or, why you need project management.
by frank stitely
the relentless cpa
here’s a story about a former staff member who caused me years of therapy and cost us probably 20 clients in one year. therapy for me consists of drinking craft beer, so i expect that i may need therapy for a lifetime.
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also, note that this story happened before i started enforcing company policies with a loaded glock. the company handbook, which i wrote, allows this. i give you the “tragic tale of tammy tardy.”
tammy tardy was an average tax preparer who worked for us seven years ago. every tax season tammy, like many of us, met with a hundred or so tax clients. tammy managed her workload using the piles of files method. after a client meeting, she put the file on the floor, knowing she would get to it shortly.
of course, 10 meetings later, she had no idea what she should work on next. so she just picked up a file from her office floor and began. she felt that it didn’t matter which returns you worked on when you were overworked and in a hurry. there’s a fixed amount of work to get done by april 15th, and you just jump in and do it.
tammy was wrong. tammy’s clients began to call and call and call. after a couple of weeks, tammy was spending so much time on the phone that she had no time to prepare returns. this is “what’s the status of” hell.
a client will call when he hasn’t heard from his preparer after about two weeks. i know this concept well from 27 tax seasons of sometimes painful experience. i can even predict which clients will call next.
i wish i could write that tammy’s story had a happy ending, but it didn’t. tammy worked april 13th through the 15th with almost no sleep. clients called and offered helpful advice like, “don’t you know this is april 15th?” but by midnight on april 15th, she had barely dented her workload.
tammy wasn’t entering her returns into our project management system, so no one knew tammy had dug a workload hole all the way to china. we had no idea how many returns were sitting on her floor or the statuses. seeing the number of files on her floor, i felt certain a pile of returns would be coming soon for me to review. those returns never came.
she learned, or should have learned, another lesson. consecutive all-nighters don’t work. you can do this one night and then recover, but three nights without sleep reduces productivity to zero. she was probably hallucinating that returns were actually getting done. they weren’t. many of tammy’s clients left, disgusted that their returns hadn’t been completed in over a month’s time.
your honor, the prosecution rests. the case for effective project management has been made.