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.