Just when you thought it was safe!
Here we are at the beginning of a massive relocation project, the planning has been mostly completed. The project involves relocating some two hundred and fifty environments between two European countries, with the minimum of down time for any of the production environments of which there are round a hundred. While I was in the office getting some timings for data transfers today I was having a look at the implementation plan for the first move, quite impressive I thought as I flipped through it’s carefully crafted fifty six pages and the contacts list with it’s thirty six names. Currently we are on revision five or six of this document, however there are still five weeks to go to the move and consequentially – probably five more versions of this document.

If you do the maths, just for this move it’s a staggering amount of paper. Just think, this is probably pretty close to the average size and circulation for one of these documents. I have had them at almost two hundred pages for a big job, the circulation being just as big and reaching version fourteen. So just as an exercise I decided to calculate out the amount of paper that we are going to use, based on one in five people printing the damn things out and doing it double sided to boot!

So here goes;

Ten versions of a fifty six page document printed double sided is two hundred and eighty sheets of paper, when you take into account that there are over thirty people on the circulation list. And that if one in five prints it out then you end up with one thousand six hundred and eighty sheets of paper, here’s where things start to go down hill – there are over two hundred and fifty of these moves to do and this is one of the smaller ones. So for a fag packet calculation, you’re probably looking at between four and five hundred thousand sheets of paper being produced for this job. This won’t include all the other stuff that will be printed out, we could probably use twice that on the project.

On the other hand the figures above could be considered conservative, if you were to look at a worst case scenario you could be looking at around five million sheets of paper not including all the other stuff that would be generated by the project. Still I have heard that the paperless office is as likely as the paperless toilet.