Organizer

Judy hired me as the Circulation Manager, but I functioned as the office administrator.  When I arrived at Heuthig Publishing, Ltd., the entire Accounts Receivable system consisted of one pile on her desk.  On a good day.  She knew where everything was, or at least what pile it was in, but file retreival was cumbersome at best.  Finally, I went into her office and asked her for all the billing and receiving files and papers.  Of course, she wanted to know why, and I told her to just trust me.  By the end of the week I'd set up one drawer in the filing cabinet with folders for each of our advertisers and vendors with both accounts payable and accounts receivable sections.  We were never late paying a bill again or unable to know within a minute or two which advertisers owed us and how much they owed.  When the company grew large enough to hire a bookkeeper, she told me I'd made her job easier because of my files.

The Pitney Bowes Office of Workforce Diversity Programs, among other things, responded to discrimination charges filed with state and federal agencies.  We had drawers of case files, both open and closed, although most open case files sat in the cubicle of the investigating staff officer.  The filing system was fairly easy to navigate, but there was no way to easily see case status or detect patterns.  I set up a fairly simple database in Excel that allowed us to see cases by region, type of case, response deadlines, open/closed status, etc.  Eventually, the management team assigned one of the staff attorneys to assist us in the investigation and response process.  One of the first things she wanted to do was implement a tracking system.  To her surprise, I handed her the one we already had in place.  She was even more surpised that she didn't need to make any changes to it.

At the Episcopal Church Center we learned procedures for many things by trial and error.  Often we wouldn't learn that a procedure had changed until we got paperwork back with a note telling us we'd used the wrong form or submitted the wrong documentation.  I started making notes and updating them every time we learned of a new change.  I gave copies of my notes to any new hire I worked with during the course of my job.  After a large reorganization, my new director asked me to head a committee to put together a procedures handbook for the new center.  The committee used my notes as the basis for the new handbook, which the other centers asked for, too.  Once we completed the handbook, I went on to develop a set of shortcut cards for the most used procedures such as Travel Requests, Check Requisitions, and Expense Reports that were used by both officers and administrative staff across the organization.

In our rapidly changing environment at the Church Center, I tracked projects from the idea phase through completion using an 11" x 17" white board and small PostIt notes.  This allowed me to quickly assess priorities, see upcoming deadlines, and change things as needed.  I'd originally done this on the computer, but even when I put the tracking document on the shared drive, coworkers would forget to look there.  They could always find the white board on my desk even when I was out of the office. 

And when they eliminated my position of Children's Ministries Officer, I used my last eight weeks at the Church Center to document all of my projects, social media accounts, and files, both electronic and paper.  I also worked with the archivist to make sure that important historical files were maintained that might otherwise have been lost, especially electronic files.  I left her, and the Formation Ministries team lead, with a complete map of my files both on my hard drive and on the shared drive. 

Even my endings are organized.

What He Said

On his blog Anchorhold David Townsend pretty much sums up my feelings about Ash Wednesday and Lent.  Read Dust.