Recently at my office, we had to do a fair amount of conflict resolution with regards to the schedule for a new single person IT Help Desk position. The issue we ran into involved getting adequate manning for trained personnel in order to cover vacation time, and also to rotate out individuals that had been working the position for several months already. The biggest challenge in scheduling, besides the fact that our local rules specially call for using highly experienced individuals, is the fact we're basically pulling a person away from their normal job and duty section for several months, and we're required to provide 24/7 coverage. The root problem, though, was the fact we could not get volunteers to fill slots, nor were any of the other duty sections willing to give up personnel. There was also a problem in which we didn't have one person to call the shots for all of the duty sections, but had multiple senior leaders with multiple opinions.
My role was being the officer in charge of the new position, and ultimately, I had to bring the issues to my management's attention in order to get everyone talking, and create a unified picture of the "health" of our position and what was needed to ensure we had coverage without relying too much on a small group of individuals. In a sense, I was a mediator between the leadership that wanted to have the position, and the people that actually had to man it.
The other participants were the individuals sitting at the new position, the new "backshop" created to support it, the leadership of the other duty sections from which we obtained personnel, and the leadership of our overall office that had to balance the needs of all the duty sections and make sure we were getting our work accomplished.
After an extended period of going back and forth between different sections seeking bodies and meeting resistance, myself and my backshop had to go up our chain of command to make as clear as possible for them what was happening and that we needed them to lay down some firmer orders to meet the needs of a position that they themselves created. Eventually, they spelled out who would sit in the position, and they've rewritten our local rules to more clearly state how we would go about training, who would provide manning, who would control the overall schedule, and how we were to go about requesting time off in order to have adequate time to make adjustments.
To this day we're still working on the overall execution of the new guidance, and still joke about the constant state of change, but we've since been satisfied that leadership is aware of the potential for problems and is continuing to work with us. Personally, I think we can still improve in terms of creating a single point of authority for any changes ("The Buck Stops Here"), and I think we can get improvement from all parties involved on matters of communicating our concerns, suggesting alternatives, actively listening, and ultimately creating mutually agreeable solutions.
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