Two men were talking about a BIG mistake that happened during budgeting.
The lady in charge of plucking in all the figures for next year's budget has missed out in including the budgets for two projects, one of which amount to almost half a million dollar. The mistake was found out by a staff in the Finance department responsible for approval of the budget. And it was found out by ACCIDENT. Apparently, this particular person happened to scroll through the list of hundreds of projects on the Excel sheets out of no particular reason and saw the ZERO figures by CHANCE. Without saying, the lady responsible for completing the budget is in BIG BIG trouble. But what if...? What if the staff in the Finance department did not scroll through the Excel sheets? What if she scrolled through the Excel sheets but did not see the ZEROs? One of the man said they have hundreds of projects and all the formulas are linked in the Excel sheets. It's impossible to go through everything and know that there's a mistake just by looking at the summary. And half a million difference looks small in a budget of tens of millions. It could be the lady's mistake or oversight that she did not key in the figures. It could be that the company does not have a system in place, or if available, a more robust system to prevent or minimize human errors (for example, maybe the Excel file cannot be saved if there's any zeros in the budget column). But what is the real issue here? While it is the responsibility of the lady to ensure the figures are correct, does it mean that Finance department can just approve the budget blindly? After all, they are ONLY responsible of approval. The responsibility to ensure the figures are correct does not lie with them. Or the Finance department just assume that figures have been checked? Or they have no time to do it? Or doing it means that they do not trust the lady? But aren't the Finance person, at the very least, curious how much different the total budget will be compared to the previous one? Is there any increase? If so, by how much? If not, why? And if there's a decrease, what's the reason? It's not just an issue of the lady's carelessness. It's not just an issue of not having system in place. It's not just an issue of who's responsible for what. It's not just an issue of making assumption. It's not just an issue o It's an issue of people who are no longer interested in what they are doing. It's also an issue of people becoming too familiar with their work that they are no longer curious.
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May 2020
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