Let's math out how much this spreadsheet fiasco is costing the shareholders

I'm not just an affected person, I'm a shareholder too, and I resent the amount of waste involved here. Immediate displacement of any director or executive that saw this as a legitimate business approach would be a good start to reducing waste.

600 individuals engaged in the MSLIST/Spreadsheet insanity, both US and Overseas employees under Tech.

Average cost of employment 200.00/hr (remember, on average it costs the company 2X employee pay, and the list of individuals includes directors, senior managers, and senior lead/lead engineers, if anything 200.00/hr is conservative).

It's taking about an average of 1 hour a day to fill this out, or 5 hours in a standard work week:

600x5=3000 personnel hours per week.
3000x200=600,000 per week for this stupidity.

But wait, there's more.

Participants had to back date 2 weeks prior to the announcement. That took on average, 5 additional hours to go back through emails, calendar, Service Now, Teams, etc, to pull that additonal information.

So 600,000 to back date the information.

Ohhhh, there is even more! After completing it, the decision makers overseeing this fiasco changed their minds, and produced another set of variables. Requiring people to go back and modify their spreadsheets, AGAIN. Another 2 hours per person down the drain.

600x2=1200
1200x200=240,000

So up to the beginning of March, we're at:

600,000 x 2 = 1.2 Million (2 weeks of updates)
600,000 = Backdating to February 1st
240,000 = Editing it to match the new set of activities.

Total for February = 2,040,000 OVER 2 MILLION FOKKING DOLLARS

Now, let's talk about March. So the same weekly cost, we're up to 2 weeks, so 1.2 Mil.

But wait....you also get:

Into 2nd week, we now are presented with a MSLIST solution. We went from spreadsheets, to quite possibly the only slower means of inputting data. We get to go BACK and manually put in the first week and a half, since the data was already input into spreadsheets, that only took about 2 hours per person, 240K

So for February we're at 2,040,000 and March to date we're at 1,240,000 for a grand total to date of 3,280,000

Now, 3 Mil is a drop in the bucket for the bank right? But what can you do with 3 Mil:

Buy an actual timetracking tool, or the SN module.
Keep several engineers employeed for several years
Buy a mirror for the NY offices so that the executives there can see what their new clothes really look like.

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Also in tech. No spreadsheet fiasco for me.

If you aren’t doing this but “are in tech” are you in CTO? That’s the only part that matters. If you are in CTO and aren’t stuck with this then you should feel existentially blessed.

But this entire thread is overblown. Is it absolutely ridiculous that we’re doing what we are in the manner we’re forced to? YES, 100%.

But I doesn’t take me anywhere near an hour a day to drop 10-15 entries. It just goes to show how Mickey Mouse Wells is for a giant corporation. This ask is standard fare in the contracting world but even the smallest MSP has their stuff together and isn’t constantly changing the target.

I will say that anyone who spent any brain cells or time on trying to accurately reflect exactly what they do in a day or get entry items added to the available dropdowns, YOU ARE A FOOL! No one cares what YOU do, they only care what we ALL do. Admin time, Dev, etc. that’s it. The first spreadsheet took me 30 minutes to fill out for the whole month. Why? You must be new, it was never going to be a valid source of data and “they” were going to throw it out.

@ac+1jpfvhr22 No, he just needlessly had a machine rephrase it for him (or explain it to him), so he could add the weird axe to grind with some specific guy.

Why does this site attract such obsessive nutcases lol

If it takes you that long, maybe that's a test to see if you're competent enough to work here

@a1 here, work in WF tech as well, and have never heard of this.

" 1 or 2 levels below Idgit that all employees in tech track their time down to the minute on a specific share point spreadsheet"

Never heard of this, and I am in tech,

@a5+1jpfvhr22 AI slop? Yup, just don't pay attention to things. Practice a little cyber bullying -- fits you well. You are probably a micromanager at this bank. This bank is a posterchild for psychological abuse -- for years. This is the root cause of its inefficiencies and failures. Rich Chung, one of the key people implementing agile at Wells left to go back to JPM. Probably to get away from handling people like you. https://www.linkedin.com/in/chungrich/

@a5+1jpfvhr22 Oh wow, an AI slop version of the OP, which is also somehow still too long and tedious. Thanks so much for your tech-savvy contribution.

A person is complaining about the cost of entering task time information into a spreadsheet. But let’s step back—shouldn't the bank’s tech division be fully agile by now?

Several years ago, the bank adopted agile, implemented Jira, and hired scrum managers. If that transformation had succeeded, this information would be easily extracted from Jira. Instead, management is forcing all tech employees to track their time down to the minute in a constantly changing SharePoint spreadsheet—now replaced by a cobbled-together MSList system. The result? A massive, ongoing waste of time that is actively delaying and ignoring real work.

Rich Chung, who spoke at Atlassian Team 22 while at Wells Fargo, is now back at JPM. His departure is just one example of experienced leaders moving on. If agile had truly taken root, these manual tracking processes wouldn't exist. Agile cannot succeed in a toxic environment—it requires psychological safety. And this bank's leadership has a long history of undermining that.

The never-ending efficiency layoffs, vague location strategies, continued offshoring, and failed attempts at agile and cloud migration all point to deeper systemic issues. The tech division is an accident waiting to happen.

The Spreadsheet Fiasco: A Waste of Millions
According to one analysis, the ongoing time-tracking process has already cost the bank over $3 million in wasted productivity. That includes:

$600,000 per week wasted on time entry.
$600,000 lost to backdating old records.
$240,000 wasted on revising spreadsheets due to management changes.
$1.2 million wasted in February, another $1.24 million (and counting) in March.
And for what? A broken process that prevents actual work from getting done—one that could have been solved with a proper time-tracking tool or a ServiceNow module. Instead, leadership continues to chase inefficiency while cutting talent and pretending offshoring is a silver bullet.

At some point, shareholders and employees alike need to ask: Who is actually being held accountable for this waste?

OP is probably referring to the demand from 1 or 2 levels below Idgit that all employees in tech track their time down to the minute on a specific share point spreadsheet, which management kept changing over and over again, and is now using some cobbled together mslist. It's really a pretty disgusting waste of time. So much work is getting deferred, or just ignored because everybody is sc--wing with this piece of scheit. Thanks to the OP, I've been amazed nobody else has brought it up.

What is this "spreadsheet fiasco"?

We moved to automated time tracking at the start of the year.

Thread regarding Wells Fargo & Co. layoffs

Let's math out how much this spreadsheet fiasco is costing the shareholders

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