A small team of people flew in last weekend to start the next phase of our software rollout and although things have gone relatively smoothly, being involved in the work has meant that my ‘spare’, focused time has been very limited. We have a monthly steering committee meeting on Tuesday and I’ve been trying to find time all week to prepare and get the materials out in order to allow time for people to read them beforehand; they are finally done, but they took me almost two whole days to put together from Friday evening onwards. Looking back now, it’s no wonder I’ve felt stressed all week. Although I spent very little time with my family this weekend I’m so glad to have got the work done. It was great to have a whole day on Saturday with no meetings and very little interruptions, allowing me to focus my thinking around what we need to do at the programme level, before I get pulled back into the day-to-day details again tomorrow.
The team that flew in are with us for five weeks. We kicked off our rollout with an early morning meeting which then jumped straight into a presentation with our first batch of users. I soon started to get the same feelings as I did when we rolled out our pilot back in November; my job quickly becomes one of trying to slow the team down, putting some structure into our approach when issues come up so that we address them in a calm and coordinated way. From what we’ve seen this week, the whole point of running a pilot has paid off and we haven’t had any significant new issues appear, despite implementing on some additional platforms. Unfortunately the start of this process has coincided with some critical technical problems with our key software vendor which means that we can’t completely finish the job for any one user until next week at the earliest. This is possibly a blessing in disguise as we were able to see the impact of doing the first part of the rollout, making sure that have a stable base before we proceed.
We managed to get a team dinner in the diary and had a fantastic meal at Haz St Paul’s on Wednesday. One of our South African colleagues said his ‘pirzola’ was the best lamb dish he has ever had in his life, high praise indeed from someone who comes from a nation of carnivores. I’ve been a vegetarian (or more strictly, pescatarian, although that has always sounded completely ridiculous) for 20 years or so and it was interesting to see how people reacted to a big round of mixed mezze as a starter. Hummus, tabbouleh, falafel and cacik go with the territory but some of the team members had never had them before, making it even more enjoyable as they discovered how delicious they were. All bases were covered in our dinner conversation and it was great to get to know everyone a little better after spending so much time talking about work for the past few months.
A South African in our London team had put an order in with the travellers to bring a few things from home. One of those things was a big bag of gem squash (gem squashes?), a fruit that I’d never heard of before. It’s a bit bigger than a tennis ball and has the consistency of a cricket ball. We are now the proud owner of a sample and need to work out exactly what to do with it in the next couple of weeks.
I’ve had so many great conversations this week. There is so much depth and opportunity to the work that needs to be done at the company and the only limiting factor seems to be the time available to do it. My client and I have made great strides in defining how we want the programme of work to be represented to the rest of the organisation; now the work is to create both the ‘presentation’ and ‘actual tasks’ versions for the senior management and programme team audiences respectively.
I didn’t feel myself last weekend and it continued well into this week; it was a bit of a cross between having a mild cold, being worn out and (now when I look back) quite a bit of stress about all of the things on my plate. We had lots going on with being up and out early on Saturday for a family breakfast for my wife’s birthday, sledging with the kids for a good part of the day, setting up a new laptop and then making a last-minute call that the snow had thawed enough for us to chance a trip out to two different 40th birthday parties in the same evening. I’m so glad we made it to the parties; although we felt like we couldn’t get settled down at either one it felt great to have made the effort and to have been there to see people that are important to us. Actually, looking back at it now I can see how I started the week worn out before it even began. Other than Wednesday I’ve been working every evening until about midnight, and then getting up a few hours later to get back to work again. It’s been like walking about in a bit of a stupor and Friday was the first day I managed to feel myself, having had any kind of a good night’s rest. In my fug on Thursday I only remembered during breakfast at my kitchen table that I had to be in early for a meeting, promptly setting a new world record for a person in a suit with a belly full of muesli and coffee to run from my house to the train station.
With so much going on, this is the first year that I’ve had to miss our annual ‘Governors in School Morning’. I always love this event. As governors we aren’t in school very much when the children are around and never automatically have access to see teaching and learning in action, so it’s a great opportunity to get a good reminder of the real reason that we’re volunteering. From the feedback I’ve seen so far it was a big success with the staff and children leaving a fantastic impression on the governors. I’m very proud to be associated with the school, and it’s a privilege to serve them. Again, I just wish I could give it more time.
Media
After reading Michael Lopp’s latest blog post I finally picked up a copy of his book Managing Humans which I have had on my wish list for the past few years. I’m a few chapters in and feel a bit disappointed to be reading the same material that I’ve read on his website, but then again the posts themselves are brilliant so it’s buying the book is a good way to give back.
Being so busy has meant that I’ve reached for some more easy reading for last thing at night. Having finished A Kind of Loving I’m back into Formula One again with Johnny Herbert’s autobiography.
It was great to have the WB40 podcast back again after a brief hiatus. Great point from Matt on Office 365’s terrible name if you have any hope of a ‘work/life balance’; this was brought home to me at my client’s office this week when a number of people refused to have Outlook installed on their phones as part of our rollout. The discussion on Chris’ trip to India and offshoring initiatives made me think back to the time I ran a project with a large outsourced development team based in Pune. There was tension between the managers in the company I was working for and the outsourcing vendor in that the former felt as though they had to get involved in everything and the latter wanted some breathing space to run things and get on with the job. It always felt to me that we should have given them a little more latitude than we did. If you go to one of the big vendors, shouldn’t the management of the setup be one of their selling points to begin with?
I stumbled across ‘Julia from IT’s post on Iron Triangles and Vicious Circles which was worth a read. She has some great points on how to broach conversations with stakeholders who want to fix all three points of the ‘triangle’ of cost, scope and schedule.
Next week
The second week of our London rollout, two evenings of school governor meetings, a steering committee and lots more vendor discussions. And hope that there will actually be a weekend next weekend.
Leave a comment