My week: Helen Mortimer

Operations manager Helen Mortimer looks back on a busy week as Team Sky prepared for their European debut.

Each week we'll be featuring a different member of Team Sky's staff, to see exactly what their job entails. This week it's operations manager Helen Mortimer, who had a busy time ahead of the team's European debut in the south of France. Monday 25 January and Tuesday 26 January I was office-based at the velodrome in Manchester for the first part of the week. With it being a new team, there has been a whole host of areas that needed to be completed and put in place from insurance issues to rider and staff race licenses. There are a lot of procedures and policies to set up, which is pretty time-consuming right now, but if we get it right now, then in the future they should help the team run even smoother. Ahead of the season we had a lot of plans put in place and now we've been updating our notes so everybody knows where they are going. In the office it's a mixture of planned long term work and also handling whatever comes in during the course of that day. Every day I'll be speaking to Carsten Jeppesen, my line manager who I work closely with for all the general operational stuff, as well as all the Director Sportifs, Doug Dailey and Michelle Dixon - who sort the travel and book our flights - Ken Ilegems at the Service Course and Fran Millar. They are the team group who I speak to multiple times a day to make sure we're all singing off the same hymn sheet and working as a team to get everything done. Wednesday 27 January I was in the office again until midday before setting off in the van down to JS Fraser in Oxfordshire. On the way I stopped off at a motorway junction to pick up some wheels from Alan Williams, one of our mechanics, after the wind tunnel testing we've been carrying out in Southampton. They needed to be taken to our Service Course so we have the option of using them during the upcoming races in Qatar, and also for the training camp we're running next week. At JS Fraser I met up with Jim Bywater, one of our drivers, and also head of transport Gwilym Evans. I dropped off some boxes of wound care products for Qatar (I hope we don't have to use those too often) and also some rider radios which are being put into various vehicles and then loaded the van with our new pressure washer which had to go to Mechelen. From there I went through the Channel Tunnel and drove to Compiegne, which is about an hour north of Paris and where the start of this year's Paris-Roubaix is. I checked into the potential race hotel, which will be the same one as our guys are going to be staying at. Because we're a new team, we don't have the luxury of booking our hotels for the following year when you are at the races, which is what most the teams do. So everyone that was there in 2009, had booked most of the beds already for 2010! It will be easier next year! Thursday 28 January In the morning I had a meeting with the hotel staff just to go through what our team needs were, from bike-washing facilities right the way through to internet access for our riders and really importantly food requirements. From working with British Cycling I have developed quite stringent criteria which the hotels have to meet. Once that was over I took on a three-hour drive up to our Service Course in Mechelen, Belgium and met up with our Service Course Manager Ken Ilegems and mechanics Diego Costa, Frederik Moons, Filip Tisma and a couple of the carers, Txema Gonzalez and Geert Van Diepen. I then had the time consuming job of sorting out all the clothing that had been left over after the launch in London, and also from our first Valencia training camp. This all had to be stock-checked, boxed up and put into storage. It was the first time I had visited the warehouse and I was really impressed. I hadn't known what to expect but it was pretty special. There's a big service area, all the riders have their own bays, and then there's things like a nutrition area, storage facility and office. Everything is really clinical. I've been to a couple of Service Courses before but this one was by far the best that I've seen. It was a late night for everyone as the mechanics and carers prepared everything for Marsellaise and Bessèges and the Valencia camp. We were there until 11pm Friday 29 January I went back to the Service Course first thing in the morning to finish the clothing, catch up with Carsten who had flown in the night before and tidy up a few more things as we have a big block of racing coming up and also another training camp in Valencia. I left at lunchtime to fly back to Manchester and went straight into a lengthy meeting with DHL, who are tailoring our account to help get our equipment to wherever we need it. This was really productive and afterwards I reported back to Dave Brailsford with a general update on where we are at with regards to our Service Course, clothing stock take, staffing needs, vehicles, insurance etc. Saturday 30 January We had our first European race down at Marseille on Sunday, which was also Marcus's first as DS, so I was just checking they had everything they needed and that there was nothing else that could be done from our point of view. There were a few last-minute tweaks with the hotel and the rider line-up going into that race, and I was on standby to deal with anything that arose. Sunday 31 January I spoke with Marcus in the evening to check how things went. He was happy with his first day in the DS hot seat and also how the team performed and was looking forward to moving on to Etoile de Bessèges the next day. The following day I got a phone call from Marcus saying the hotel the race organisers had put in place for Bessèges wasn't what we would have liked. That was quite a big upheaval as we needed 12 new rooms in a remote part of France within a few hours, but we got a better one sorted which everyone was pretty happy with, but that is a whole different week! At Team Sky we're always learning because we're striving to be the best at what we do. We take great care in looking at the attention to detail and hopefully that will set us apart from some of the other teams. It is so important to try and get things right from the start and build a solid foundation.