I’ve spent this week reviewing what I’ve achieved at work this year and identifying what needs to be done in the last quarter. So far, most of my objectives to date have been met, a few have slipped and one or two have been shifted due to external forces. That’s a satisfying place to be in the run-in to Christmas and Hogmanay, and it means that tomorrow I can finish for my holiday with most things in reasonable order and with some idea of what my priorities will be for January.
It’s the nature of work plans that they are more ambitious than reality generally permits to come to pass. One lesson we’re learning is to be a little less ambitious and allow ourselves to succeed at more. If you have too much in the plan, and only so much time or resource to deliver it, you’re setting yourself up to fail. If, however, you identify the tasks that really are essential for delivery or improvement, then energies can be focussed in the right direction and success is much more likely. And, if you have an idea about what else you’d like to do if time permits, then you’re not short of other projects to choose from when opportunities arise.
We’ve done a lot of work this year on reviewing how we deliver our function as health and safety regulators. The big training day I ran a couple of weeks ago was part of that, and now my job is to support the teams as they start to deliver the specific projects we’ve identified – gas safety in catering premise and Legionella in spa pools. We’re also now up and running with the desktop risk assessment for sites which fall to us for enforcement and that should start to give us much better intelligence about where the risks really are out there so we can do something to tackle them.
Priorities for the last quarter of the year are really about looking forward to the next year and the things we need to be doing in that. So, a review of policies and procedures, documents to make them more usable for readers, planning projects for the next year and planning training and learning activities for inspectors. And there’ll be some work with the database system and the document management system, the internal health and safety group and the regional partnership group.
It’s going to be fun.