Day 2

Day 2 Today my day consisted of shadowing a number of employees as they created the systems involved in creating the accounts and evaluating employees, as well as filling them out. They were encountering the problems of changing their systems to account for new changes within the organisation and when confronted by all the tonnes of intricate changes required to the system I must confess my head hurt. They essentially were working on a few systems, checking the division of an FTE's labour, uploading the forecast costs, working out said forecast costs and processing all the original costs. Seeing how intricate an excel document could actually be and from my own experience with it helped me realise what an onerous task this one. I could now understand why turn around times on changes in politics, economics and businesses are so long. For every small internal change all of the systems in place that are effected by it need to be changed to take account of it. The system regarding queries, itself, fascinated me. When they make changes in the organisation or have issues with proposals in meetings either emails are sent out to everyone and with simple sorting, all the problematic issues are received or an interactive spreadsheet is created within the department, where people can register queries. These can then easily be adressed. This then laid the foundation for my second learning of the day. Planning a head is crucial. I had no idea how much forecasting was involved in running a business and this showed it too me. They have a forecast for every month of the year and then an overall forecast for the end of the year. Each month they review the forecasts based on their actual results and usually find they're accurate to the nearest percent, whenever it's not questions get asked about why not. It's incredible how serious they take their forecasts and having and having seen the business it's clear why. If there's a problem with the systems changing them can have a knock on effect on other systems and result in massive changes and it's important they identify these as quickly as possible. The other reasons is that, in an organisation like the civil service, the specifics are important and a small miscalculation or human error can have far reaching consequences. This was the basis of my final learning of the day. The way that the department work is in a pyramid style system; the people at the bottom break down their data into the important manageable chunks, which are fed up to the person above who collects lots of these key pieces of information and then boils them down to their most noticeable factors. He gives this info to the person above him and it continues thus until it reaches the senior civil servants and MPs. This is why it's important to eliminate all small errors in the data at an early stage, lots of 1% errors can amount to large over/under evaluations of performance and it'll be a month before these errors have any chance of being spotted. It isn't possible to miss out the finer details as if there is a query higher up (for example "what's the main part of that cost?") they can then break it down (and find out it was the purchasing of an expensive software). I had no idea that politicians had to deal with this simplified outlook on the civil service, yet if they notice they're spending too much of their government spending on the service then they can find out what is causing it. So I guess the main thing I have taken from today is a sense of perspective, whilst large decisions can be made at the top of the hierarchy there's always tonnes of employees somewhere down the line who get affected.