A year of work in progress – day 98

Day 98 – 2 June 2014

Today was a game of two halves. The morning was in County Hall in Durham and the afternoon was in County Hall in Northumberland. This is going to get confusing. After a couple of very short meetings about the web and communications for Digital Durham I tried something different and put on a training course under the title of ‘Drive your desktop’.

When I go round the various locations I see a lot of people who are using their desk top applications ineffectively, not because they are bad at what they do but just because they are not aware of those tricks and tips that can help speed up their work. The beauty and the misery (is that the opposite?) of Microsoft products is that there are so many ways to achieve the same outcome yet some are much quicker than others. I don’t think I have had any formal training on the Office package, most people are the same but there are things that I have picked up by watching others and asking how they did that.

When I was a salesman, selling car parts and paint to the good folk of Oxfordshire, I would set some time aside to just drive down roads I’d never been on. Invariably I would find easier ways of getting from A to B and occasionally some new business. So that was what my morning’s training was about, going down different roads, trying things out and see what they do. I didn’t give out any notes so that the participants could follow me on their journey. Some of the tips they already knew and others they didn’t but we went for a ride.

We looked at four applications, Word, Outlook and Internet Explorer but I started with the most important of all Windows Explorer. There were twenty or so attendees and I think it went down OK. It was interesting when I asked who had a laptop and about half the hands went up. I then asked who had brought it and only a couple were held high. I asked why and someone replied ‘I didn’t know we had to bring it’ and I wondered why come to a demonstration of how to work your desktop and not bring your device.

In the afternoon I took the next step in getting to know the Head of Service at Northumberland. Pam had arranged four sessions in a row. The rest, another eight, are spread over the next couple of weeks. These were very much introductory meetings and I was there to listen. What I wanted to do was to build up a picture of the issues that face the authority and the role that ICT Services (or IS as it is called there) will play. I asked questions along the lines of: What is that you are trying to achieve and what outcomes are you looking for? What are the current issues that you are trying to face? How can ICT help and what do we need to do? And of course, what do they want from me?

Again these went down well and it is interesting how differently the services are set up between Durham and Northumberland. These are going to be a very stimulating next couple of months.

Learning points for today: More suitable antonyms for beauty may have been inelegance or disadvantage; andragogy is a posh way of saying teaching adults (see pedagogy); each service lives its own acronyms and; delivering training is not good for your throat.

Today’s enjoyment rating 9/10 – nice people.