Alexandra Nicol has spearheaded our Operations Control Centre coronavirus response to keep our customers safe and warm during the COVID-19 crisis.
I joined SGN 13 years ago after my father, an SGN employee himself, encouraged me to apply for a position within the dispatch team responding to gas emergency calls.
SGN offers great progression opportunities and I’ve developed a fantastic career in our Operations Control Centre (OCC), where I manage a team of dispatchers responsible for sending engineers to attend gas emergencies across our network. I’m currently undertaking a Support Officer role within the OCC and I'm overseeing our standards of service, liaising closely with our Operations team, and working collaboratively with colleagues on projects that impact our department, like system upgrades and ensuring everyone has what they need to do their job effectively.
Adapting to continue providing an efficient service
We provide a gas emergency service and efficiency is key in protecting the safety of our customers and employees. We decided to split our OCC over two sites so that we could follow social distancing measures while maintaining our call handling service.
Moving the department across two sites was difficult to schedule based on the shift patterns in place before the pandemic. We had to think fast, and we were able to draw up a plan in a relatively short timeframe. There's also the potential for us to continue working in multiple locations, helping safeguard our department during the coronavirus crisis and beyond.
There were limited contingency plans in position that covered the unprecedented nature of the pandemic’s impact. But despite the challenges, we’ve adapted to quickly overcome these with a high level of success. For example, the OCC is increasingly incorporating technologies like Microsoft Teams to communicate and share information about our work. This has enabled us to continue delivering a fast, reliable gas emergency service.