Day 57 – 27 March 2014
I thought I’d get the train in this morning as I was in County Hall all day. I tried to check that everything was running fine on the national rail web site only to get a run time error. I must admit to experiencing a little schadenfreude at the thought that it isn’t just us that has the odd ICT issue.
I chanced it anyway, through the rain and thankfully the train was on time. When I arrived in Durham it was bright sunshine.
First up this morning was another Tier 4 manager, my twenty fifth so far. I’ve worked with Lorraine for some time as she is part of my own service grouping and part of the ICT Core Systems Group but that doesn’t mean that I understand the role of the HR Manager (Operations and Projects).
As a fellow Gemini we get on like a house on fire. We get on with everyone. She looks after the transactional aspects of HR, handling the employee lifecycle from establishment control to pensions. Her team work out of two floors on County Hall. ‘Hanger 1’ looks after all of the current employees including DBS checks, starters, leavers and changes of circumstances. It includes the data and systems team.
‘Hanger 2’ which is on the next floor down looks after payroll and pensions. We pay nearly 20,000 people, not just in the council and manage the pension for another 50,000. It’s a big responsibility.
One question I didn’t get to ask was why having worked in Marks and Spencer and British Rail she came to work in the public sector. Perhaps I’ll do this next time.
Before lunch Steve and I met with the irrepressible Darran from OnBrand Partners. I really like them as an organisation and they have helped us with some of our culture journey. It seems at time this is a trip without an end. It doesn’t matter how far we have come (and I believe that we have come a long way) there is always much further to travel. After a good discussion we settled on some plans to develop our leadership and management capability. They’ve also been doing some work with a neighbouring authority and so I’ll be looking into that as well.
Over lunch I realised that my glasses were falling apart. The screw was coming out of one of the legs and of course when I took then off to fix it I couldn’t see what I was doing. As our Deputy Leader once said to me ‘there’s nothing fun about getting old.’ What do I expect from a £2 pair of glasses but I’ve had much more expensive ones which have done the same.
Quick as a flash I decided to visit the Install team who were bound to have a suitable screwdriver. They did and while they sorted me out we had a useful conversation about how busy and stressed they were. This caught me a little by surprise and lead to a conversation about holiday, flexi time and busy times of year. I need to raise this.
This led to some interesting questions at the last presentation in the afternoon.
Learning points for today: You can get a not to go to guy; You can slap a barrel but it’s better to slap the apple; we need to be more open about work flow and the issues we are facing with a reduced workforce and; we have important systems which are not fully on our radar.
Today’s enjoyment rating 8/10 – Does having problems make it a good or bad day?
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 