Hi, I’m Anne Budd, Strategic Support Manager for Service Delivery Total Facilities Management Scotland and Northern Ireland. Phew, as an introduction this is quite some mouthful and offers little inkling of what I do!
I’m based at Forthview House, Rosyth, which is located a stone’s throw away from the Forth Road Bridge and the Queen Elizabeth Class carrier which being pieced together on the Forth.
This site is both a DIO Hub and a Service Delivery area, accommodating 203 staff. Most are from DIO, but we also work alongside Industry Partners and 50 Defence Equipment & Support personnel. Our community within Forthview House includes staff from numerous areas of DIO: Service Delivery, Programme and Project Delivery, Security Services Group, and Operations Development Coherence. Consequently the range of jobs performed here is quite far reaching – we have cost managers, commercial staff, engineers, assurance staff, quantity surveyors, programmers and administrative staff to name but a few.
Supporting Staff
Prime among the tasks that I’m personally responsible for is the role of Site Chair for Forthview House. Like other colleagues in each of DIO’s 33 Service Delivery areas and six Hubs, the Site Chair is the designated “Go To” person (as opposed to “Go Do”). Specifically; this includes helping to build a sense of community; championing new behaviours and ways of working; maintaining the standard of working conditions in supporting line managers and others to discharge legal obligations; and, most importantly, providing a conduit for effective communications.
Challenging the Chair
To accommodate extra staff, we’ve added a sizeable extension to the existing premises. Every effort was made to minimise disruption over the last six months, but we lost the use of three of our four conference rooms and a quarter of our car parking. Provision of utilities was interrupted as well. As Site Chair, I was responsible for ensuring that everyone was kept informed of developments and keeping the peace with our neighbours in the local community with regards to ‘errant’ car parking. I’m happy to report that we now have an enlarged building with additional up to date conference facilities, sporting the appropriate DIO signage and more than adequate parking.
Adding an Admin Hub
Another major initiative for me, and a great step forward, is the formation of the site’s Admin Hub. This small, but perfectly formed, team is responsible for providing certain administrative support for all DIO team across the site. As the Site Chair, they are a crucial part of most of my work as they have a key role in communicating and the overall organisation of the building, which in turn goes a long way to supporting our military users.
Contracts and Christmas
Site Chairs across DIO are supporting the introduction to staff of DIO’s Strategic Business Partner (SBP), which takes control of managing the organisation this autumn. We are setting the scene and providing an overview of the site, as well as facilitating meetings with staff. The Forthview House session is planned for late August. I will be supported in this activity by experienced staff from all the DIO areas within the building. On a hot summer’s day it may appear out of place to be talking Christmas, but we need to look forwards! Conscious that we want to foster the DIO community, we are planning to host a Christmas event. So, as you can see, the Site Chair role is not all about hard work and strife!
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