The remnants of Storm Bert meant that I spent the entire week working from home. The River Nene had burst its banks, flooding Northampton station and resulting in most of the trains being cancelled. The odd train was still running, but it seemed ridiculous to try to catch one with no clear plan to be able to get back home again. Working at home for the week was great for productivity, but it reinforced to me how much I do like being in the office. Three days in and a couple at home is a pretty good balance.
This was a week in which I:
- Had a great discussion with a colleague about how we use checklists in our department and how our practice could be improved. I haven’t yet read Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto, but I can guess what it says, and why. An immensely experienced commercial airline pilot will still go through a checklist before a flight, not because they don’t know what they are doing, but because the checklist removes any residual human error from the procedure. In my Technology career I’ve seen many checklists, but they are often used as a rough guide as opposed to a document to be meticulously checked off. How do you change a culture when it isn’t safety-critical?
- Asked some friends whether they considered document management within a team to be a solvable problem. For years, we’ve had an outstanding project on our backlog to consolidate a bunch of SharePoint sites together into one, but I wonder how much payback there will be for the amount of work that will be required. Filing things in the right place matters less now that search is so good. I also wonder whether it is inevitable that someone new coming into the team will decide to start filing things their own way, adding another repository to the situation. Being a team librarian and showing people the way is a lost art.
- Continued to edge forward in agreeing a follow-on contract with our construction vendor. There are so many little moving parts and different parties involved.
- Marvelled at our CTO as he gave an incredibly informative presentation to one of our client-facing teams about a prospective client in the technology sector.
- Met with two of our client-facing teams to give them an overview of construction work that is taking place in our building over the next couple of years and to answer their questions.
- Attended our Information Risk Steering Group meeting and spoke about how we plan to tackle a refresher of our document management standards across our division next year.
- Reviewed and made some refinements to the slide deck that gives an overview of my team and the work we do.
- Had a discussion on the principles of how we give contractors access to our computer systems and equipment.
- Reviewed our approach to our Microsoft Copilot initiative. We heard an enthusiastic take from one of our colleagues who has been embracing it in his daily work to make himself much more productive.
- Took our sister company through the latest design proposal for the audio/visual setup of our shared space.
- Had our final Lean Coffee session of the year. One of the topics I proposed and we discussed was whether people felt that Lean Coffee meetings worked well and whether we should continue them. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive.
- Spent some time cleaning up our team Kanban board, removing duplicates and things that we are never going to do.
- Attended a BIE Executive webinar on Overcoming Prejudice in the Workplace.
- Joined the inaugural Copilot Fireside Chat a monthly Teams meeting on the subject of Microsoft Copiot. Unlike the Teams Fireside Chat, I was the only attendee besides the presenters who kept my camera on for the whole meeting. I’m amazed at the difference in culture between the two calls. The topic of conversation went very deep, very fast, and made me realise how little I know of this space.
- Got on top of my work emails, processing the 2,000 or so that were in my backlog. I now have a screenful of messages that I actually have to do something with.
- Managed a nine-day streak on the bike, primarily as a result of working from home. TrainerRoad recommended a rest day on Sunday to prevent long-term fatigue. I didn’t argue. I’m feeling quite old at the moment, with a calf that won’t let me run, a painful shoulder when I raise my arm up too high and a bunch of bites on my leg that I presumably got when we stopped out on the club bike ride on Saturday. The club ride was eventful, with one of the crew getting two punctures on the same wheel, one of which was caused by hitting a massive pothole on a very fast descent.
- Surprised myself by how much I enjoyed listening to Alanis Morissette at an online Album Club night.
- Enjoyed a belated Thanksgiving dinner with friends old and new on Friday night. I don’t think I’d ever been invited for Thanksgiving dinner before. It was lovely to get out and meet a bunch of new random people.
- Had another dinner out with friends on Saturday evening, eating an incredible chickpea and cauliflower curry with just the right amount of spice.
- Bought our Christmas tree. We knew he was a big boy before we got him in the car, but we didn’t anticipate that he would be quite this huge.
- Bought a new tuxedo ahead of the work celebration this week. Perhaps I’ll get a bit more use out of this one than the last one I had.
- Enjoyed playing with Plexamp now that two of my friends are using Plex and have given me access to their music libraries. It’s so much more fun than browsing someone’s collection of Spotify playlists.
Media
Podcasts
- Superb episode of The Guardian’s Politics Weekly UK on the topic of assisted dying, ahead of the vote that took place in parliament last week. It really is a topic where I can see both sides of the argument. Wouldn’t it be great if most parliament business was debated and decided on in a similar way as opposed to MPs being whipped to vote?
- I love hearing arguments that make me change my views on things. In this episode of the Risky Business podcast, they talk about the use of facial recognition cameras in an Australian hardware store chain. Typically I would object to this technology being used anywhere, but the store released footage of the abuse that their staff have been subject to. They use the technology to detect and alert staff when someone on their list turns up at a store, and the data for anyone that is not a positive match is quickly deleted. This seems like a reasonable compromise.
Articles
- London’s Smithfield meat market and Billingsgate fish market are both going to close after 850 years. What a shock that Brexit has something to do with it.
- Claims of ‘ethical AI’ are difficult if there is no transparency about how an AI model has been developed. This includes transparency about the workers that have been training the models with their human feedback.
Video
- Loaded: Lads, Mags and Mayhem is a superb documentary. I was 17 in 1994 when the first issue of Loaded appeared, and I remember devouring the magazine from cover to cover. It was interesting to see it in perspective as part of mid-90s culture here in the UK. Those first issues had long interviews with people who are now cultural icons that I knew very little about at the time, as well as documents of trips to extraordinary places and parties that felt like an adult world that I didn’t quite have access to yet. In my teenage years I spent a small fortune on magazines, somehow having the time to devour their contents. As the documentary notes, magazines were our Internet of that era. It is fascinating to look back and see how quickly the ‘lads mag’ concept degenerated into a race to the bottom. By the time I went to university in late 1996 I was just an occasional Loaded reader and soon stopped buying it.
Next week: An end-of-year and retirement party.