Where speaking truth to power is pointless.

In the aftermath of my “resignation” from TBS, I reached out to the primary antagonist of the situation, the top bureaucrat in the corporate services sector, Ms. Cahill.

After she accepted my contact request, I attempted to engage her in reassessing a nasty turn in events she helped bring on.

There are two points of contention I wanted her to take another look at. There was the lack of requirement on the part of those who use the PSPM (Public Service Performance Management) system to sign their entries. And the other was the work objectives which were assigned to a small group of individuals in the AMG (Access management Group) in the IT solution section which she oversaw.

 

Karen Cahill

 

3rd degree connection· 3rd

Sous-ministre adjointe Services ministériels chez Secrétariat du Conseil du Trésor | Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat

• SEP 2Kenth Cound sent the following messages at 9:35 AM

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Kenth Cound  9:35 AM

A: Because I care. Q: Who cares if there is no signature, only a check box?

• SEP 14

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Kenth Cound  11:27 AM

To seek the names of your employee's friends is overt control, and rushing to the aid of a serial incompetent micromanager is just wrong. Of course, they are going to come running crying and swearing one of their charges is driving them crazy by asking for explanations they cannot provide. I learned a valuable lesson, and the failures are mine. I make no apology. I seek no reset.

• SEP 25

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Kenth Cound  5:08 PM

New day here, how will it start? I will produce something a little more esoteric, a treatise on what is positive and negative when we talk about work objectives. Let’s say you work in an IT shop; you make accounts and administer changes to them. You might be asked to make a 100 of them to fulfill a quota. That is a positive work objective. Let’s say new products come online and you are asked to split your work between network accounts and cell phone setups. Still a standard type of requirement. Now we will complicate things somewhat, your boss says a new work assessment software is going to be used and the people in your section will have to perform a percentage each for some of the ticket types. You must take the orders from the top of the ticketing system queue. 

You might get an arrival or file system change request. Now your ability to make quotas is completely out of your hands. So you ask your boss to assign you the tickets, we'll because when you enter your work place at 9 unless it is really busy, all the arrivals and account transfers are taken. And since the boss determined the priority for tickets only she can change things. You cannot achieve your objectives and your complaint has made you pariah.

 The reasoning management provides is that they have been told to use a performance rating system that must include work objectives to fulfill a calculation. The manager makes the standard but does not remove the ticket queue. There is no satisfying this requirement. Your luck is now being stretched. This is an oversimplification of the situation I encountered when I was a tech in the government of Canada. I had this work objective. •Percentage of requests completed at the end of the fiscal year that includes requests from these key categories – Person Departure Request, Person Arrival Request, Outlook Permissions / Generic Email Account Request and Network Permissions Requests is: At least 25% for technicians with more than 3 years’ experience in the team. At least 23% for technicians with 1 - 3 years’ experience in the team. At least 19% for technicians with less than 1 years’ experience in the team. •Percentage of ticket closed by a technician that is reopened or completed incorrectly is less than 15% of the total tickets completed over the fiscal year. By this standard one cannot know whether one is on track or failing until all the numbers are in and it is too late to reverse any trend.

 It is like the manager is telling the worker to do a quota as well as other work and that objective does not take other work into account. And what happens to all the other types of requests that are not one of the above? By making different requirements for techs of shorter or longer tenure the whole concept of 100% is lost. There are only three techs the equation applies to. Somebody with a more ingenious mind than mine might devise a system to keep track of it all and we can ignore the fact that taking tickets from the top of ticketing system queue is still the rule. But I could not, and there is just no explaining the basic concepts of statistical analysis to some people. For example, what happens with the other types of tickets? We have a service desk where people can approach with their devices and their inquiries etc., and tickets are made for these. You basically must stop what you were doing and make a ticket from scratch which consumes time. Management stick to it, are prepared to punish any who question, and have no answers regardless of the policy that they must be able to explain the objectives. This all flies right under the noses of HR. In their happy-go-lucky world there is no need to have a union representative when workers have Them. And how lucky they are for being given a system to support their arbitrary judgements. Again, in my life I see a window of opportunity and feel the need to address it. This should be an easy win. The objectives are not clear and numbers do not and never will jive. I am sure there is an accountant somewhere who is thinking that this is satisfied by creating an entry on a spreadsheet like “ Extra work extracted by all the workers confused about their work objectives but who are not able to articulate their confusion, so they just try to do more and hope it is enough.” She would discount the impact such strictures have on workers’ mental health and mitigate damages by removing anyone who speaks up about it.

• OCT 12

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Kenth Cound  10:32 PM

Hope this finds you well Karen.

This will be my last word about Karen Cahill. She does not know my pain yet she is prepared to hunt down a lowly CS1 to issue the blow that will in her mind, clean up the service desk. Shame. We all know it has little to do with a few harmless jokes.