Work Experiences

---

Work- well, it's certainly not particularly onerous at this precise moment. This week's very quiet as most people are off on field trips, doing 'activities'. I'm sat here in a spacious office which have just moved into, playing music on my laptop and awaiting the return of an electricity supply.

My job is to help the organisation sort out their documentation (mainly paper). There have been considerable changes of staff over the last year or so and the new recruits are finding it difficult to locate information prior to when they started. In addition, the overall numbers of staff have increased, they have moved to new offices and, since I have arrived here, completed an extension on the new offices, giving them more space.

Prior to the extension being built, the offices were pretty cramped, shared by several people, and full of boxfiles, piles of paper and pamphlets and books on religious and development matters. My mission is to get all their paperwork tidy and with a classification system such that they can find things. What they need to be able to do is to find documents produced by colleagues in other departments as well as their own.

First job was to try to get everyone to go through all their boxfiles etc and get an understanding as to what was there, what should be in a different office, what is no longer current and what could be chucked. You can see my colleagues with their documentation before and as we started in the attached photos. I hope to later post the 'Afters'! We then needed to document how we are going to categorise things in future. So far have had meetings with all the departments and we are in the process of writing up the new classifications so that everyone can be clear as to what should be where. The next step will be to organise everything (both paperwork in current use and that to be archived). This could be a big job! However, have broken everything down into small chunks so wherever we can get to during my stay will be an advance, and it will be straightforward to continue if necessary once am gone. Apart from one workshop I facilitated, my job has been to start people off on tasks and then encourage and assist. In one sense it is quite an interesting challenge. Compared with some of my recent projects, it's about getting other people to deliver and not doing it myself. I don't need to know what's in their boxfiles and find things. They do. Best day was when I could report that over the last few days I had done pretty much no work but that other people had!

If there is time and there is the appetite, would also like to help out with some other IT, documentation and project planning issues. Am passing on hints and tips in Office as I go and have hopefully provided the organisation with a useful asset register (their last attempts got lost when lightning destroyed two computers a while back).

---

Photos

Where do I file this?
Other finds included old shoes and Toyota spare parts

Offices
The new extension is the left half, the mirror image of the right (though internally different)

My desk
I share with the Director, and have been provided with a great desk and chair.

Colleagues
Those remaining to man the fort this week