should do, but Excel was the only thing I could build it with.
I knew people were writing code with AI. I just didn’t know where to start. A former colleague encouraged me to ask the AI how to do it and follow along. So I paid for one and tried. It didn’t get me very far. Trying another meant a second subscription, which meant asking my wife. Approved with comments. I’m still closing them out.
Now, on my own time, I’m building tools for the work I do today. By a developer’s standards they’re probably rough. But they fit the job, because the person with the problem is the one designing them. Same rule as the Excel days. Entering data stays simple, and the program does the busy work, graph included.
The video rebuilds the old tool from memory, with AI and sample data. The original stayed with the company.