Operations Research Management Science - Was It Something I Said?

OR/MS Today - October 2002

Was It Something I Said?

Weddings & Workflow

By Vijay Mehrotra

A few short weeks from my wedding day. The closer we get, the more "real" it seems. Much has happened since we got engaged: the wedding date has been selected, the site located, the reception facility chosen and booked, and the invitations designed, printed and shipped. We have dealt with florists, bakers, caterers, champagne vendors, travel agents and retailers. We have even addressed some bigger questions, like what to include in the ceremony, who to have in the wedding party, and what to wear for the big day.

Jennifer and I are getting through the whole thing just fine, and we're still solidly on speaking terms with one another. Unfortunately, I already have some real regrets: "data management" and "workflow."

Way back in college, I spent a couple of summers working for a catering company that frequently handled weddings. One day, I saw a customer make a down-payment to reserve our services for his wedding, still several months away. I felt a spontaneous sense of empathy. I wondered, "How is this poor guy going to remember that he has already put down a deposit with us? How will he keep track of how much he's paid out, and to whom?"

The next weekend, I was scheduled for a wedding reception. Arriving early in my white shirt and blue slacks, I fell into the usual routine, setting place settings for nearly 300 guests, a sea of round tables, silverware and starched linens.

This led me to another epiphany: Every one of these people must have gotten an invitation in the mail to their home address. Each one sent in a response card. Someone had to write down somewhere that they were going to come, so that they could create these nice little name cards. And someone had to call us with the final count so that the kitchen could place its food order.

It's all just data!

I vowed that when I got married, it was all going to be handled differently, efficiently, optimally. I would use software to tame this process, to master it.

Reality turned out to be quite different. My fiancée and I ended up creating a bunch of different spreadsheets with guest lists, tasks and notes. I also wound up with a master list of addresses in Microsoft Outlook, leveraging the Mail Merge features of Office to create our labels. We swapped many e-mails with the friend who designed our invitations, and traded phone calls and faxes from the DJ. We are definitely scrambling to get through it all in time.

What happened?

Basically, we just started doing things to get ready for the wedding. Suddenly we were sending e-mails back and forth regarding various topics, and talking about things over dinner. We soon began to lose track of what had and had not been done.

Being a well-organized person, my fiancée then decided to organize tasks and lists within a spreadsheet, and off we went. We are really good at using spreadsheets, so there was no training period at all, making it very easy to get started. Soon enough, once we had a critical mass of information into Excel, it seemed to make perfect sense just to keep on going. I knew there was a better way to operate, but being busy with other things, I never found the time to research and propose another solution.

Soon after I had accepted the data management status quo, however, complexity began to appear when it was time to send out invitations. So many of my addresses were in Outlook that I didn't want to go through the process of migrating them into Excel. Meanwhile, Jennifer was getting e-mails with addresses, which she dutifully put into her spreadsheets, and my parents were sending me Word files full of addresses in raw text format.

The net result: I spent an inordinate amount of time cutting and pasting addresses into Outlook, and then sorting and merging and printing in a frenzy in order to get the labels out in time. Meanwhile, return cards started to trickle in, which Jennifer began recording in — where else? — the Excel spreadsheets. And, of course, I had no good idea of who we had written checks to, who we had given credit card deposits to, and who we were going to have to pay between now and the wedding.

You get my point. What did I learn from all of this? Mostly, I came away with a much better understanding of what clients, and prospective clients, wrestle with. More than ever, I have a sense of why so many organizations struggle with taking steps forward to improve their workflow.

Most managers are not ignorant about the possibilities for improvement; they don't really lack "The Vision Thing." But imperfect solutions combined with different agendas, time pressures and priorities often keep things standing still. There is, it seems, nothing more permanent than a good temporary fix. And the longer the makeshift bridge stands, the harder it is to muster support for building a shiny new one.

In many companies, as players and roles change, there is often no learning and no real improvement in how things are done. At my house, however, we're planning a whole new integrated approach for managing the mailing labels for the Thank You notes.

Hey, it's a start.

Vijay Mehrotra is vice president of the Solutions Group at Blue Pumpkin Software. He can be reached by e-mail at Vijay@BluePumpkin.com.

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