Summing Up

I worked for Sustainability at the University since late July 2010. During that time I have developed myself in a professional role. My timekeeping has improved as has my personal presentation. I have also learnt many new skills, particularly in data analysis and management.

Within the time officially designated ‘work experience’ I feel that I have gained a lot of useful experience. My main improvement has been with my methods of organising work. The pressures of only working one afternoon a week, and of having to keep a reflective journal have forced me to keep a notebook as I work. I have found this makes me better organised, more aware of my tasks and better able to answer queries about my work. Previously I worked with notes, but I rarely contained these in a book. Instead I had a series of notes spread across several different bits of scrap paper. This often caused confusion and made my work area messy. A notebook is more practical, contained and allows for better reflection.

My reflective practice has been helpful in demonstrating to me how I can improve my work. It has fed back into changing my work practices; I have started ordering my tasks better after realising this was an area of weakness. I have not been as regular at uploading my reflective practice, or filling it in as I should have been. I also feel that the usefulness of the reflective practice was diminished by the fact that I started completing it after more than 6 months working in that position. If I had begun reflective practice as soon as I started work it would have been very helpful in allowing me to see the areas I needed to improve. When I next start a new job I will start keeping a reflective practice journal – this will ensure I settle into the role as quickly as possible. The techniques I have learnt will help me to become better at my next job.

I feel that my employability has been hugely boosted by my time working in Sustainability. The work was professional, office based and practical – something employers are keen to see. I have learnt to conduct myself in an office environment, co-operate with colleagues and to take the direction of several different people. These skills and a long series of tasks I am now familiar with will be at the forefront of my new CV and will help me get my next job.

It only remains to say thank you to all my co-workers. They have all been supportive, kind and generous as well has giving me plenty of opportunities to prove myself. I have developed as a person and matured within that working environment and I will bring their generous spirit wherever I next work.

Work - 23rd March

This was my last day in the office on the work experience programme. I was extremely complimented to be told that I was obliged to come back in the summer term to arrange a farewell event. My colleagues have consistently made me feel welcome, useful and praised my abilities – this reflects my work and their good nature. My work this week was finishing the spread sheet I started the week before. This became the now fairly familiar task of tidying up the edges, writing the last few formulae and proofing it to check that everything works. Error identification is always tricky in a large project and I was glad that it was being worked on by several other people – if I missed any mistakes they will be likely to catch them before the project goes ‘live’.

I used my notes from last week to make a list of all the elements of the spread sheet and based my first round of error checking on this. It is always important to have a systematic process to ensure that nothing is missed; randomly looking will not do the job. I caught a few minor errors and corrected these. Having checked everything in the order that I created them I went through the spread sheet as if I was a user. I checked that entering data into the sheet worked, and that it behaved as I expected. This revealed a slight flaw with the maths, which I also corrected.

My final error checking method was to ‘try’ to break the sheet. I deliberately entered incorrect values in all the boxes and made sure that the programming could cope with this. At this stage I also realised that I had not put in any data validation. Data validation checks the data being entered by a user and makes sure that it is within a defined range, or form. For example ‘In a spread sheet detailing personal information and qualifications data validation would be used to prevent users from entering a date of qualification earlier than their date of birth. Alternatively it could be used to prevent letters being entered into a numerical field.’ In addition it is possible to ‘protect’ some cells so that you cannot edit them without a password.

To me it was essential that all the fields had data validation and protection where it was necessary – without it users can modify the spreadsheet. If the sheet is complex this can often cause it to stop working, causing more work for the person who wrote it originally – they are normally the ones asked to fix it. I asked K if she wanted me to add these protections, and she was confused about the reasons they were important. It illustrated a divide between people who create complicated spreadsheets, databases and other digital projects and the people who use them. Creators – programmers, data analysts and similar people – often don’t trust the end user. They assume that the user will be likely to break the spreadsheet and then not be able to use it properly. This motivates them to make it very hard for anyone to change their project without authorisation. They then find themselves at odds with skilled users who want to be able to customise the project but can’t because it is locked. I have found myself on both sides of this debate; when I create something I want to protect it and when I use something I want it to be unprotected.

In the case of this sheet I persuaded K to allow me to add the protection. I felt that since it was to be used by the sustainability team to assess the performance of other departments that the whole university must work from the same spread sheet. Allowing multiple versions to be created would only make using the data after it had been collected much harder. Producing a sheet in this way is the equivalent of a form in Adobe PDF. It is important that everyone gets the same version and that the owners can be sure no one has edited the wording.

In the general case – I feel that I would trust myself with my own project. I would also trust some other people. However, when I don’t know the audience that I am distributing a product to I feel it should always be protected and locked. There are also people I would always lock my work before allowing them to use it – it all boils down to trust.

Work – 16th March

This week K asked me to start work on a large project. She wanted a procurement toolkit that would allow the university to quickly asses the sustainability aspects of their procurement practices. In practice this meant a large spread sheet with a lot of information given to the user as well as entered by the user. I was asked to create the framework, with all the buttons, categories and other features ready to go. I started by have a long conversation with K about what she wanted from the spread sheet and how it should work as a document. Once again I started a little over-ambitious with the level of complexity I wanted to add. K toned my aspirations down; it’s only necessary to add a feature if it will dramatically improve the end product. I was effectively trying to put a lot of features on something that K wanted to be a very simple product.

Having planned what was necessary K left me to get on and do it. Several of the features we had agreed turned into more effort to add than I had thought. I had to become more familiar with programming macros than I was; this learning process caused me to make a systematic error throughout the project than I then had to correct. This cost me quite a lot of time and the spread sheet was not as far on as K had hoped for; I felt that I had lead K to believe in the best possible case and not delivered. This was a lesson I need to learn – more accurate goals and to give the potential ‘slippage time’ on a project, not just the ideal finishing time.

I did feel that I managed to produce a good start on the project, especially given that I had to learn some of the techniques for the first time. The buttons and macros I programmed really did make the sheet more usable and improved its functionality. I feel I did the right thing in recommending that they were included, but should have been more open about the time that they would take. I also felt that I achieved a lot in a short space of time; some of the interns that shared my office commented that I was working hard. I feel that I enjoy hearing such praise and that this motivates me to work harder. I feel that my work ethic has been a key factor that persuaded the department to continue to offer me work. Although my time-keeping skills let me down, I have learnt to work very hard to compensate for this. It also helps that I often stay in the office after most people have gone home. This presents an excellent image to people who observe me staying late even if it is somewhat undeserved as I don’t start at the same time as them.

I feel this afternoon’s work presented me at my best and worst; I learnt and applied new skills, understood a brief and worked towards that, but I also let down K on the time it would take to deliver what she wanted.

Work – 3rd March

This week I was presented with a lot of little bits to work on. Several teams had returned their green impact audit spread sheets with queries and J asked me to follow these up. G had a very minor set of figures for me to add into the database and check – he thought some of the earlier entries in a series of meter readings might have been wrong and wanted these numbers to double check. K had a set of figures that she needed calculating – information about the amounts of waste the university produces and comparisons with sector averages.

These tasks had been sent to me by email over the preceding week. I had replied to some of the shorter queries in my own time. Since I regularly check my emails I often reply quickly to queries. This generally gets a positive reception – people appreciate receiving a prompt reply, even if it only says that I will look at the problem in depth at a later date. K and J had expressed some concern that I will end up working when I am not supposed to be ‘at work’ so I have tried to keep my replies to a minimum. On the other hand K has more than once been grateful for my quick reply to a concern she has over spread sheets I have created.

I made a quick plan of the afternoon’s work in my notebook; notes make sure I can get all the work done in a sensible order. I always keep notes in a handwritten notebook, not on the computer. I think the physicality of writing the notes allows me to reason better. If I have a problem that I need to solve with logic I always result to pen and paper; digital software doesn’t let me think properly.

I had checked with J and K how they wished me to prioritise their work (G wasn’t in to check with) so I had a good idea of what order to approach things in. Having worked out a plan of action, I began work and kept going until I had finished. All the tasks were fairly simple; J’s queries were the most involved. They concerned working out the portion of an energy bill assigned to a small team within a building. An example would be the education offices in Queens. I needed to establish the floor area they occupy, and the type of work they do in that floor area. This was simple to do in most cases – a matter of looking the relevant rooms up in the university database, but some teams had listed their rooms incorrectly. These were the queries I was dealing with. My approach was generally to start by phoning the person who had submitted the completed audit and ask them which rooms they occupied. When I had the database in front of me it was easy to identify which rooms they meant and enter the information correctly.

The data entry for G went very smoothly. I entered a new set of figures onto his database, compared these to the old set and identified where the problem had occurred. I then emailed the results back to him so that he could correct the mistake (I don’t have sufficient permissions to undo that particular error). Similarly, K’s task was a matter of running some calculations on excel. I made sure that I checked my numbers and calculated them in more than one way. This makes sure that the numbers are right. An example would be the choice between multiplying a set of numbers by a constant, then summing them; this is equivalent to summing a set of numbers and then multiplying by the constant. Doing the maths in ‘both directions’ goes some way to convincing me that the excel formulae are doing what I want them to.

Work – 23rd Feb

Todays work followed on from last weeks. I continued with the spreadsheet that I had planned and started the week before. I found my planningand notes were effective in reminding me of what I needed to do on this, and the task continued smoothly. Since I didn’t have anything to occupy me after I finished the sheet I emailed J asking if she had anything else for me. In the end G passed me a set of figures to do some data entry – somthing I’m not always keen on doing. Since I could combine this with revising the drafts I was sending to K it wasn’t too bad. My spreadsheet continued to be refined; K is very direct and consise in her instructions so it is usually a simple matter to change something. We also sped up the process by using the shared drive to access the same file and make notes on it. Editting a document – whether it is a spreadsheet, word document or something else – is always made up of lots of little tasks. There isn’t generally anything that takes a long time. In this case I did feel that I had to click on every macro-programmed button in the document to ensure that I had written the correct code. User testing is something that I have forgotten in the past and it can make things un-usable. It did concern me that I was going to release this project without having any ‘end-user testing’ (K doesn’t count as she was involved in planning the project). My comfort was that I had written a framework which was to be filled by other people. They will hopefully identify and bugs and report them back to K who can ask me to fix them. This does not represent best practise; in the circumstances and given that I hadn’t written particularly complex code it would be fine. The process of writing this sheet involved a lot of buttons used to hide and display portions of the sheet. This took a lot of time and systematic working to implement. I was somewhat intimidated by the scale of the work and the necessary attention to detail, but in the event I found it surprisingly easy. With the perpective of a little time it seems that I was more afraid than I needed to be and that my capacity to do detailed, painstaking work is in fact above average. This does contrast with my lack of attention to detail in my personal life; I can often seem slapdash, clumsy and forgetfull. It seems that I can pay attention to a specific task or item whilst forgetting the world around me, or remember the world and forget the detail. Balancing this tendency is something I am getting better at, but I can still improve. My in-between task was entering meter readings into a database. This is tedious work which nobody wants to do. G (who asked me to do it) is aware of this and asked me whether I minded, and it did give me something to do whilst K went through the spreadsheet so it wasn’t too bad. Since the other people in my office were leaving I put music on (via headphones) to keep me interested. I know that I can keep my interest in a boring task much better if I have some music playing in the background – its quite antisocial though and some people think its rude. I tend not to have any music if there are other people in the room – it doesn’t seem worth annoying people over. On balance this seems a sensible decision, but is it just making my work worse so that they don’t become offended? It all probably depends on circumstances; the temperaments of the people concerned and their strength of feeling. Being selfish occasionally is important – subsuming your desires to the wishes of the group can only be done for so long before it becomes constraining. ON the other hand managing to keep an active social life is about subsuming the things you want to do into activities that everyone will want to do. Just like everything else, its a delicate balancing act.

Work - 16th Feb

Work - 16th Feb

This days work further demonstrated the need to think about the dilemmas raised with last weeks post. I was asked to take a previously prepared spreadsheet and add some links, macros and other tools to make the sheet more usable. The work involved taking a lot of direction from K and working with her to determine the most feasible and practical balance between functionality, usability and the necessary level of complexity in the programming. Whilst K has a clear idea of what she wants from the completed item, I have far more experience programming Microsoft visual basic and putting spreadsheets together. It is my job to take her ideas and aims and mould them into something that is achievable within my abilities and the timeframe.

My first step was to take extensive notes on the function of the spreadsheet, the way it currently worked, the people who were going to use it and what K wanted to improve K took me through the spreadsheet in her office; this is certainly something that is only really possible to do face to face Then I prepared a list of tasks that I needed to do, and prioritised the tasks. I find that the process of splitting the work into smaller tasks and sub-tasks allows me not only to prioritise my work correctly but to establish if I have all the information (and equipment) I need to start work on the tasks. When I do this properly my quality of work is improved, I can better identify the amount of time it will take me to complete work and communicate better with colleagues.

My weakness in this situation is to become over-ambitious and attempt to stretch my abilities when is is not necessary. K is good at recognising when I am attempting to implement something that is more complex than needed. I find working with her means I have to be more disciplined to fit in with her expectations of me. I find it hard to work out what she is thinking; this isn't normally a problem however as she tells me exactly what in need to know. I don't normally find that I need to be friends with people to work well with them; friendliness doesn't seem to affect the quality of the work I do. Obviously I do prefer to work with people I get on well with though.

In the end K was very satisfied with the work I did; I completed the first draft that afternoon and reviewed it and completed the final draft the next week. The sheet had several other elements and contents to add to it but my part is now done. I find it disappointing sometimes that I will never see the completed items in use.

General Jobs – February 8th

This entry is rather late – I did this work on the 8^th February but I have not been able to post until now.

I will start by answering some of the questions I was asked from last week’s entry:

Firstly some more detail on why I emailed a colleague (J) down the hall – I did this because it allowed her to answer the questions when she was ready rather than demanding her instant attention. I tried to ensure that each time I came across something I needed to query I could work on something else until J had time to reply. It does seem slightly anti-social sometimes. This may be a more efficient way of working but does it rob us of chances to talk and get to know each other?

A few times I missed J while I was out of the office. I wasn’t working on these trips; but on the other hand I only left 3 times and she managed to pick all the wrong moments. The longest I was away from my desk was when I popped out to get a quick snack halfway through the afternoon and bumped into a friend ad started talking. I was only out of the office for less than ten minutes – I think it was just bad luck.

I was asked to do a number of tasks – put together some publicity (compiling text and graphics) printing a few flyers and other mundane tasks – and then to check through a long list of links to external websites for the sustainability website and add a few more links to specific areas. I accomplished the more mundane stuff first – printing and chopping – and left the rest for later. I finished the printing quickly and to J’s satisfaction as far as wording and typesetting went.

I didn’t have any particular difficulties with this and I think I completed everything in the best possible way. Again I completed the digital part of each task and then sent it to J to be proofed whilst I worked on the next one. That got a cycle of creating/proofing/printing going that worked well to ensure that I stayed busy.

I started on going through the list of links to check. Most turned out fine, but one linked to a somewhat inappropriate placeholder page left after the site had closed down. I immediately emailed J and K to let them know and get the link removed. This made me rather popular – and illustrates the need to keep checking these sorts of pages!

Next I had to find links to a list of topics – student bodies relating to sustainability and professional bodies relating to sustainability. I wasn’t immediately sure how to proceed with the task on professional bodies so I started with the student societies. The guild website was my starting point and I quickly had a list of societies and a number of NSU green initiatives. Some of these were duplicated or partially covered elsewhere in the document, which gave me a dilemma. Should I try and fit everything into the original categories, or should re-arrange everything and try and order things in a more logical order.

I keep coming across this problem; at what point should I use my initiative, and when should I remember that I am doing work for somebody else and remember that it is his or her opinions that count? I can often make sweeping decisions and change the nature of a project without thinking through the consequences. In the instance of this bit of work – if K had a set format online for these links that was for some technical reason difficult to re-arrange then she would need exactly the headings she started with.

I think I tend to ask J for guidance on work that I do for her, and not ask K when it concerns her; K is very often busy, in meetings or otherwise unavailable whereas J is more likely to be in her office answering emails or open to being disturbed. I think I tend to set a threshold for needing further information; the threshold is dependant on the people and the importance of the task and the time of day as well as a whole range of other factors. I can get closer to the threshold as my query involves more and more of the work, prevents me from continuing (i.e. without an answer I don’t know how to do the work) or if I get it wrong would involve re-doing most of the work.

In the event I decided to just move everything about, but keep a copy of the original document so that I could go back if that was required. This meant that I expanded the work outside the scope of the original request – I went looking for links to ensure that my new headings were all filled with a reasonable amount of content. All this work took the rest of the afternoon – I had started it about 3:30 so I continued until sometime after 5. I emailed it off with the part expectation that I would have to re-work it into the original format; I was certainly a little nervous I had done the wrong thing.

I’m often nervous I get these judgement calls wrong. In fact I’m sure that I do get them wrong sometimes, but I’m not sure that there is any substitute for experience to make it better. Certainly you have to know the minds and characters of your colleagues to be good at knowing when to ask for clarity. Also it helps if you have a part in planning and delivering a project, rather than just completing a small part of it. Since I have no real say in the direction or purpose of most of the tasks I complete I have to do them to the specifications of someone else. This means that I have to seek guidance more often; if I had designed the work myself I would know the answer to most of the questions. Seeking guidance irritates me though; I dislike disturbing people, and I dislike not knowing answers.

In the event it would appear that I made the right decisions. I sent a first draft to K and she replied with some more detail on professional bodies the wanted to include. I added these and replied; she emailed me the next day to say that it as ‘perfect’. When I bumped into her later in the week she commented on how good I job I did. Both K and J often compliment me on the work and thank me for coming in. This is something that gives me a lot of satisfaction; I really like being valued. This means that I put a lot more effort into my ‘work’ work than I do my academic work.