Where do you find this resource, which has to have a particular, very specialised skill set at short notice?
BDiONU
You are correct, however the company’s upper management is negligent and reckless in that they demand this, that and the next thing without any thought on impact.
What is going to be the next 'big' project? IFACTS is not on time, TCNE airspace has failed, Central has failed, so guess what, lets bring in TC CAPITAL and do a major change in operations in 9 months - including re-arranging an OP room (TC) that was not future proofed when it was commissioned, less than a year ago.
This company fire fights- that is evident in most things it does... as a company we rush head-long from the next 'big thing' to the latest 'next big thing' once the first - 'big thing' has failed. We do not listen to the experts, for instance the call for enough support staff for the (New) Central/Capital simulations has been compromised... yet one of the reasons we are doing this latest project is because we did not resource the original project properly.
We can't afford pensions, but we can spunk 2 or 3 million quid on a project, then when it fails, neglect to learn from the lessons learned.
The company is managed by to many yes men who bend over and kiss ass whilst telling the upper management who have not got a clue about real life ATC that we will do this and we will do that.
We would be properly resourced if we did not continue to shaft ourselves by saying we can do this or we can do that.
NATS needs a reality check - PPrune Radar is utterly correct - why should you or goldfrog or anyone else work long hours because management or some lily livered yes man has said we can manage?
Proper resourcing comes from being realistic about what can be achieved... projects will often go awry and need extra manpower/hours thrown at them - we should have a contingency for this... not expect some poor fool who has pride in his/her job to do 50 hours a week.
Barron drives off in his nice company Aston Martin while those below get shafted.
BDiONU - you are ex-RAF - even though the junior service, you must be used to a hell of a lot better management practices than NATS have.
Fire fighting is required from time to time - with NATS it's made inevitable by unrealistic goals and aims.
But hey, lets do it anyways and in the meantime let NATS screw us out of our pension.
Question - so why don't we give NATS a donation of 5% of our salary every month? Ridiculous idea? It's less than what people do when they work 50 hours or so a week for nothing. 