Able & Tireless

2006-02-11T16:07:00.000Z

Apocalypse Now. Enforced relocation to a business park on the outskirts Bracknell. The One Good Boss(tm) has handed in his notice. At least they are offering us voluntary redundancy. One assumes there will be plenty of volunteers.

2005-07-05T18:11:00.000+01:00

Cable & Wireless blog. There's going to be a Cable & Wireless blog. I'm not sure you can have a blog that doesn't represent an individual or small group. Isn't that just a website? If blogs are about genuine communication then how can 10,000 people speak with one voice? It will initially have press/news type information. Perhaps with encouragement something that hasn't been screened by nine

2005-06-20T10:35:00.000+01:00

Motivation, Motivation, Motivation - the three Ms. I want everyone in Operations to get to know each other and feel like a big happy team. What shall I do? I know I'll put on a coach to Birmingham leaving from the office at seven in the morning and getting back after 8pm. Then I won't tell them what it is they are going to beyond telling them to dress casual. Are these people totally

2004-11-24T13:17:00.000Z

'People protect themselves from frustration by deciding not to care. So you end up with people whose attitude is, "Well, I showed up for work today. That's all I have to do. If I can't make progress, that's not my problem; that's the bosses problem.'" -- Richard Stallman in Free Software: Freedom and Cooperation1 RMS is actually talking about frustration with non-free (speech not beer)

2004-11-17T09:19:00.000Z

(Yet another) end of an era. Mr. S is leaving us to become Technical Head of Exposure Interactive. With his level of frustration reaching epic levels recently (see this blog) you can't be surprised. He will be missed, of course. And who's going to look after PAL and Escalation?

2004-11-11T14:52:00.000Z

Closing 124 Theobalds Road. In many ways the closing of Red Lion Square which held more people and realer people was worse but closing 124 really is the end of an era. When I joined Cable & Wireless in 1998 we had 65,000 employees, two big offices in WC1 and big interests in Hong Kong, Australia and the US. Now we have 20,000 employees, are based in Bracknell, and have none of those

2004-09-27T14:11:00.000+01:00

Total bollocks. Why oh why am I bothering to do this team leader/management shit? There is surely no need. If I went and joined Tom's team as a developer I'd have: A really fucking brilliant laptop (much better than current laptop)Much less stressEarn the same amount of moneyNow why on earth would I stay in management? Literally, the only reason is so in 6 months time I can leave to get a

2004-09-18T20:39:00.000+01:00

Staff Terror. I have recently been put in charge of a team of 6 and one of the first things that has surprised me is how scared everybody seems to be of actually expressing an opinion. Now, I'm not a management master, but my general opinion on it all is to trust your programmers and let them get on with it. Make it easier for them to do their work. Deal with the red tape. Trust their instincts

2004-09-02T13:13:00.000+01:00

Management. Mr. S and I have been "promoted" to have our own little teams of six and five developers each. Although Steve remains head honcho this does involve things like reporting, objectives setting, etc. so it is real management. This sucks. But the alternative was having a layer between us and Steve and that sucks double. I don't really feel like a manager and I certainly don't feel

2004-07-31T17:03:00.000+01:00

I don't know if I agree with everything he says, but my favourite guru, Paul Graham has grabbed me again with his latest article, great hackers. This seemed relevant: The cartoon strip Dilbert has a lot to say about cubicles, and with good reason. All the hackers I know despise them. The mere prospect of being interrupted is enough to prevent hackers from working on hard problems. If

2004-07-28T14:08:00.000+01:00

This is just too good not to share. Woman writes to my boss, following his email telling her some work has been completed: -----Original Message----- From: ****** Sent: 28 July 2004 13:26 To: ******* Subject: RE: Workplan Application - New User Type - Work Completed Hi ******, How can this be closed without a finance form being produced? Regards, *******

2004-07-15T15:13:00.000+01:00

Pay rises! Pay rises! We really did get payrises. Wow. I think mine even may have been slightly above inflation. About 80 pound net per month in the bank extra. That's my first more-than-teeny pay rise since 2000. Turn that corner baby! Now it only remains to pick morale up off the floor and dust it off.

2004-06-10T00:11:00.000+01:00

The New Office Space ... is here! Yes, we've moved!! Ok, to be honest, its not all that, but after so long without a proper desk, phone, drawers, cupboards, power points and network points it feels just great. I have 4 power points to myself! 2 or maybe even 3 network points! 3 drawers that open! With a lock! You see, its the little things that count Although I have to say its in a right arse

2004-05-10T10:18:00.000+01:00

I am in a state of feverish anticipation. My laptop would have been four years old in July. Unfortunately it exploded several weeks ago and was declared unfixable. In magnificent style I was not bumped up the queue for new laptops (despite the fact that they are re-equipping people with perfectly good machines every day) and had to remain in my place in the queue. Needless to say my place in

2004-04-30T15:01:00.000+01:00

ok, so despite the fact that I'd like to be positive about the company, I just have to share this: "We believe that our people are the best in the world. And in an industry that is changing almost every day, we do not see the point in tying them in knots with a mass of rules and regulations. Instead, we allow them the freedom to express themselves, follow their instincts and achieve their

2004-04-30T14:29:00.000+01:00

Setting your own objectives actually turns out to be a very good thing. I was concerned that, like Tom, it wouldn't be possible to come up with some interesting objectives that the boss men would approve. However, I seem to have worked it out ok. Now its not been officially approved by anyone higher than Steve but it should be, and this would be a good thing. Basically, my problems (excluding

2004-04-29T17:52:00.000+01:00

There's directives from very high up regarding objective setting for the coming year. Yes, they created a silly pow-wow in Egham to tell us about it and there's some silly flash-based presentation too. But overall it might not be a bad thing to make people set up real objectives. If Jaws is mailing me about his new objective to share technical knowledge through the wider team (which must be 20

2004-04-24T09:46:00.000+01:00

The office space revolution seems to consist mainly of working at home. Still I have a ten foot sash window that opens to a five feet gap, a view of a garden with blossom and squirrels and *brilliant* tech support in the form of me. The only thing that's missing is the team element. Skunkworking at Adam's despite being suggested numerous times doesn't really seem to have taken off so we're all

2004-03-09T14:02:00.000Z

Office Space. Our current office space is as follows: In an out of the way location, with no amenities nearby No natural light on any desks Not enough desks for the team Less that 2 powerpoints per person Noisy (near a "test desk" team constantly on the phone to engineers) Absolutely stinks Now I'm not saying I expect a Clerkenwell office with beanbag chairs, a pool table and a bar

2004-02-19T20:11:00.000Z

Some blurring between work blog and personal site. Check out my article about productivity statistics of my latest project.

2004-02-17T13:15:00.000Z

The results everyone has been waiting for are in. If you ever doubted that e-Learning is a vital business tool here at C&W, let me put your mind at rest. Most Popular Courses Bronze Medal: Display Screen Equipment Silver Medal: Learn 2 eLearn and ..... ... the winner is: Gold Medal: Office Safety Yep, almost 1000 people have enrolled on the Office Safety course.

2003-12-11T00:44:00.000Z

A little gem I heard tonight: less than five years ago, C&W network engineers were frustrating their counterparts in NTL by handing over network diagrams... in microfiche format. 'Yo guys. We're sending those files over you wanted to have a look at. What was that? You want me to email them to you? Nah, they'll be arriving by truck.'

2003-12-10T16:54:00.000Z

I guess the last thing you want to do when you are a communications company is not communicate. It has now taken me 6 days to get a firewall change made to enable one of our users to gain access to our own servers in the Swindon data centre. I wonder if there are any jobs going at Marconi!

2003-12-03T20:19:00.000Z

A Quote From the Briefcase Guide To e-Business Strategy, by C&W " 'When you stand on a dog's tail the head barks. If the dog was five miles long, the head would still bark. Thats how the telephone Internet works, only there's no dog' With apologies to Alexander Graham Bell" Well, thats just great isn't it? Tens of years, millions of man-hours, innovation after innovation, and its turns out

2003-12-03T12:41:00.000Z

A little tale of hilarity. This is a wonderful story that someone told me, that nicely illustrates the sheer lunacy of large corporations (I'd be a naive fool if I thought it was just C&W where this happened). Anyway: A new web-based billing tool has been recently introduced and now customers on the right billing platform can get their bills via email. Its quick, its paperless and its very very

2003-12-03T12:29:00.000Z

More Wiki. I've been using it to store all my bugs and change requests for the Complex Rating project. Comment from boss: "its an absolute godsend for seeing all your stuff". The complex rating users are using it as well, to see what changes I've done so far, and whilst I've not yet got them adding stuff to it (that's stage 2!), I think they are enjoying getting almost real time updates on what

2003-12-02T19:09:00.000Z

Wiki. Put all my email weekly reports in it and gave the page to the BRAHMS project manager instead of another email with this week's report on. He thought it was great. So there are people out there who are open to possibilites and not in fear of the organisation.

2003-12-01T10:58:00.000Z

Number of applications within C&W. Currently, still, at around the 1,500 mark apparently. This is causing us as a company to try and reduce this number (a good idea really - 1,500 is far too many). But it got me thinking as to how its going to affect my role. Our team traditionally wrote small, quick ASP 3.0 applications to solve a particular business problem. Because they were specific, they

2003-12-01T09:20:00.000Z

Workflow Analysis. It's even got a beautiful name. Last week we are asked to fill out a voluminous excel spreadsheet about EVERY task we received/performed in the week with such useful information as, 'Authority Required to Perform the Task' and, 'The Average Time that Any Single Person Would Take To Carry Out the Task'. Leaving alone the fact that the latter is not really a sentence that

2003-11-28T15:35:00.000Z

The wiki. I think I'm going wiki-crazy, but I'm pushing forward with my plan on trying to get other teams to use it with me. So far, I've come up against a massive wall of resistance, but I'm fighting through it. People are scared of change I guess, even if its a good idea. This is the sort of thing I've been getting back from people who I've asked to use it: "i cannot knowingly contribute to

2003-11-27T18:20:00.000Z

Complex Rating demo. Adam on the (crap) speakerphone and can't really hear us. I think he got the idea he had done terribly but his demo was actually the most structured and useful thing in the three hours that some of us sat in that room. After he went off it was more "I dunnos" and "I'll find outs" but without the netmeeting demonstration in between. The trouble with firing vast numbers

2003-11-27T12:26:00.000Z

The complex rating project is all about rating traffic from one carrier to another in a sophisticated manner - being able to say use a rate of x for traffic up to volume i between dates a and b for weekend timeband, then use rate y for traffic between volume i and j between dates a and b for evening timeband and so on and so forth. I've spent the last few months writing the front end to capture

2003-11-27T10:29:00.000Z

Trying to find somewhere to collaborate with other teams, and our internal customers has always been a bit of a drag - Livelink is slow and horrible, emails get deleted and word docs stored on a mapped drive just aren't collaborative. So, I'm currently pretty excited about the work wiki. Here isn't the place to describe exactly how it works, sufficient to say, it provides a place for people to

2003-11-27T09:19:00.000Z

I hate to start off on a negative note. But I have to share this email from Internal Communications. What's next? An email telling us that murder is illegal and, what's worse, not company policy? -----Original Message----- From: Communications, Internal Sent: 25 November 2003 16:26 Subject: Message from Peter Dugmore - Use of mobile phones and other electronic information devices in

2003-11-26T22:26:00.000Z

Welcome To Able & Tireless. Today I spent half an hour at the end of the day filling in my Daily Task Worksheet, rather than being able to go home. Its so upsetting that I can barely speak. Even now. 3 hours after the event. Although I did manage to fix almost all the problems with the Complex Rating project. And my bonus has hit my account, which is nice. The big question now becomes, do