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Cathy MacDonald wondered: <<Has anyone encountered a "tech writing" job
that encompasses three separate responsibilities, that is, technical
writing, translation preparation, and doing the department's
budgeting?>>
Yup. I did this for a bit more than a year for the feds when my boss
left abruptly and I found myself doing both her job and my own. I also
did this for a few years as part of a self-directed team while we were
looking for a full-time manager and I was desperately trying to avoid
taking on that role. <g> It suspect it's not uncommon, particularly
where our jobs aren't well understood and the company is in enough
financial difficulty that they think they can get by without hiring a
manager.
<<Our four-member department creates massive amounts of documentation
that need constant revision. The medical manuals are translated by an
outside vendor into 16 or more languages. The department is incredibly
busy and understaffed. It's no mom-and-pop enterprise either; it's one
of the 10 largest conglomerates in the world.>>
Isn't it amazing how many big companies award their senior management
millions of dollars of unearned compensation while firing the
footsoldiers who do all the real work? Yeah, like _that's_ going to
work. In any event, the real problem here is understaffing, not the
multiple hats they're asking you to wear. To get around that problem,
you'll need to find yourself an advocate in the management team who can
make a case for finding you more help. This person may not be the
manager you report to, but they're the person you should start with.
<<... making up departmental budgets, juggling invoice dates, and
trying to guess how much money should be spent each quarter (a
constantly moving target) is not a skill I've ever needed before...
It's not that I would object to learning a new skill, but I was
surprised to find a very disappointed supervisor staring me down on the
first day because I was unable to demonstrate my accounting skills.>>
Have you had a conversation with this person in which you gently point
out that you have none of the relevant skills but are certainly willing
to acquire them if the supervisor is willing to mentor you? In short,
start out by defining realistic expectations that both of you
understand and accept, then agree to some formal schedule (in effect, a
written contract) by which you'll gradually come up to speed. You'll
also need to see an example of what the supervisor considers to be an
acceptable budget; whether or not an accountant would agree, it's your
supervisor you're trying to satisfy. Then do a reality check with
whoever approves the budgets (if not your supervisor), since they also
get to decide whether you get what you asked for.
Let's be blunt about this: real accounting and budgeting is a
profession all its own, and one that takes considerable expertise. At
our level, with our typical training, I always used to call budgeting
"science fiction": the science part was that we used real numbers; the
fiction part was that they were sometimes wildly optimistic predictions
of the actual future reality. (In the wake of certain infamous
accounting scandals in recent memory, perhaps I should say that the
pros write "urban fantasy"--lots of magic and waving of hands, goblins
and elves, and only a tangential resemblance to reality. <g>)
That being said, basic budgeting really isn't rocket science. The
complete idiot's approach (mine) is simple: Get a copy of the actual
budgets for the past several years, broken down into the most important
categories (e.g., staff, translation contracts, printing, computer
hardware and software, whatever). Ask your colleagues what unusual
(i.e, non-recurring) expenses they anticipate (e.g., upgrading their
DOS 3.0 computer to WinXP) and do the same with all the product
managers you work with (since they're the ones who may surprise you by
throwing an entirely new product at you). For each category you create,
find out who affects expenses in that category and ask them if they
expect any surprises in the new year.
With all these numbers in hand, you then plot the results in each
category on a graph--lines or bar charts, it doesn't matter. Draw a
line through the points/bars for each category of expense showing the
general direction in which the costs have been increasing over this
time period, and extend this into the new year. If there has been
significant variation around that line in past years, add a fudge
factor equal to the typical variation; similarly, check with all your
subcontractors (e.g., the translation vendors) to find out what price
increases they anticipate in the new year. Add any predicted one-time
expenses based on your intelligence gathering (new products, equipment
replacement, etc.) That's your budget.
Yes, it really is that simple: you take defensible numbers, use them to
generate defensible estimates of current trends, predict next year's
values, and repeat the process annually with new data. Each year, you
learn something new about how your approach failed last year <g> and
account for that problem so you can accumulate better data; in a few
years, you'll be budgeting like a pro. A real accountant will do
exactly the same thing, but using more sophisticated tools. They'll
also be more politically astute about how to pitch a budget to the
powers that be; for instance, in some companies you have to ask for 25%
more than you need because the keepers of the royal vault automatically
cut back all budgets by 25%.
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