Hopefully you have seen in your email that the Office 365 licensing issue has been successfully resolved.
I am a volunteer like you, I just happen to volunteer at HQ and any outage would have impacted me in the same way.
I was really happy to see positive and proactive comms on this problem. The perm staff worked incredibly hard under difficult circumstances to ensure that this payment issue didn’t result in a huge disruption for the RAFAC.
We are all very quick to criticise, particularly on this forum, when things don’t go well but in this case we should recognise that HQ has done something well. The way in which this was handled with transparency and professionalism should be a template for how future incidents should be effectively managed and brought to a successful conclusion.
Agreed. Whilst there was frustration on my part with the government procurement rules there was nothing HQ could do about it and I for one welcome the new paradigm of communication and hope that it continues. It works far better than the rumour mill and keeps people happier
There will be those who focus on things like “there shouldn’t have been a problem in the first place”, but I think we were all (to some degree) grateful - if not also pleasantly surprised - that someone was proactive enough to actually tell us what was going on behind the scenes instead of just trying to cover it up and hope it would work out.
We’ve spent so much time complaining about x decision or y issue and lack of comms… There is actually some positive that has come out of this and I hope it continues and spreads to other areas.
Agreed - in particular (in addition to the behind the scenes) hard work it was good to see a reverse-mushroom policy when it came to information.
Given the fairly catastrophic effect that this would have had if it had become an issue, it was good to see the level of forewarning. It would be nice if all business was conducted in this way!
Despite this being a positive resolution to a potential negative issue that would have had a large impact on the organisation had it occurred, you do have to applaud the fact there were corps wide communication, that you would only miss if you live under a rock and don’t review the primary communication method of the organisation - EMAIL.
There are only 2 other communication methods available to the organisation - PHONE & LETTER, neither of which are practical.
I really hope other areas of HQ & further down the chain, look at the effective comms issued by the BADER Team and implement them as well, our biggest shortfall remains communication, as uploading a file to SharePoint, even with an announcement isn’t communication.
Good bad or indifferent this has highlighted the fragility of the way we (and everywhere else) operates in terms of total reliance on these products and how the general panic that sets in.
I wouldn’t like to cast aspertions but this wouldn’t have just impacted us, it would have had a far wider impact. If it had just been the ‘volunteers’ that were affected I doubt very much the comms would have been there and nor would the sense of urgency. A bit of credit yes, but let’s see it across the board before we get carried away. This will be one of those, ‘do you remember when …’ moments, as it’s not being done at that point.
