WITH FEW exceptions, probation officers must learn to work with their colleagues in groups before they can hope to do so with their clients. This is the contention of this paper. Further, it suggests that the longcherished autonomy of officers has been the main obstacle to the expected ' growth of group work in the Service. For this reason, the proliferation of group work training courses has had little effect. These arguments derive from my experience in the London Unit of the IMPACT experiment. While casework has still proved to be the main focus of the work, a variety of groups have operated in addition to conjoint marital and family work. From the outset of this experiment, the officers involved have placed a strong emphasis on the importance of working closely as a team. This means that we share responsibility for the whole project, the initiation of ideas and the discussion of all referrals to the Unit. We hold three team meetings a week of one and a half hours each, at which cases are allocated and frequently discussed. In this way, all members of the team are involved in each case and its treatment, and far more clients are also known personally to the team than is normal in the traditional office. An extension of this added involvement is our system of &dquo;paired working&dquo; whereby each case is initially allocated to two officer, one male and one female. Our caseloads are limited to a maximum of 20 &dquo;active&dquo; cases each. While this may allow an added degree of thoroughness, I would maintain that the essential characteristics of such a team approach could be developed profitably in the traditional office setting. The advantages which team work could afford in a unit attempting to provide a wider range of treatment methods can be seen in the following description of the groups which have operated in our Unit. I shall begin by describing a group which &dquo;failed&dquo; but from which we learnt a number of valuable lessons. At the beginning of the experiment, we occupied premises outside our catchment area. Four officers decided to use the &dquo;Pentonville ovives and Families Centre&dquo; for their reporting evenings. The Centre provided relaxed surroundings which led to the development of an informal group among clients over subsequent weeks. Many of these clients were in their late 20's, with similar problems of marital difficulties, heavy drinking and occasional periods of imprisonment. It was decided by the office. team to try to formalise this group so as to obtain maximum benefit from it. We then decided that the group should have two leaders. There was a great deal of competition between the four officers for these positions. Associated with this competition was a good deal of reluctance amongst officers to give up their clients. This reluctance was not openly admitted at the . time. As soon as the group was formalised attendance at the Centre dropped dramatically. Many clients mistakenly expected their officer , to lead the group, while others resented the imposition of a new struc-, t...
Cyber Protection Teams (CPTs) are responsible for providing mission assurance by ensuring that mission-relevant cyber terrain is secure and protected for operations. In order to do this effectively, CPT planners must correlate and integrate information regarding customers’ missions with information about the systems and networks required to perform those missions. To support this challenge, a CPT Planner work aid was designed and evaluated to assess its effectiveness. The evaluation compared the work aid with current CPT planning methods. Ten participants with varying planning expertise performed four planning tasks (managing approvals, assigning resources, managing accesses, and scheduling meetings). To test the efficacy of the proposed work aid, participants were tasked with planning a fictional mission utilizing both the traditional planning method and the work aid method. Data was collected from objective metrics to include time and task performance score, as well as subjective perception of workload. In addition, participants were asked a series of situation awareness (SA) questions after each task to measure their understanding of the mission-relevant information. Score and time to answer SA questions were also recorded. While CPT planning experience did not have a significant effect on performance, results revealed significant improvements in task time, SA question response time, and perceived workload when using the work aid versus the baseline condition.
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