Day 29 – 12 February 2014
I woke up to snow today, the first of the winter. It wasn’t much, just a light dusting. We don’t get a lot of snow at lower levels normally but to have gone this long without any is unusual. It’s been an unusual winter for weather all-round though what with all the flooding in the south.
I started a new book ‘Digital Government @ Work’ by Ian McLoughlin and Rob Wilson (I know him). Do you like what they did with the at sign?
It’s management Wednesday again, a people SMT in the morning and a Resources management team in the afternoon.
Our people meeting always has some standing agenda items such as sickness (or attendance as we pretend to call it these days) and Health and Safety but we had some other interesting items as well this morning.
Our Business Continuity Plan needed to be refreshed for another year. It’s a good plan and it’s been tested at least three times, once for real during Thunder Thursday. Basically if there is a problem that affects a large part of the organisation we call each other and get onto a conference call that is always available. We then find out what is the problem and agree who is going to do what. All of the SMT have information about people, locations, customers and suppliers with them at all times.
The other issue of note was our P1 process. Any call made to the service desk that affects a significant application or building (and which isn’t a BCP issue) is logged as a priority 1 (or P1). These are the most important calls to be fixed as it means our customers are unable to operate and can’t do what they come in for. The process has been reconfigured to make sure we handle these calls better and communicate to our customers more effectively.
There were two considerations for me. The first was a question of trust. I want an ICT Services that encourages its people to make decisions as close to the point of contact with the customer as is possible yet our process wouldn’t allow the service desk members to ‘call’ a P1. We’re all clever people and can work out when something is important when we are at home so why should we not be able to do so at work.
The second was around telling our customers. We know who is affected by them telling us but what about those customers who may be affected but they haven’t let us know, either because they can’t get through or they are not aware themselves. We agreed a change so that the Business Engagement team were involved and would ring those who ought to know. Let’s see if these changes make a difference.
Learning points for today: There is no real name for the @ sign in English but across the world it is known as the: Apestaart – Dutch for “monkey’s tail”; Snabel – Danish for “elephant’s trunk”; Kissanhnta – Finnish for “cat’s tail”; Klammeraffe – German for “hanging monkey”; Kukac – Hungarian for “worm”; Dalphaengi – Korean for “snail”; Grisehale – Norwegian for “pig’s tail”; Sobachka – Russian for “little dog”.
Today’s enjoyment rating 7/10 – being in a meeting all morning and a meeting all afternoon made for a long day.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 