Steven E Jens

Found and corrected errors in spreadsheets, implemented an Excel look-up table that increased my and my two coworkers' productivity by 25%, automated small tasks with Visual Basic, answered questions for my coworkers, and trained new temps. These duties were added to a role that was initially primarily data-entry.

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CitiStreet administers 401(k) plans. One feature of the plans they offer is automatic rebalancing — a participant can specify what percentage of his money should be allocated to each available fund and elect to have his funds automatically redistributed every 90 days based on the selected allocations.

Due to an error by CitiStreet, some rebalancings were not taking place as scheduled. After this was fixed, my coworkers and I were brought in to determine how much money each participant would have had if the rebalancing had been done properly so that CitiStreet could credit the accounts that had been shortchanged by their mistake.

To accomplish our task, we used a template Excel spreadsheet to create a spreadsheet for each participant. For each participant's spreadsheet, we had to look up each transaction since the first missed rebalance and the fund prices for each transaction date and each rebalance date. Initially we were looking up each set of prices for each participant. Toward the end of our first week, I set up an Excel look-up table so that we only had to look up each date for each plan once. I estimated that this increased our productivity by 20%-30%; when I asked one of my coworkers for an estimate, he estimated 25%.

I also found several bugs in the spreadsheets. I eventually wrote a VBA macro to verify that the formulas in the spreadsheets were correct. Since I understood how the spreadsheet worked more quickly than my colleagues, I answered a lot of questions. When new temps were hired in the middle of the project, I was given the job of training them.

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