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.

First Post - Some Explanations

I'm working at my University and doing a Work Experience module whilst I do so. Hopefully this exercise will let me improve my effectiveness and be a generally more useful person. To put things into context I'll explain what I've already done and some of the people.

I applied for an internship - the 'reuse intern' job - at the start of summer 2010. This job involved 100 hours over the entire summer helping with a project to direct as much of the reusable waste produced by freshers leaving halls away from landfill. In practice it meant taking about 3-4 tons of clothes, kitchen utensils, knick-knacks and old books etc and managing a team of volunteers who sorted them ready for charity shops and finally fellow students to take over the summer. Since I impressed in the interview I was offered a job with the Sustainability team as a flexible intern - essentially working as full time as I cared to be given my other commitments over the summer.

I enjoyed the work - it varied from sorting clothes, rehanging a door(!) to serious number-crunching in excel and access. The main thrust of my work 'in the office' (ie non-reuse) was to make a map of all the electricity meters in the uni so that places to install additional automatic meters could be identified. I enjoyed this, but I did a bunch of other things now. Along the way I met people:

N - a manager in the accommodations office - was my line manager for the re-use project.

K - was my line manager in Sustainability

J - works under K in Sustainability - I have done a lot of little bits of work when she has too much

G - manages the utilities and parts of the shadow-billing systems. I did most of the analytical work for him on various projects. He asked me to make the meter map.

Other people will crop up, but those can be it for starters. My first 'reflective' post will pop up shortly!

Green Impact Sheets

Today I had some work to do from J - the Uni's travel co-ordinator (and other half of the Sustainability team). As part of the green impact initiative each green impact team has a energy audit toolkit which they can use to work out how much energy they use. One of the methods is to enter information about their buildings energy use and the floorspace they occupy and use the billing ratios to work out how much energy to use - data most of the teams don't have access to. J wanted me to take the returned info on room occupancy from all of the teams (in a varying state of completeness), compile the data and complete the sheets.

I identified a few issues as she went through it and queried them, but a phone-call interrupted the conversation. The rest of the afternoon we mostly communicated by email (down the hall-way).

The information I was given was mostly patchy, and I did have a number of queries for J. I think I identified them reliably and accurately - I didn't create extra problems - but in retrospect I could have found all the issues in one go and sent her them as a job lot. That would probably have made her life easier as she was rather busy.

I completed everything within a few hours and emailed them off to the guy who wrote the spreadsheet for error checking. This didn't work immediately as the email was too big to send; I sent it in lots of little bits.

How did I go about doing it:

I took the info in her original emails, and jotted the relevant stuff down in a notebook to have it to hand. Then I worked out what more info I needed - for instance which room numbers are on the 8th floor of Laver etc. I sent my queries to J and then started work on the ones I could sort out immediately. She replied before I finished the easy bits - this saved us both time, I think. I phoned through some contacts she gave me to get the extra info, and then emailed again with any further queries, before getting on with more work. This process followed until I finished.

Strengths

-I did a good job of analysing the information I needed to complete the next steps

-Contrary to what I said in the start of this post - I did compile lists of all my questions and let J start on them in her own time. This lets her work when its convenient to her but doesn't leave me waiting for a reply

-I believe the numbers are correct

Weaknessess

-Perhaps I could have been more pro-active in getting the information straight from the source. Mostly J just told me to phone the relevant contact; maybe I should have done that myself. Next time I will ask if thats the system I have to use.

-Every time (both times?) I popped out of the office to do something else were the time J went looking for me. Unlucky perhaps, but it does give me a bad image? Stayed a little late anyway, so no harm really done.

After I finished the spreadsheet J asked me to proof something for her. I did this, but its not my best skill; I made that as clear as I could but there are a few people she is going to get to read over it. I am very bad at communicating with written (by hand) word - my writing is awful. J knew that though and we left time to talk it all through.

Next week - more work from J, though I don't know what yet.