can find
this from october 2023, but from where i'm sitting, looks like the same thing
glassdoor has
this (although no 'attached documents' but does include a name / phone number
First one doesn't look quite what I remembered, the second one looks a lot more like it, good find thanks. Still don't actually have the official invite yet, tho they did that on a Thursday before.
When looking I did find there are multiple people in with the same job title at the council already there that I could find on linkedin and I know a lot of them didn't seem to be on it when I worked there before. Weirdly I didn't see this in January or the other postings as I do get emails from them.
One huge bonus (for me at least) they don't mention in the job spec is that they pretty much work 100% from home or maybe 1 day a week max. If you want to work from an office then you can but the uptake was something like 2% when I worked there and some of those had to be on site anyway. There is not enough space to get everyone in anyway and they just dropped another building so thats two main council places closed, one I used to work in is now being turned into accommodation for hospital workers or something.
i have mixed feelings about procurement and that sort of thing. having worked in the more operational end of local authority, it sometimes feels like the main purpose of procurement people is to stop you getting anything done...
I found a lot of people were told to do tasks which really required a lot more knowledge about how things worked than they had. Almost like some kind of training would be useful but it seemed to be an osmosis based knowledge system. Had people with 100k devolved authority but absolutely no knowledge of public procurement, timelines, authorisation routes, etc. It was available on the intranet, if they knew to look there, but also had broken page links and a lot of the information was out of date, they told me they were fixing it for several years. My department had a different initial procedure which was not on the intranet, for auth and spend tracking, which I was running but if you were a new employee you would have no idea. My onboarding process document I found after 7 months in a random folder, with references to 10+ people who were no longer working there.
Someone coming in from private especially would feel like we kept stopping them because they would submit things think well thats done and I have to say no we need to do an IR35 check, yes we do need a standstill period for this, etc for everything. There was a council guidance document, which was hundreds of pages and had absolutely nothing useful for a new joiner. So I had to write a very dumbed down guide just for under 25k which was still 2 pages and full of hyperlinks to resources and contact details for me/other relevant people if what they were doing varied at all from a very basic procurement, not EU, etc. This was sent to everyone in the department, who mostly got directed to the intranet.....
I frequently had to chase people after the initial request because they would not complete things (which just about everyone did repeatedly apart from the emergency accommodation lot who did everything perfectly) or missing a lot of things (same). They would then leave it for ages and try and do things at the last minute, then I get blamed when they are overshooting dates like its my damned project, not that they didn't bother to reply for 3 months after I had raised this as a risk and told line manager etc. Obviously that's one of the worst ones but even when I was in a council where from the form they insisted on using should then allow the entire thing to be worked through. People would miss cost centres, their name, departments, put wrong details in, stick things in the wrong place, complain they can't type over a formula? Mostly it was just things missing entirely and they would ask me where to find it, like you are running a project, have been given cost codes, are supposed to be tracking spend etc, I have not been. I'm also not your service accountant.
But since it was on the tracker with an end date and my name attached it would keep being brought up as behind schedule and look bad on me, when I was not the hold up and can't make people do their work. I get that we want an outcome and we have a budget, so we have already done a business plan/etc and should not have to start asking me what it is they should be asking for when we should be going out to tender. I am not an expert in the requirement, they are, I just make sure everything goes properly through the processes so its all on the contract register, properly evaluated and is MAT etc. Asking me what number of prepaid cards are being used by the 4 teams that use them is not something I track. Maybe try talking to them about it, also if we don't know this where did the budget come from, guessing? I just want to get through the process with as few head desks as possible, if people just provide what they should be able to do its not all that complicated. There is a huge training problem tho, no one is getting any and learning by trial and error is not good for anyone.
Also found sometimes they had gone off and done huge amounts of work on it, decided who they wanted, tried to do a direct award. Got denied cos no you can't just do that without a bloody good reason and they don't have one. Had someone actually get annoyed when I had to insist on a mini comp and then they saved money and got more provision from another provider.
