Posts by Terry 6

Re: Excel for dodgy databases

This was what I was thinking when I read this. It sounds like an ad hoc procedure that someone in a selection panel has bodged up to help them to do do their job, that has been helpfully passed along to their colleagues elsewhere. Maybe even the master spreadsheet was an afterthought.

Re: "all GP practices have changed to appointment booking solely via an online portal"

Also, people with poor local infrastructure, a crap ISP, or unable to afford the fee, or has had their power cut off,or anyone unfortunate enough to get sick when there's an outage from a (maybe normally reliable) ISP.

Re: Forced upgrade even of machines that pass checks?

Yes. File format has been a non-issue for years. Half the time I don't even know which I'm using.

Re: Process failure at Google

It took Google about a year after the new M1/M6 (S) junction was finished* to stop telling motorists to carry on going down the ( going nowhere) stump of the M6. And if you miss the new exit it's a f****ing nightmare** to get back on track.

*This wasn't a small or sudden change. It's arguably the main interchange for the whole of England, (if not the UK) linking London with the, respectively Birmingham/Manchester/Liverpool/Scotland and Leicster/Yorkshire/Hull/Newcastle routes, and they'd spent years building the bloody thing

**Unless you welcome tours of the Central English countryside

"..your busy users didn't have time to spec upfront". Or didn't realise needed to be included, or thought too obvious to mention, or forgot that it still needed to be done because it already just happens, or thought that this bit was someone else's job to explain, or explained it poorly because it's something they just do, but don't really know why, or just don't even think about it until <date>......

All of which I'm sure is not unique to a public body. But I'd suspect that they are more the rule than an exception in a public body.

In part this is inevitable. A LA is treated like a single "business" In reality it's several in a group. Each totally different in form and function.

Re: LA are all the same

That is frankly bullshit.No two local authorities are the same, though there will be some broad groupings like " rural".

The authorities do not spend money needlessly. On the contrary every bloody penny has to be justified and almost every LA service is significantly underresourced. Or haven't you noticed the potholes, the poorly maintained schools, the closed libraries, the loss of arts and museum spaces, the vanishing sports centres.Maybe you are too young to remember when the kids could go to youth clubs instead of hanging round on street corners. I'm sure you have heard of care homes closing down because the local authority can't afford to pay the true cost of using them.Or of Trading Standards offices that haven't the staff to investigate shops selling vapes to kids.

Re: (debits still go in the column nearest the window).

Unfortunaely the council will have no choice but to spend £10,000 a year monitoring the pencil distribution. Because otherwise the Daily Fail will be running a story that StixBorough Councill is wasting hundres of pounds every year due to poor pencil distribution control.

Re: It was only after the implementation began that they revealed that they couldn't.

And some of the structures will have compulsory fields that aren't applicable to a great chunk of the users. But can't be bypassed to go on to the section that is actually needed to get the job done..

Ah yes

Any attempt to tidy it up is stymied because each department won't let go of its responsibility without being paid to let go of it. budget

Partly because somehow budget changes always seem to involve taking away more cash from one department than the function required. And giving less cash to the other department than they need. In other words, Department A will lose £1000 in costs but have its budget cut by £1500 because of some supposed additional savings that no one has ever been able to identify. Department B will only be transferred £700 in extra budget because of a new evaluation by Finance that no one has ever seen broken down. £800 will be added to the budget of some totally different department, that happens to be in favour with the higher ups.

This is in line with the underspend/overspend paradox that used to get me so angry ( actually still does and I've been retired from there for years). Manager A will carefully plan a budget so that there is enough money to last until the next financial year. Manager B will simply have no budget controls at all and run out of money two or three months early. (B is rarely running a frontline service, by the way).

Two months before the end of the financial year manager A will be told, "You still have money left, obviously you don't need it. But department (of) B does". And the money will be clawed back. If manager A is really lucky he'll get a 10% reduction in the next year's budget too, because "Oh you didn't spend all yours last year".

Re: Plausible...

Talented.Witty.Appreciative

Just off the coast of West Africa

witty.appreciative.thoughtful

in the Atlantic too just off South America

Re: Missing .au

Kind of in reverse. Some years back I went to a site BigCompanyName.com

And was surprised to see that it was USA only. Not even links to other country's equivalent sites. I queried this with them. "Why does your .com go to the USA only site? .com isn't a USA only domain"

They said "Yes it is"!

Re: Enter Password

For all that her job involved constantly working with a PC, she was terrified of doing anything with it for fear of breaking something.

I spent hree decades of working with/managing highly skilled, specialist teachers and supporting our IT as a side role.And that worry was a common thing pretty much from the 80's until teh 2000s.

I don't think staff got less worried, just theystopped caring.

Re: Who is Mozilla?

It ain't just car makers.

Our Samsung TV (now not used anywhere with an internet connection) has a hard to find "privacy" section buried in the settings Within that are *pages * of permissions granted by default to hundreds of data collectors. Each one has to be set to "off" individually- some have two or three buttons to do it. There is no "all off" button. There is an "all on" button though, deliberately placed right next to a button you do have to press, where it would be easy to click by accident. Just in case you did persevere and start to turn the switches off all the pages of them....One moment of lost concentration, or a fat thumb incident and whoosh, all the permissions are back on again.Bastards!

Yes. It could get you prosecuted for driving a vehicle not in a fit condition in the UK. Just as a broken brake light could, even though you won't have known about it and there is another light anyway. A decent cop would just give you a warning and instruct you to get it fixed. But....

Yes, I had this, many years ago. A cop with a trainee or probationer or something in tow. Stopped me and gave me a ticket for a dodgy brake light. No suggestion of anything wrong with my driving otherwise. I'm pretty sure it was a training exercise for the new copper. But that's the law.

Re: US conservative "fear" meme

"if the electric utility wanted to shut me off, they could dispatch a worker at any time, period."

In the UK they need a court order to come in and disconnect a meter. But not to flick a remote switch.

Or you could be a teacher or well, any other publc service. Get the nonsense and the poor pay.

Re: Plenty of specialists, massive shortist of generalists

Organisational Psychology when I did my degree in the 70s was about interaction within companies. And often was, or could be, about being manipulative to get the staff to behave how you want them to (effectively work harder for less money). But it didn't have to be.

When I did a postgrad in education leadership, (pretty much the same as the head teachers' NPQH), around 15 years ago almost all of the organisational "research" was based on narrative Socialogcal research, devoid of any rigour that I could discern and none of which I'd bother using to wipe my.........

But it was also mostly about getting the plebs to do what you wanted. I had/have the suspicion that Psychology couldn't or wouldn't give them the results they wanted so they resorted to this witchcraft.

Research is not value free.What gets research grants and is published depends massively on the political climate.

Before the UK and other governments decided that Phonics was the only way to reach reading I received and read dozens of research papers on literacy teaching methodology and effectiveness of different approaches every year. Once Phonics took a hold all I got was dull comparative studies of phonic acquisition across different populations/languages.

Oh thinking can be taught, good language skills can be taught, good interpersonal skills can be taught. There are some brilliant programmes for this. (e.g.. Philosophy for kids) But not while politician and the public deride these things and insist on drone learning, measurable targets etc.

Re: qualities HR doesn't like

Yeah. Successful ( in career) HR types, like surgeons, bury their mistakes. The brilliant technician/teacher/social worker/anyone else who doesn't get the job because they didn't say the right thing at the right time in the right way will mostly just never be known about. That's probably no different from the old fashioned interview panel, to be fair. But it does mean that HR's process can be very inefficient. Safe choices rather than best choices.

Re: Plenty of specialists, massive shortist of generalists

HR are here to ensure a company meets legal employment obligations. Just as bean counters are there to make sure it meets financial ones.

The problem seems to arise when they're given guru status and have the control of their respective domains rather than just advising on them. Because neither group has any sight of the organisation as a whole. The tunnel vision leads to narrow decisions.