DIRECTORATE OF TELECOMMUNICATIONS
JOB CARD SYSTEM
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Introduction
During the 1970’s the Directorate took the decision to introduce a Job Card System to track maintenance, installation and other related work carried out within the organisation. This topic includes the JCS booklet to accompany the CB201 tracking form and is shown on Page 4.

I am grateful to Derek Theobald for writing the article to this topic and describing how the system came about, together with some personal conclusions about it’s ultimate demise.

The Job Card System by Derek Theobald

Factors leading to the Introduction of the JCS
In the early 1970s, DTels was asked by the Police National Computer Unit (PNCU) to take on the responsibility of installing and maintaining the Visual Display Units associated with the computer. These units were located in police premises throughout the United Kingdom. At that time, DTels had very few technicians with the skills to carry out the maintenance aspects of this task.

In addition to this, maintenance in general was carried out using mainly local procedures and methods supported by individual equipment handbooks. A handbook of the time, in the main, explained how an equipment worked and not how to fix it when it went wrong. In this way, the times taken to repair common equipment’s varied from depot to depot.

At the request of the Deputy Director (Field Services), Andy Holdstock, then SWE in charge of the Field Services HQ technical support team, produced a discussion document which set out to examine the problems and offered answers to many of them.

As a result of the ensuing discussions the Maintenance Planning Group (MPG) was formed, located at 60, Rochester Row, London SW1, with a move to Weyhill shortly afterwards.

One of the tasks set MPG was to establish the reliability of operational equipment and the time taken to carry out repairs and modifications, VDUs in particular as these items were owned by a third party and were subject to separate financial arrangements which had to be justified.

Cue the Job Card System!

Implementation
note: I had some difficulty in attempting to match events with dates as the development and use of this system took place around thirty years ago. So I have abandoned that approach and concentrated on what I can remember of this system in terms of general statements.

From my previous note, I stated that one of the factors leading to the introduction of the job card system was to establish a basis for charging P.N.C.U. for the work done on their behalf.

Although the Directorate H.Q. canvassed the depots with respect to technicians with ’digital’ experience in the early 1970s (I was an S.W.T. at Hannington at the time), the job card system was developed and brought into use during the time I was a C.W.T. in Field Services H.Q. , most likely during the middle of the decade. I’m sure its demise happened during the time I was i/c Maintenance Planning Group, about 1979.

Field Services H.Q. (Ray Stoodley and others) required what became to be known as the Management Information System (M.I.S.). The Job Card System was one (major) element of this.

From this latter system it was planned that the following information could be ascertained:

1. Equipment Reliability - Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF); derived from the frequency of repairs against equipment population. This information was helpful in determining the need for referrals back to the manufacturer, plus the correct level of spare equipment’s to held and which were paid for (via the rental scheme) by individual police forces and fire brigades.
    
2. Equipment Maintainability; time taken to repair. Useful for determining the need for modifications, changes to maintenance policy and procedures, re-equipment programmes and future purchasing requirements.

Establishing the ratio between actual productive time (repairs or installations) and other time (travelling, paperwork, training courses, depot duties etc.) could be ascertained, but was only
required as an input for assessing charges made, centrally, to third parties (e.g. P.N.C.U.).

I believe at the development stage, which was mainly carried out by Andy Holdstock in consultation with other senior DTels staff and outside bodies, many time measurement techniques were considered. Those which involved the recording of activities by a dedicated member of staff (as in time & motion studies) were eliminated. This left the recording to be done by the operatives themselves. Traditional time/work sheets were seen to be too labour intensive and so the use of the ‘marked up’ sheet, which could be ‘optically’ read was adopted.

The layout of the form CB201 was established in consultation with the printers and other companies who were to be involved in:

1. ‘optically’ reading the forms
2. converting this information into a statistical form which would provide the raw input to the M.I.S.

The forms (CB201) were completed by individual technicians (deliberately not identified) at depots and sub depots and forwarded to M.P.G. Weyhill. From here they were sent, in bulk, to a contractor where they were ‘read’ and the resulting data transferred to tape. The next stage in the process was for the tape to be ‘read’ and converted into statistical data. Who actually did this escapes me, I don’t think it was done at Weyhill. Although at this time there was a D.E.C. PDP11 computer at Weyhill, it was used as a tool for remotely carrying out test procedures on VDUs in for repair at the various depots (i.e. a test rig). Its main i/p device was a paper tape reader and hard copy o/p was achieved with a teleprinter.

The day to day operation of the system was under the control of an SWT, originally a chap by the name of Martin Thomson-Neil, he was an enthusiastic sailor in his spare time and later worked at Tavistock. He was succeeded by David Greenwood.

Line management was in the hands of the M.P.G. C.W.T. (myself for a time) and later, Dave Cahill.

>>> continued page 2

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