Service Delivery

In response to Simon's query about consular work...

I am currently on a one year political posting - after this I will do one more year in London probably doing what is opaquely termed a 'service delivery' role. These are jobs that focus more on providing a service (clue is in the name I guess!) - either to the public or to the FCO as an organisation. These roles can be anything from UKvisas work, to project (or programme) management. Personally, I am quite looking forward to taking on a role like this - I can see that the office needs to have people who have a wide range of skills, and service delivery roles are really important in developing awareness of how the FCO works (and crucially how it could work better) and how it interacts with the public.

On the flip side of this, I can understand that some people in the office feel that they joined to work on political roles, and service delivery roles such as change management are not the kind of jobs that attracted them to working for the FCO. I guess it really just depends on how you look at it - I think I would really enjoy a role like that which helps me understand more about how the organisation runs - in fact, i have taken on an IT change manager role for my team in the office, which will hopefully give me a really small taster of project management. How the FCO, or any foreign service, should be run, and how it should look in ten, twenty or thirty years time, and how the service it provides to the public should be managed, are all really important questions, and it can only be a good thing that new starters are encouraged to get a really wide range of experience.

Posted at 08:45 21 January 2008 by Sarah Russell  |