A bed of roses

So, getting the regrade requires me to (as a colleague put it) do the donkey work.  It would suit me sooo much better if management could say, 'we need x role to do x work at x grade and Rosa is doing that so give her the money already!'.  Because I know I am doing that role at that grade and I have been for at least 2 years (since my previous line manager was ripped away from me) if not 5 (when the line manager before that was, frankly, useless) or even 8 (when the person who used to have the same role as me was ripped away) or EVEN 11 (when I joined the department and had a random collection of 'additions' to my role).  I am not expecting back pay but geez...

I may have mentioned this before but it's something I often muse on.  My previous line manager and I gelled really well.  They gave me a confidence in what I was doing and supported most of my ideas - although my requests to be given some PM responsibility never got anywhere.  When they were made redundant, I was crushed.  I felt I was really getting somewhere, both individually and as part of the team - a team that was both coherent and cohesive, which I hadn't experienced in at least 10 years.  With them gone and a new line manager who was largely (at that point) a figurehead and admin role, I felt cut loose, adrift.  But that meant that I had to find a role for myself, build it from the ground up, which, ironically, resulted in me being stronger and more confident in what I was doing.

I will always be grateful for my previous line manager and their support - because when they suddenly weren't there any more, I found I was actually stronger and more capable than I had thought I was.

Now back to the regrade.  I was told I needed to gather evidence to support the business case.  Initially, I thought I should approach it like a job application but the word 'evidence' caught at me.  Writing a job application is, I always think, an exercise in creative writing - you aren't lying as such, but you are 'spinning' it to some extent.  'Evidence' to me suggested actual things, 'artefacts' that I've produced.  So, I spent a morning gathering various documents of various kinds that I've produced, bundled them up and sent them to my line manager.  The answer came back that they don't show what I've done and my line manager gave me an example from their work where they'd gone outside their remit. 

And a penny dropped - I'm not so much applying for the NEW JD as showing how I'm working outside the CURRENT one.  So, I took a line from my current JD where I could show a LOT of evidence of working outside it (the current one says something about helping management maintain consistent processes and I've not only written my own processes, I've just gone through an exercise with the team to update and rewrite them all off my own bat) and sent that over as a proof of concept.  This time the answer was that I was on the right lines!

So, 'writing' time in the early mornings and some of my work time next week will be spent going through the rest of it.  And I still have my artefacts to pull out of the hat if they're needed :D