Moments of paranoia and presumption

I've become used to questioning the motives of my employer with increasing diligence, some might say suspicion. I received notice yesterday that I can leave employment tomorrow, but couched in these terms: "Your last day of working ... will be 27th April 2007... your last day of employment will be 10 May". At first glance you might think (since the letter discusses this) that my employer is kindly calculating the holiday owed to me. Given that the company is probably aware of its precarious legal situation -- potential constructive dismissal and breach of the disability discrimination act -- I'm a little more circumspect. If I'm employed until May 10, how do I start a new job on Monday?
But my employer is presumptive and underestimates me, despite me telling them that they shouldn't.
Since my new job is a contract through an agency, I can still start Monday but my contract can start May 10. I still meet the end client's needs, but don't get paid for a couple of weeks. The agency doesn't care.
But I don't even need to do this. Check out the contract I signed. It doesn't say I can't work for anyone else, just that I can't engage in "business where there is or there is likely to be any conflict with the interests of [the company]".
And there's more.
"In the even of the termination of your employment you will be paid for any holiday that has not been taken on a pro rata basis." I take this to mean that I'm paid the holiday that's owed to me, without being employed any longer. So I'm owed money up to May 10 without being employed. Either way, I'm not in breach of contract for working elsewhere over this period (unless this was for a competitor to my current employer).
There's still more.
The company "undertakes to provide a comfortable, safe and creative environment to work in". Which they didn't. Isn't that breach of contract on their part?
Anyway, as I said, Friday is my last day, so you shouldn't have to put up with me harping on about work. I realise that I may have alienated my small readership, so I'll get back to talking about PDAs and politics again soon.

More piss-taking

I'm not going to go into all the details, but my employers are really beginning to take the piss now. Went to a meeting to agree a leaving date, but we didn't. Then their response to my grievance said that I didn't do enough to ensure my own successful integration.
These people just don't get it. If they had talked to me properly from the start and made the assumption that I was their equal instead of some pushover, they'd have realised, like Aesop, that there's more than one way to skin a cat.
I may have to try the crane on them next.

Hardball or softball

Following my resignation, the offers keep coming:

• A more senior position in the company.
• A salary raise commensurate with that position.
• Charge of the graduate recruitment programme in consulting and research.

I've spoken to the Employment Tribunal Service however and they tell me that in only 1% of cases does the board believe that a grievance is sufficiently malicious for them to award employer costs against the employee. I also have an idea of costs for a legal representation through an employment tribunal.
The question I have to ask myself is, what would be able to let me stay? Is there a way I could draw a line in the sand and continue in employment here? Or do I want to burn all my bridges when I'm going to be looking for other work in future?
The easiest -- but least satisfactory -- course of action is just to walk away. I'm not prepared to do that:

• I don't want it said that I left because I just couldn't hack it, that I got a poor review and got arsey over it.
• I need to establish that they discriminated against me because of my cancer.
• Could I be really onboard for the graduate programme if I have doubts about the company?

So, there's nothing that'll make me stay, because I've lost faith.

Updated:
Now I've articulated my position to the head of HR, things have turned a little more hardball. They're completing the grievance process at a subsequent meeting and will take the view that they've made every attempt to resolve the issue. I will say that they did this only once I'd resigned. They'll say that the process wasn't complete and that I could have appealed before I resigned, but chose not do do so. They told me the process was complete, but I have no witnesses to that, so it'll be difficult to prove. I'll tell them that I'm going to an Employment Tribunal. They'll say fine and won't do anything until they hear from the service, which means I'll need to pay hundreds of pounds for a lawyer when I shouldn't need to. If the tribunal sits, they will lose, but I won't win much because they'll claim I didn't follow the whole process. It's a stupid way of doing things, but they forced me down the hardball route.

Coursing adrenalin

I quit just now. There's a tinge of regret, no doubt.
My head of department admitted to me that comments in my appraisal related to my cancer and that he should have transferred me to the newly merged company at a higher level. So there's some concession there, but it's too little too late. I don't want to be a hard arse over this, but if I knew about someone else being treated as they've treated me, I'd be really pissed off.
The head of HR came to see me within about 5 minutes of me resigning, asking me to reconsider, so I'll spend tonight discussing with Helen and try to take as open a mind as possible.

It's a mashed up world out there

This blog is turning into yet another whinge about work: YAWAW, or YAWN. It was never meant to be. So let me pretend that I'm saying something wider about society and the internet rather than just about my terrible employers.
If you're into things webby, you'll almost certainly have read about if not actually read Tim O'Reilly's call for (self-)censorship, which has made the headlines in a number of places. I think what's shocked the internet community is that someone with as much understanding of the web should advocate this approach, when the whole strength of the web has been its liberalism; I use the term with all its implicitly positive and negative connotations.
Generally the internet has grown because it is innovative and free form, permitting the majority of people with the financial means to post content little hindrance to do so. There are of course exceptions, but generally this liberalism has led to rapid innovation of diversity of content, business models and technology. This is particularly in evidence in the much rehashed concept of Web 2.0. Such innovation creates issues for the politically reactionary, but few in our industry would have expected Tim O'Reilly to form part of that group.
You wouldn't expect the leading internet agency in Europe to form part of that group either, but an email to staff suggests otherwise:

[We] have been asked to attend a brainstorming seminar at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on April 19th to explore the subject of how digital media can be used to defend against radicalisation.

The FCO tells us:

Groups such as Al Qaeda use the Internet and other communication media to great effect for propaganda and recruitment purposes.

Leaving aside my doubts about how much Al Qaeda is a cohesive group that distributes mass email and uploads photos of insurgent activities onto Flickr or terrorist mash-ups onto Facebook, let's just consider the company's reaction. It accepts without question that radicalisation is wrong and that the internet should be used to control it, then seeks to engage staff in telling the government why. So we're telling the government how to censor ourselves (coz they sure as hell don't know) while we tell our clients about how radical our thinking is in providing innovative solutions on the internet. We're provocative, we are. You can be too. Unless you're doing something that's not right. We'll be the judge of that though. So, we can create Web 2.0 style forums and develop some of the biggest mash-ups in the UK, but we're in favour of censorhip. That's because we're ethical. But we can still build sites for arms and cigarette manufacturers.
Wow, it's a complex world out there.

Hiding my glee

Do you judge people by the company they keep?

I've set up my own today, which implies:
1. I'm leaving my current company, which is deeply patronising.
2. I've won some business!

I have to hide my glee as I'm still in dispute with my current employers, but I'm over the bloody moon.

Expert, schmexpert

Here are the categories for our new company expert programme:

1. Multi Channel e.g. IPTV, Mobile, Tablet PCs


2. Emerging Technologies eg, Vista, Ruby on Rails


3. Transactional Merchandising


4. Social Computing & Networking


5. Convergence


6. Youth Market & Online behaviour


7. New Online Business Models


8. Information Management, Enterprise Search & Dashboards


9. Rich Media


10. Inclusive Design


11. Youth trends

These are the subjects where my company sees itself at the forefront of thought and wants to produce a PowerPoint each quarter to prove it.
Some notable absences from the list: content management, systems integration, CRM, business process improvement, scalability and performance, security. What I'd call the fundamentals.
I have two main issues with the list: firstly, there's no place for me to show expertise unless I appropriate information management as being a broader understanding of content management (which it isn't really) and secondly, it's so bloody assumptive. If you're some kind of futurologist determining strategy and saying these are the things we should be interested in, why do you assume dashboards are going to be valuable, when all the current user research shows how much people hate adopting them? And why are Tablet PCs in there? Is the act of clicking on a website with a pen on a tablet radically different to using a mouse with a laptop? Why are multi-channel and convergence different subjects? Why are youth trends and youth market separate?
Then there's the final issue, which is that for each subject, the company is going to nominate four experts from different streams to contribute their expertise. How can you talk about new business models and about social networking and then prescribe who you define as an expert? Have these people never heard of wikis? Oh yes, they tried to implement a wiki but failed to grasp the fundamental concepts: there are 19 company wikis, where you can't add documents, can't use HTML and which can't be searched across. Nice.

Six degrees of refrigeration

Today, the maximum temperature is 9 degrees Celsius. The average temperature is considerably lower than that, around 6 degrees. But I'm sat in my corridor at my new permanent seat with no heating to speak of and no insulation save a broken glass panel above my head that's covered with a bit of cardboard box. How can this be an appropriate working environment by anyone's judgement? Must stop now as my fingers are seizing up... (No, that's not an exaggeration.)

"This is not a meritocracy"

Some 10 days after submitting a grievance to my company about the way I've been treated, I had a meeting with my head of department and HR rep yesterday. How enlightening it was too.
While it's difficult to go into the nature of the grievance in detail, suffice to say that following a merger I was assigned a new "level" in the merged company that I felt denigrated my contribution. This is one of many grievances I raised.
My moment of clarity came when my head of department explained that people are assigned a level in the company based on commercial need, so that even if they meet their objectives and the criteria for a level, they may not be promoted (the only way to receive a pay rise).
- Does that mean we're not a meritocracy, I asked.
- Yes, this is not a meritocracy, he replied.
Call me naïve if you want, but I thought the point of setting individual objectives was for people to be recognised and rewarded for meeting them.
Leaving aside any legal implications of his statement, how does it motivate me for my head of department to tell me that my promotion is dependent on plugging a commercial gap rather than on what I do? What are my prospects if no one vacates a more senior position?
These apparently arbitrary levels are used to allocate people to projects, so another point I raised was that I would be allocated to less challenging work than I'm capable of, so my potential value to the company is diminished. My head of department corrected me on this point too: the business director would request me because he knows I'm capable of delivering a project even though I'm not officially ranked at a higher level.
The (quite overt) implication is that the company will keep me on a lower-level rating at a lower salary even though I'm doing higher-level work which, if they needed to recruit someone to do, they'd have to pay a significant amount more to that consultant. So I'm cheap labour doing a skilled job. Thanks very much.
I was also told that the work I've done in management and reporting is irrelevant to any consultancy skills (even though it's a measure on the appraisal form). Not like we sell management and reporting is it? Oh, hang on, we do.
The meeting concluded with the company representatives telling me that I shouldn't feel that I'm being picked on. These kind of problems are an issue across the company: it's just that I've been affected more than others have.

Keeping up with the MySpacers

A couple of posts about work this morning, which doesn't reflect the intended balance of this blog but for which I'm unapologetic.
Our company is launching a new corporate website to reflect its brand, the work it does, complete full service bla bla bla.
The site is (obviously) in Flash and quite funky. But does it work? Let's send an email out in an open source software style to the company and tell them there's a "PHAT" prize for the person who can find the weirdest error they don't yet know about.
There's a bit of a rumble of contentment goes around the office as any automated test produced 100s of errors. Then people start picking the bones through the site and finding more user-journey based errors (ever tried going back in a Flash animation?). So people compare and contrast what they've found and email it back to the project team.
About a week later I got an email from someone in the team saying they couldn't replicate the errors I'd found in Firefox. The team is using version 1.5. Why? Version 2 has been out of Beta for months. And the team have never heard of AdBlock, even though it's the most downloaded Firefox Add-On. Then I discover that this isn't from some bussed-in tester, but from a bleeding "Program (sic) Manager", that is one of the most senior people responsibility for delivery in the organisation.
Is it just me or is this company fucked?

PDF to happiness

I've been doing some work for Dresdner Kleinwort recently, who conduct some interesting macro-economic research. One of their stars is a guy call James Montier, who writes about behaviours involved in investing. He's written a particularly interesting article on the psychology of happiness, which is well worth the read even though it's in a PDF.

Finally done it

So I submitted my grievance today to my HR rep. Of course, I had to go to the HR department to find out who my HR rep was...
21 grievances listed. I also suggested 6 things that would fix them.
I'm not sure what they're going to come back with, because it's so unpredictable. I can quite easily imagine that they do nothing for the next couple of weeks: sit on my complaint until I go to harrass them again. Alternatively, they may get bolshy about me not having followed proper channels: not that these have been explained to me, of course. And I wouldn't put it past them to agree that I have a case, but then find some other way to make my life difficult. I saw them really stick the knife in two of my colleagues through some legal shennanigans they'd contrived. I'm open-minded about it, but not expecting too much.
What most annoys me, however, is that I feel forced into this position. This company, for all its faults, represents a really good opportunity for me to learn new skills and work on interesting projects. But if they're forcing me into a position where I can't actually work here, then what choice do I have?

I don't mean to bleat...

Company results came out today, so a company meeting was scheduled. I say it was scheduled, but...
Originally the meeting was scheduled for Thursday, but someone thought it would be better to deliver results on a Friday afternoon. So we cancelled the venue we'd booked and sought one for the Friday. Then the CEO put his foot down and said company meetings shouldn't be on Friday afternoons, so we went back to the venue and tried to move it to the Thursday. They'd already booked it to someone else while we'd been changing our minds. Never mind, we'll hold a two-hour company meeting in an area of our office with 20 seats for 400 employees.
Ah, better book the seats then.
It's snowed, so loads of people haven't turned up, so we'll reschedule.
Which is a good job, because the CEO who wanted the meeting today and is presenting the company results had booked the day off work.
I think you're beginning to get an idea of some of my frustrations, particularly if you follow the work keyword for this entry.
Am I doing anything about this? Yes.

Knowing me, knowing stuff I shouldn't

With due deference to El Reg's BOFH, let me tell you about some things that have been going on at work.
I'm participating in the KM project, an initiative to improve knowledge sharing largely through a portal (aka intranet) through which you can find relevant documents and people from the constituent companies in our recent merger. I've been drafted in to give the initiative some direction and some impetus; in other words a kick up the backside, though I may have mistaken this location with the teeth.
So today the portal was launched. Shortly afterwards, Client Partner (basically a sales director) comes back and says:

CP: I can access all the staff salary information on the portal.
Me: It's not on the portal. That's the point, it's a portal. It's just showing where you can access it on the file server.
CP: It's a disgrace. The portal's broken. It must be closed down at once.
Me: If I close the portal down, you'll still be able to access the salary information. You need to change permissions on the file server.
CP: Are you questioning me?
Me: Look, I can stop people finding this through the portal, but you're not solving the problem. You have a problem on the file server that existed before the portal did and will exist afterwards. Anyone with a mapped network drive can search using Windows search and find classified data. You need to fix this.
CP: Bring the portal down.
Me: Ok, so there's two-year old salary information available. Is that so important?
CP: It's a security risk. The portal shouldn't be able to access this information.
Me: I agree, but the search index runs as if it were any employee, so if the portal can access the data, so can anyone else. We checked with your office what should be indexed and they told us to index these folders. We have, now it's broken don't blame us.
CP: Well you obviously didn't check or we wouldn't have the problem.
Me: Here's the email that says index all the folders from your office. By the way, this problem doesn't exist for any server at any of the other offices. Doesn't that point to the problem being in your office rather than with the search tool?
CP: That's because you're from the other two offices and you don't understand how we have things set up.
Me: That's why we asked you what we should index the first time. Fine, we'll start again. We'll bring down the intranet, send you a list of all the folders that we index, you can tell us which to exclude, we'll reindex the server.
CP: I'm glad you've seen sense.
Me (to developer): Change the CP's profile so that every time you hover over their name, an appropriate message appears.

Obviously this is a stylised representation of fact, with CP representing a conglomerate of dickheads. If it had been just one idiot instead of half a dozen it wouldn't have bothered me so much.

Twixt brewery and piss-up

To continue on a theme, the image above is illustrative of what I have to put up with in this place. Isn't there someone competent enough, or even just willing, to make PCs work across different domains?
I can't connect to any printers, see anyone else's calendar, see most shared folders let alone write to them, use the timesheeting system, I don't have a phone, filing cabinet, allocated desk, mouse, or screen, I miss out on most company emails, don't get any departmental messages, haven't been inducted into any of the HR processes, and haven't had my appraisal, even though it's a fortnight overdue. I'm a little frustrated. But since there's no channel through which to complain (I'm either ignored or told it's someone else's responsibility, who then ignores me) I turn to the blog.
Professional services my arse.

A white Christmas?

As temperatures drop to brass monkey levels, the chance of snow lingers, just in time for our company Christmas party this Friday! So it could be a white Christmas after all...
Why are we having a Christmas party in January? It's not calendar iconoclasm (more's the pity). The official line is that when we merged this year, we couldn't anticipate how big the company would be when booking a venue. The real reason is a combination of tight-fistedness and incompetence. We always knew the merger was happening, but didn't book anything early enough and balked at the prices of the venues that remained.
I'm steadily beginning to appreciate the gap between brewery and piss-up in the merged company's competencies. Example.
I've been trying to push an internal knowledge management initiative. We were almost ready to launch a new portal providing access to all our documents and people in time for the aforementioned Christmas party.
Then "technical support" got their mitts on it.
Their contribution was to:

1. switch the domain name settings so now a quarter of the staff can't access it;
2. move a third of all our documentation to a new file server without telling anyone; it then broke and it'll take 4-6 weeks to fix.

The adage of "if it ain't broke" rarely applies to the systems administrator mentality. But it appears here that the idea of fixing broken things doesn't apply either.
*** Updated ***
And there's still more... having sent the content authors a user guide telling them how to add content, one has now come back telling me that some people can't see the content he's entered. Did he enter it into the portal? No. What am I meant to do with these people?

A sceptic's guide to web strategy

I've recently joined the Strategic Services department in my newly merged company where, I've been told by my new line manager, "there's no place for cynicism". I think he meant scepticism, but contrary to the perception you may have of me, I wasn't being anything but positive at the time. In fact I uttered not one negative word.
But I have to challenge the perception of companies like ours that they're somehow going to challenge the leading consultancies, break into their markets and offer clients incisive advice about their business strategy. There's such a level of naïvety about how clients may -- and should -- react to some jumped up person in their 20s or 30s who has just read Michael Porter's Competitive Advantage and thinks that no one else has, despite the fact it's been taught on almost every business course in the western world in the last ten years.
So we're selling our intellectual property in Situational Analysis, Business Intelligence, Strategy, etc. as though our clients were inept gits who don't know their own business. I say we're selling this, but of course we're not. What we are selling is user research, usability, and brand development because most businesses haven't ever addressed these issues and are confused by them. If our clients really wanted Business Intelligence and felt they couldn't read all the books produced by McKinsey, they'd go out and hire one of the Big 5 or an individual who used to work for them. But to think that anyone with any experience of a consultancy would ask us to come in and tell them how to run their business is foolhardy, to put it politely. We should be finding a niche that clients have limited exposure to but know is important: content management, for example.
This is all borne out by the "strategy" project at the moment, which is probably the least strategic project I've ever worked on. One of those where I say, "I wouldn't have started from here if I were you".
Our web strategy offering should be:

• Are you expectations from your web applications realistic? This applies to both websites and intra/extranet-style applications.


• Does your brand work on-line?


• Which technologies should you be using to deliver your requirements?


• Do you understand what's easy or difficult to do on the web?


• What else can you achieve on-line that you hadn't thought of before?

That's it. Web stuff's not that complicated, but if your head's out of the web, it can be daunting. But thinking you can persuade clients to part with thousands of pounds each day without being sceptical is about as far from a strategic approach to our value proposition as you can get.

Ha ha ha

From: Human Resources
To: London Staff

Dear All,

Our company is going to be considered for inclusion on the Financial Times "UK's 50 Best Workplaces" list which is published in May this year.

The Great Place to Work Institute who are responsible for compiling the list will send you an email with a link to an employee survey regarding employee opinions.

This is an independent survey, so feel free to be honest and candid. No one from the company will see your responses.

If you have any questions about the authenticity of this survey pleace contact : [email@greatplacetowork.co.uk].

Thankyou for your participation.

So hard to update my blog; so much to say and so little time...

I've been managing some work with IBM recently. It's been really interesting to see how the big boys work, having previously contemplated an offer from Accenture. There are undoubtedly some very bright and talented people in these organisations, so it makes you wonder how the rest get in. It's not as if the turnover is that high either; had an appalling presentation the other day from an IBM team to one of our clients but they'd all been with the company at least three years.
Not the worst I've seen though. When the people presenting have an argument in front of the client, you know not all is well..
But I digress as is my wont when I've been doing too much of the same old thing. This morning I had a waking dream where it was time for work, but I couldn't remember what preparation I needed to do. I was pretty sure I didn't need to do any financial consultancy so did I need to have a lecture prepared on Racine?
It was only when I awoke fully and figured out I needed to get to Clerkenwell that I remembered my job was about web stuff that dreams are made on. Reminds me of a dream where I had to resit my A-levels but couldn't remember the double cosine rule; frighteningly real.
The best thing about this season is how you get to see dawn each morning with having to wake from your dreams at some unprepossessing — does anyone know what that means? — hour. Rosy-fingered, as Ovid tells us, she shows us as many colours as my next-door neighbours horticultural specimens. So arise and enjoy! Don't submit to the media's Brrr-itain hegemony!

More on professional services...

I've been somewhat remiss in my blog, not through lack of things to say but through lack of time. Consequently I will let someone else's image speak for me: