Working In Unison With UNISON

Z/Yen has just completed a major piece of work with UNISON, the largest trades union in the UK, reviewing UNISON’s use of third party resources for IT services. Between April 2001 and June 2002 we made a business case, consulted widely within UNISON on requirements and helped UNISON to find a single, suitable supplier to provide a structured IT service. From a large field of potential suppliers, Pink Roccade were eventually chosen, commencing services in June 2002. Ian Harris, Jacquie Chapman, Giles Wright and Geoffrey Rutland were the main participators on the Z/Yen side. John Cole, Director of Systems Management at UNISON, who led the UNISON team on this project, says, “we had been grappling with the issues around our IT services for years. Z/Yen helped us to define the issues, find a suitable way forward and see it through in just over a year, which is quite an achievement.” Z/Yen will have a continuing role quality assuring the transition and helping to put appropriate contract management and IT governance in place for the future at UNISON. Now and Z/Yen singles out Jacquie Chapman for special prominence in this feature, partly because she is seeing through most of the continuing work and partly because she has never previously been mentioned in Now and Z/Yen despite her leading role in several Z/Yen projects. Ian Harris is celebrating his return from the trenches by editing this edition of Now and Z/Yen.

Z/Interregnum

Z/Yen’s appeal for naming its growing risk/reward interim management group bore fruit, not least the in-house winner shown above in the headline. Now and Z/Yen readers, however, showed more wit and less reverence. Locum Hocum was one superb suggestion. PRIMAs (Professional Interim Management Associates) made us wonder what acronym we might tag on the end for DONNAs. However, the winner came from Tania Draper of Venson who suggested "Z/immers". Strangely, some of our more senior associates seem underwhelmed by this name. Bubbly for the winner as promised and books for the best of the rest. Well done.

Getting To Know Your Aspects

As with all relationships, you don’t really get to know people until you’re in deep. Z/Yen’s acquisition of Aspect is proving no exception. Firstly, Stephen Martin submitted a piece to Now and Z/Yen of such startling obscurity (his family’s supermarket shopping habits as affected by air miles and recycling campaigns) that the editor hardly knew where to look. However, publishers often fail to spot emerging demand for writing, so if Now and Z/Yen readers want to know about Stephen’s literal in-house market research, please let us know. Then Laura Wright announced to Now and Z/Yen that she used her honeymoon to conquer Mount Kinabalu in Borneo, because it is something that all other members of the Z/Yen Aspect team have already done. Laura also explains that she and husband Chris raised about £3,000 for Diabetes UK as a by-product of their intense honeymoon activity, which left them “with aching legs”. We might be getting nervous about all this, were it not for the constant stream of significant win announcements, including, in the past couple of weeks, business intelligence and market research assignments with Caterpillar/Perkins, Westcon and Epson. Well done to the Z/Yen Aspect team for such an excellent start with Z/Yen, plus special congratulations to Laura and Chris for tying the knot so charitably.

Friday On My Mind

Z/Yen has always prided itself on being ahead and staying ahead of the game. In particular, we thought we’d written the book on having a daft name yet memorable brand. Until, that is, the recent announcement that PriceWaterhouseCoopers has spent somewhere between £75M and £120M (pick your paper to pick your number) on rebranding its consultancy with the name Monday. We now realise that Z/Yen is a mere amateurish attempt at being memorably daft. However, we don’t have £120M (or even £75M) to spare for our rebranding, but are delighted to offer Now and Z/Yen readers the usual chance at a bottle of bubbly and/or a book. Ideas please, in the form of names, logos or both, to Now and Z/Yen, pronto.