On Wednesday, ONE Workplace colleagues will get on their bikes at MediaCityUK Salford with a three day, 180-mile journey ahead of them - all in aid of Children in Need! With BBC Bristol as their final destination on Friday, they will be stopping by at BBC Manchester on Oxford Road and BBC Birmingham at the Mailbox along the way.
Time permitting, the team will also drop in to surprise colleagues at other BBC English Region buildings including Stoke and Gloucester.
The group is made up of Peter Mathieson - Contract Director Balfour Beatty Workplace (BBW), Richard Seago - Programme Manager BBC, Dave Lang – Operations Manager BBW, and Suzanne Elders – Communication Manager for BBW, who are ably supported by Kev Atkinson – Project Manager BBW, as driver of the support vehicle.
You can track the team's progress on Twitter and find out more about their journey on Facebook.
This will be no mean feat so please do support the team by cheering them on and helping them on their way to the £10k target by donating now through JustGiving. On behalf of he Pedal for Pudsey team, thank you for your support.
On Monday I watched as Land Securities and Bovis Lend Lease handed over the keys for the BBC's new building - BH Phase II.
In a simple but important procedure a group of 19 people received formal confirmation that the 89,000M2 building was officially finished and the systems were ready for testing. This process will take 10 weeks - more about this in a future blog post.
Now that we have achieved sectional completion, our next objective is to secure full practical completion by the end of November (22 November is the anticipated date for this), thereby delivering the project three months ahead of the contractual schedule.
Looking around the group of people who attended the handover procedure I was struck by how much each and every one of them plus their teams had put into ensuring this project went to plan. Delivering large complex construction jobs in the middle of a city is no small task and I want to pay tribute to the professionalism and hard work of Land Securities and Bovis Lend Lease and their respective teams.
Looking closer to home there are many people on the BBC side who deserve recognition, past and present, and I could go on for ages in acknowledging everyone. There is however one person who has been with the project, both man and boy, right from the very start of phase 1 in 2003 and it is appropriate to give him a mention. Gareth Pinney has lived, eaten and breathed the project since conception and his dedication and application is second to none - a big thank you.
In chatting to Caroline Thomson, the BBC's COO, on Monday I came across a really good example of how she has used technology to make a speech at the International Media Congress in Germany.
Faced with the dilemma of having to be two places at the one time, Caroline opted to harness video conferencing to keep the commitment to deliver a keynote address at the medienwoche@IFA conference in Berlin (www.medienwoche.de) whilst also being able to take part in a conference at Television Centre in London.
This is yet another example of agile working and should prompt us to re-think our approach to doing our job. Essentially the big difference today is the ability to maintain personal contact and still speak face to face - whilst not having to be in the same place for these meetings.
In this particular example the benefits are clear:
- more efficient use of valuable time
- cost of travel avoided
- Reduced impact on the environment
The technology used in this example in simple and is now readily available to most of us to use. All we need to do is to ask ourselves the question - can I do my job differently?
|09:20 UK time, Monday, 27 September 2010
