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.