Screwing It Up

Many years ago I paid some professional tradesman to do a couple of jobs for me. One was high up, one was very heavy. Both of them ended up having to be redone. Whilst not a damning indictment of all tradesman, of whom I am sure there are many excellent ones, it did set me on a path of trying to avoid paying somebody to do a job that I could do (just as badly) myself.

On the plus side, this means I need to have a lot of tools. Many, many tools. Things like a steering wheel puller, which to be honest is not something you need every day. I once bought an airless paint sprayer because I read how incredibly dangerous they were. If you miss the wall and hit yourself, which seems unlikely, you can end up with an unwanted tattoo. According to Forbes I have nine of the ten most dangerous tools*.

However, and possibly disappointedly, this blog is not about dangerous tools; me cutting off some entertaining part of my body but rather the perils of cheap tools. Because I need every tool known to man but need some of them rarely, I tend to buy inexpensive ones. Also, I am just inherently cheap.

Cheap Chinese tools (and I don’t mean the name brand tools made in China) have got a lot better over the last 20 years but still frequently suffer from basic problems. The thing that drives me nuts and is the subject of this blog, is that those things are not complex engineering problems, but such basic simple things that you wonder why they are even problems at all.

1. Tools vibrate. Therefore screws will fall out if you don’t retain them properly. The cost and effort to put threadlocker on a screw is miniscule. The time and effort to repair the powerhead to my strimmer when the magneto screws came out at full throttle….
2. Poorly vulcanized rubber hoses crack. In an air hose this is annoying. In a petrol hose rather more exciting.
3. Motor brushes should not be made of pencil lead. If you feel the need to give your customer spare brushes, you probably need better brushes.

Of the three, the one that gets me time and again is number 1. It is the easiest thing to solve but the most annoying. I don’t buy that it’s planned obsolescence – nobody is going to buy a Chinese quad bike again if the wheels fall off the first one. It’s a lack of attention to the most basic, boring, yet important things. The Chinese tool guys have managed to make very complex castings, injection moulded plastic cases that are almost seamless and tiny and efficient electronic controls. But doing the screws up tight?

In shared services, we face similar problems. We are good at big and exciting projects, at least most of the time. It’s the smallest and simplest things that can let us down. Forgetting to tell the customer who they are talking to, or asking their name. Moving a piece of equipment and not entering into the equipment database that you did so. Forgetting to renew a digital certificate. Not difficult, not complex but really, really important.

I’m convinced that if we ever suffer a major failure as an organisation it won’t be because of something huge or something complex. It won’t be a WannaCry or Petya style cyber attack. It’ll be because we didn’t do the screws up tight.

*The one I don’t have is a JCB.

Giles Letheren – Chief Executive Officer

Splash!

The opportunity to share an evening with colleagues messing about on the water, was one not to missed for Delt’s intrepid water babies. An introductory lesson in Stand Up Paddle boarding at Mount Batten Water Sports Centre.

We arrived and were warmly met by the unwitting coaches who had let themselves into an hour or two’s mayhem. Having been suitable equipped and briefed we headed for the warm summer waters of Plymouth Sound. A little like Bambi on roller skates we made our first venture onto the water, within moments a couple of us took an early bath, much to the amusement of those who had yet to take a dip……

Having tried various methods of falling in, with additional points for the largest splash, wiping out others and general getting your friends wet. We opted to move away from one-man boards to the much larger Team SUP’s.

Well, if you think controlling your own balance, whilst 6 of your colleagues are simultaneously trying to move, wobble and stay upright is an easy task I would suggest you give it a go, needless to say the effect was 7 people soaking up the salt water. These team events, very quickly, broke down into water fights, cross board incursions and free for all wrestling matches. Old scores being settled, and new ones being quickly levelled, as Director took on CEO, technicians taking on service heads and all round general merriment, mirth and bruised (and wet) egos.

The 2 hours passed in a splash, leaving us exhausted but having had a great team building experience, very different to the usual office interactions.

Damean Miller – Interim Head of New Business

We Helped A Zoo

On Friday 29^th July, 10 Delt staff members travelled to Dartmoor Zoological Park in Sparkwell to assist the staff with whatever task they had planned for them.

“Delt supports local charities offering occasional no charge use of our manpower. On a paid leave basis, groups of Delt staff carry out work which supports the charity’s goals and acts a team-building exercise. All our staff are actively encouraged to take part allowing Delt to be recognised as a positive force in the community.”

We arrived at the Zoo at 8am and made our way to the café to meet Tim the maintenance manager. He gave us a brief of what the day entailed and also went through the relevant health and safety. We then went to the main store where we picked up our hi viz, wheel barrows, rakes, gloves and dumpy bags.

Our first destination was the African paddock where there were two beautiful zebras and two ostriches. Before entering the paddock, we had to go through biosecurity to clean our shoes to protect against the spread of infectious diseases.

It was a really hot day and the field, which was huge, had been freshly cut the day before and our task was to manually rake all the dead grass. Working as a team, some of us raked the grass whilst others collected it and placed it into the dumpy bags which then had to be wheeled to another area to be disposed of. We stopped for a break at 10, then got back to it half an hour later. We managed to get this all done quite quickly. We were then split into two groups and tasked with weeding and filling “holes made by moles”.

We got off to a good start and worked up quite an appetite. We headed back up to the café where our lunch was waiting for us. Benjamin Mee, the Chief Executive of Dartmoor Zoo, joined us for lunch, where he told us some stories about the previous owner and also spoke about parts of the film, “We bought a Zoo” starring Matt Damon, based on Benjamin’s true story book of the same name. When he was approached about making a film he was asked to think of an A lister that he’d like to play him, he went back with Ewan McGregor and was immediately told that he wasn’t a big enough star! It was great to chat with him, he had so much time to sit with us and even met up with us a few more times throughout the day.

After our long lunch we toured the zoo, looked at all the animals and watched the cheetahs being fed their dinner. Reluctantly we went back to the weeding. During our time there one of the other volunteers told us about a close encounters session that was about to take place so some of us slipped away to go and meet some more animals. We saw some fascinating and endangered creatures including a really odd-looking toad which just looked like a head, and we also saw a 3 day old gecko! We also had the opportunity to hold a corn snake and a few of us held a gorgeous chameleon. By the time we had come out of the close encounters session we had all but finished for the day and headed back to put all of the equipment away.

Giles Letheren, our CEO added: It wasn’t the smartest thinking in the world for this unfit CEO to join a day of manual labour at one of our sponsored charities, Dartmoor Zoo, on the hottest day of the year. However, the enthusiasm and sheer joy of working outside in beautiful surroundings managed to avert my overworked hearts inclination to quit. It’s amazing how even something as simple as clearing grass can turn into a competitive sport. I hope the Zebras were grateful. We met a load of lovely zoo staff and volunteers, got a bunch of jobs done, one of the emu’s – which were enormous – gave me a feather for my already embarrassing hat and (sadly) nobody was eaten by a lion. And at the office, if we get to the end of the day and nobody has been eaten by a lion, I call that a success.

Sarah Longcake – Senior IT Support Specialist

Showing Passion

When I joined Delt in January 2015 we didn’t have a website. Come to think of it there were quite a lot of things we didn’t have! So, we built a website and felt very pleased with ourselves. But that was more than 3 years ago and we are a very different organisation today. We recently went through an exercise where we found some people who didn’t know Delt and told them all about us. Then we asked them to look at our website. It wasn’t a great surprise to find that what they saw on the website didn’t represent the story we told. Yes, the vision and values remained unchanged but the focus on customer, the focus on people, the services we offer and the passion we show just didn’t come through.

That leads us to today where we launch a new Delt website. It’s the same vision and values but almost everything else has changed. The new site is very customer and people centric and reflects much of the journey we have been on. We started life providing IT services but now have a much wider support services offering. IT, Payroll and Pensions, Specialist GP Systems Training, Cyber Security, Professional Consultancy. We started with just two customers and now have closer to thirty. We have increased our revenues by 50%. We have generated millions of pounds of benefit for the public interest sector. We employ more people and invest more in them than ever before. I get genuinely excited every time I talk about this. Our hope is that the new website reflects not only the company we have grown to be, but the passion and excitement our people bring to the vital work they do, in helping our customers do amazing things.

Giles Letheren – Chief Executive Officer