C-Suite Edition.
My company was implementing a new customer relationship management system. A Senior Vice-President was rolling out the implementation requirements and casually mentioned that each regional manager was responsible for validating all the data in the rollover within 8 weeks so that the senior management could produce a sales forecast with a touch of a button.
I knew that at any one time, I had more than 15 divisions with an average of 2000 inquiries from my region in the pipeline. Prior to the meeting, I had taken two examples that I would consider normal and edited the record so that it would include the additional information the management wanted. It took me 8 minutes. 15 x 2000 x 8 was 240,000 minutes. It would take me, with the help of the product managers, 4,000 hours to complete. I was one of 6 regions. The entire conversion would be 48,000 hours. It would take an effort of 3,000 hours a week to accomplish, or 500 hours a week for each regional manager to meet the deadline.
I carefully asked if they could demonstrate real-time the record validation process. Clearly irritated with the question, they proceeded – it took 12 minutes.
My boss intervened in the meeting at that point and suggested that the example he chose wasn’t representative and we could move on in the agenda. Later, at dinner, he said that he had to intervene because I became the only thing between the SVP and his six-figure bonus.