Archives for work
Hell No! I won’t go! – World Poetry Day 2017 [Poetry]
English: The RedBalloon office - an example of an open plan 'Bullpen'-style office. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) World poetry day was yesterday, and it prompted me to write some poetry on the train home. This first draft is provisionally titled "Hell no! I won't go!". The inspiration for this poetry is a proposed series of office moves to bring our teams into fewer buildings. Many colleagues have been grumbling about moving office. This is intended to be a comic take on it and bears no relation to any real reason people may have cited. All this is purely imaginary, and I hope it brings a wry smile. Hell No! I won't go! The bosses have decided. We will be better together, in a new office. The new office is where everyone will be. Enjoying their coffee, except for me, I commute…
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Guest Blog for Government Digital Service
I was asked to do a guest blog for GDS on my experience as a Service Manager on one of their early service assessments. You can see what I have been doing at work of late, including a screenshot from the passport online appointment booking service and the project's agile kanban board, which I stole the idea for from the Government Digital Service. So here it is - Learning from assessments Related articles Learning from assessments Government leads the way on Online Digital Services. Eh? What??
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Nineteen Years in Public Service
Nineteen years ago I started work, at Her Majesty's pleasure according to my job offer letter, as an Executive Officer with the Department of the Environment. I was a graduate entrant on the DOE's Management Development Programme and was paid an annual salary of £12,200, including London Weighting. That was quite good money at the time, the average graduate starting salary was £10,000 and in today's terms it would be about double that (using the Retail Prices Index (RPI) to update it). The expectations that I had were of relatively rapid promotion to Higher Executive Officer (HEO) after about 3 years and then skipping past Senior Executive Officer (SEO) straight to Grade 7 in about five years after getting to HEO. I also got told that I would have compulsory retirement at the age of 60 and that I would…
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Five Day Week – day one
This is my first official five day week for almost five years. Until now I've been working full time hours over four days, nine hour days (plus lunch) as standard. Now that Alexander is at school I need to be able to start work after dropping him off. So I'm on the train in right now (0857 from Merstham, although it actually left at 0910). Wonder how late I'll get in. I'm used to a late start being 0835 when the train after the one I normally get arrives. Right now it looks like a 1000 start (0950 actually).
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Not News!
We're not in the news! Huzzah! OK, I know lots of people and things are not in the news but usually that's because nothing has happened that the media would even be aware of. We've had a busy couple of days at work (Monday afternoon and all day yesterday) because of the publication of a Select Committee report. There have been a few press notices about this embargoed until 00:01 today and we have been doing our side of the story to be ready in case of press enquiries. However not a thing on the news or the websites for BBC News or the Guardian that I've searched on, even Google News doesn't have anything on it other than ePolitix. So far so good, although no doubt it will be picked up at some point. Then the deluge of enquiries will start.