Are they even real?
I was watching Office Space today on E!, and it got me thinking about this. There are several great gags where they mention putting together (or rather failing to put together) their TPS reports.
I’ve worked in a corporate environment for nearly a decade, but my line of work is very different from the IT stuff the characters in the movie appear to do.
If they are real, has anyone here ever done one? Or is it just something they made up for the movie?
According to Wikipedia: TPS report - Wikipedia
Nevermind.
Just remember: when working on your TPS reports, keep your music volume at a reasonable level.
That’s right, it’s a Testing Procedure Specification report, not a Total Pile of Shit report. Don’t even get that idea in your head, because it’s WRONG. Got it?
It’s just we’re putting new coversheets on all the TPS reports before they go out now. So if you could go ahead and try to remember to do that from now on, that’d be great.
I think you meant to say greeeaatt.
Despite the Wikipedia entry there is no TPS report. Even the document discussed on the page is a Testing Procedure Specification. It is not a report at all. It is instructions for carrying out the designated tests. There are several reports routinely produced in testing but no report on the instructions for conducting the work.
What’s a TPS report?
Didn’t you get the memo???
(Don’t worry, I’ll send you another copy.)
… if they take my stapler then I’ll set the building on fire…
I once worked in the IT department of what was a small company when I started there and grew into a large one (with 500+ IT people) by the time I left. By the time I decided it was time to leave, we had to fill out combinations of time sheets and status reports that sure felt like those Office Space TPS reports.
“You work here 8 hours a day and 40 hours a week, and your time sheets must come out to those totals. If you report either more or fewer hours we need to see management approval. We need to know in one hour increments which phases of which projects you worked on. If you worked on any particular phase of any project more hours than your manager originally estimated it would take (or completed it in fewer hours than the estimate) then we need an explanation of the variance.”
My offer to put down whatever numbers my manager wanted to see was not taken well. 
Just noticed the username. How long have you been waiting for this one to come along?
Office Space threads come up here regularly actually.
“The ratio of people to cake is too big.”
My brother is a plumber and doesn’t get Office Space.
He is a lucky, lucky man.
I can’t even watch The Office because it hits too close to home.
A fitting post for a Monday.
Getting back to the OP…lacking evidence that the writer had something specific in mind, my guess would be that they just picked any three letters that sounded plausible to represent a mind-numbing, pointless, bit of bureaucracy.
I have to go now; I have a meeting with the Bobs.
I’m a high school teacher. I was voluntold to participate in a focus group to address our chronic problem of students being tardy. Not only did I manage to get the program named Tardy Prevention System but I made sure the assistant principal who volunteered me had to turn in bimonthly reports on its effectiveness
Those would be TPS reports.
No one but me gets it. Sigh.
Does he get the cover pages on them right?
I must say, the posters in this thread have displayed a remarkable amount of flair.
I work for a very famous pharmaceutical as a senior consultant company now. I have to fill out 5, count them 5 timesheets, as a consultant every week which takes up most of a Friday and I am sure that many more will be coming. There is much more documentation of what you did on top of that even if it is plugging in a loose cable. I am not allowed to work over 40 hours a week. I am convinced that in a few weeks, everything will be under one entry, “Time Sheets and Misc. Administrative Tasks”.
I would love to do some meaningful work which I do some of now but the time wasted on these things is ridiculous. My trainer gets paid as the last step in 5 levels of consulting companies on a tiered level. He probably gets his time paid as $200 an hour to fill out such things although he gets only some of that. I am lucky in that I only have three levels so it is much more efficient. Telling a union member to move a box 50 feet costs an incredible amount of money all things told. Everything is incredibly inefficient. It costs about $2000 to fix an obsolete computer and put the pharmaceutical software on it and tested and it happens every day. You can’t touch a thing without at least 10 people involved.
I know that joint transplants are a sensitive issue but it is out of control.
I’m a software engineer, and one of the drawers in the file cabinet in my office is quietly labeled “TPS Reports”. A surprising number of non-engineers who spot it get the joke.
I used to work for Motorola, and some of the posters and slogans in the background in Office Space give me unpleasant flashbacks.