Happy Path

Clarity

Somehow the angst of June had morphed into July. I'd gone on vacation, on the brink of losing my mind to FinTech. It was a much-needed, much-appreciated two weeks of downtime. I thought a lot about what was next for me, as I'd been doing for months. I kept my cards close to my chest and told my family only that I was looking for something that would be a better fit for my skill set and interests. I've always been like that—I want to find my own way out of trouble and fear. For the most part, I preferred to struggle privately.

When I returned to The Bank, another full-timer had been laid off and our director was reporting to a different Vice President. By all accounts, the sweeping changes were a new experience. Long-time employees who had never experienced lay-offs were being packaged out. Contractors were given notice that they wouldn't be renewed. People were choosing sides and taking action. It was a general shake-up. I remained meh.

I still hadn't met with anyone from the PMO and I'd decided that they could come to me. Weekly emails concerning new practices—or at least practices new to me—found their way to my inbox and I mostly ignored them. I developed a deeply truculent attitude toward what was happening around me. It remained important that I supported my ADS group, but I wasn't subscribing to anything that I didn't perceive as affecting me directly. I was in an IT&S holding pattern.

One of my duties included timekeeping for my team. You will recall my love of MultiTRAK. Well, that ancient and frustrating system was being phased out—hallelujah! My feelings were more of empathy than personal relief. It was an awful program and it needed to go, but I really just wanted everything to be put on hold until I could get out of the way. Was that too much to ask? The new system, confidently called Clarity, was coming and I thought I still had time to prepare because our group wasn't changing over until the last wave in mid-October. Except I was no longer considered part of my group when it came to time tracking.

A precursor to the new time management system was four days of torture with a spreadsheet innocently referred to as a "tick sheet". All we had to do was tick boxes and record what we were doing. Easy, said the company. Do it, said the boss. We even had a meeting where our director told us not to ignore this exercise. Charles had been cherry picked to attend a focus group for the new order, so he had a direct line to the scrutiny of tick sheet submission. The Bank wanted to know how we were spending our time, with four boxes to fill each hour.

Inevitably, the first question was which box do we tick for the time we spend filling out the tick sheet? HAHA! Everybody laughed, but I actually spent most of the first morning answering questions related to the form. Since I'd done some training and was the go-to person for administrative questions, it made perfect sense for my entire team to come to me one-by-one to ask what was essentially the same question. I couldn't fault them—they never had to think about their time or their contracts because I took care of that. They wanted to know if they were doing it right, not wanting to make themselves or the department look bad.

Once everyone else was squared away, I started filling out my own sheet. You know how budgeting is a great way to see where you spend your money? Well, taking stock of what you're doing every 15 minutes is a great way to create a map of how you spend your workday. It was more obvious than ever that my job with ADS wasn't project-related, but department-related. Everything I touched had to do with departmental support or covered a number of projects at once. The tick sheets for the contractors on my team looked like eight hours of work on a single project. My tick sheet looked like a Jackson Pollock painted with checkmarks.

In the end, we all survived four days of work reporting and were very glad to send off the tick sheet for a final time on a Thursday evening prior to a long weekend. However, I still had to warn my team that this was a harbinger of the new system to come. The Bank wanted accountability and this was one way to ensure that funds were being properly allocated. The tick sheet was just the warm-up for life under a microscope.