Stuart Kelly and Ben Chehraz

Tiberone enjoys a diverse group of talented individuals with an even more diverse range of interests – one of which is light aircraft piloting. Ben Chehraz and Stuart Kelly took to the skies from the small historical Biggin Hill airport, renowned for its profound participation in WWII as a RAF Spitfire airbase.

Howard of Cabair (http://www.cabair.com) took the newbie pilots under his wing and after a quick basic lesson they took to the skies, avoiding the temptation of ramming a commercial aircraft. Motives included, but were not limited to,  a recent delayed flight from that particular airline.

With a near perfect 50-mile visibility and with Ben at the controls at just below 3000 feet, he was reminded to use VFR (Visual Flight Rules). These rules exclude the use of electronic instruments and solely rely on paper maps and various two-fingered signals, which carry the risk of being misinterpreted if used on the ground. With Shoreham approaching, Ben was advised to ignore the passing trains directly before the landing strip and calmly concentrate on the landing. A few terrifying heart-beats later, of what would’ve been a perfect landing, Howard finally took the controls for a safe landing.

After lunch, it was Stuarts turn to avoid the temptation of ramming the unsociable, non-radio, glider pilots from a nearby teaching school. With so many hours at the helm of Microsoft’s Flight Simulator, he too was disappointed with Howard pushing a paper map under his nose. The return journey was more eventful with a distress call from a light sail aircraft, having trouble with its landing gear and a last moment gust wind, which Howard handled smoothly.

With a safe landing at Biggin Hill Airport the fun day came to an end, but the dream lives on – will they return to get their PPA’s next year? Watch this space…

Special thanks to Howard from Cabair for his great instruction throughout the day and to Ben for organising the day event.

Ben is reminded to use his fingers to get the aircraft level

Stuart flies with a paper map as his guide

Aircraft for the day

Make your resolutions count this year.

Happy New Year to all of you!

January is considered the time for reflection, growth and change. It’s the time to look back at the previous year and learn from its mistakes (and successes) and then apply its knowledge to the year ahead.

For this reason it’s no wonder that the name was derived from the Roman god Janus, which had two heads facing in opposite directions – one looking to the past and another looking to the future. To reflect this, we still practise the age old tradition of making New Year’s resolutions on the 1^st of January.

Making New Year’s Resolutions is easy, but applying them to the year ahead can be difficult. January is a cold and wet month and snuggling up under the covers, seems to take priority over everything else.

This year I would like to provide you with a different view in order to help you keep the resolutions you‘ve made. Instead of making it a yearlong resolution, make it a resolution for January. Scientifically proven, it takes 21 days to adopt a new habit or break an old one. Since January has 31 days, you’ll get an extra 10 days to make it work, so don’t despair if you struggle the first week.

Start with a single resolution and work on it throughout January. By the time February comes, it’ll be second nature to you and you can move on to the next resolution on the list. If you repeat this every month, you’ll have completed twelve resolution by the end of the year.

Create a symbol for the resolution and mark that symbol on each day of your calendar for January. This will remind you every day of the resolution you made. It can be a picture of an apple if you want to eat healthier or a clock, if you want to be on time for meetings. You can even create a code, such as removing the repeating letters of the resolution i.e. IWANTOEHLY for “I want to eat healthy”.

Whichever method you settle for – you’ll be amazed with the results.

Good luck with 2010,

Celeste Groenewald

PS. Why not emphasize your resolution by adding it as a reply below.

It’s been a little while since I sent out the last thought for the week. It’s been a bit busy on the projects recently, as I’m sure you all know. Last weekend, I found a little booklet entitled ‘Professionalism 101’ by a chap called Nicholas Bate, amongst some material I was reading. The following link brings you to the online version.

Professionalism.html

It’s worth-while taking a few moments to read all the way to 101, honestly!

As you’ll see, this chap is quite prolific. If you get a chance to browse and find something pertinent, please share it.

It’s a pleasure working with you all.
Thanks, Phil

Many studies have shown that time wasted reading emails is the major contribution to ineffective working in the workplace. The truth is a working day could consist of many distractions, such as telephone calls, people stopping at the desk for questions and instant messages.

On a normal day you can receive anywhere between 120 and 150 emails a day.  On average if you dedicate 1 minutes of your time to read each email, this will easily equate to 2 to 3 hours a day!! At this point we are only talking about reading emails and not even action or reply to mails.

For a project or operations manager this is very concerning.  The key element in any operation is productivity, and one of the factors effecting productivity is time management.

There are a number of methods that can be used to manage email and productivity. Some of these take months of practice, but here is some simple advice:

1. Schedule a time to read your emails or messages. You have enough distractions during a day and every interruption like the “ding” on your email client or Blackberry device could easily put us off what we are working on. If possible close your email client or switch off your wireless email device. One hour is all it takes to Read/Classify and action emails.
2. Classification is key.  All emails can be classified as either “Reference” or “Action”. Statistics shows that using such a technique can save 50 minutes per day, almost 7 hours per week.

Create folders in your email client and move emails to these folders. Try keeping your inbox empty. If you have hundreds or thousands of emails in your inbox then that is a good indications of bad email management, leading to inefficient time management.

• Reference email: These are emails that you receive where you do not have a task or action but you wish to keep it, so you can refer to it later.
• Action emails: Data that you use to complete and action a task.

1. One at a time: Avoid the temptation to open emails at random. Most people open emails where the subject is of interest. However, working through emails one by one has proven to be more effective and increase productivity.

More to tips to come soon …………..

I am David Morgan, a senior technical consultant within the Tiberone Consultancy, and I would like to welcome you to my little blog.

I hope to be able to post on a regular basis about several areas, but would first of all like to tell you a little about myself.

I first encountered Remedy way back in 1995/6 when I was part of a unix support team – at first I thought like all other support technorati – that Remedy would just be another way for the “management” to keep tabs on what we are doing. As time progressed however, I began to realise how powerful a tracking tool was in relation to my job, and also, since I was looking after the machine on which the application and database was residing, that I should start to get to grips with what was happening “under the covers”. This was Remedy version 1.2!!

Over the years, I have been involved with most of the major and minor versions of Remedy at various organisations – from large Blue Chip clients through to small (less than 50 people), and have built both Bespoke and tailored/altered the out-of-the-box (OOTB) applications which use the Remedy Workflow Engine as a base.

After some years in the field as both Support, Administrator and Developer I eventually joined BMC Support and did a number of years within the fold before joining Tiberone where I further expanded my knowledge of both the Core Workflow Application and associated installed applications (like Helpdesk / Change Management / Approval / CMDB Atrium), and of the database systems on which the Remedy system operates (Oracle, MS SQL Server, Sybase and others). I hope to be able to provide some insight over time into all of these areas.

I hope this introduction has been both brief and illuminating and hope that you will “tune in again” to read some more on my next post.

I’ll be blogging off now……

Dave