Johannesburg felt different this time. After a tragic fatal shooting close to my client’s office a couple of weeks ago, I saw the landscape through a new lens, my senses heightened as I walked to and from my hotel. I am so grateful to live in a place where I don’t feel the need to continuously think about my safety as I wander around. It’s hard to understand how people can tolerate the potential of armed violence at every turn, wearing you down as time goes by.
The week was focused on catching up with all of the key SA-based people involved in my programme and making sure that we are aligned on how it will be funded and executed in the coming months. Having regular calls in the diary is no substitute for catching up face to face and having the space for the conversation to diffuse and expand. As well as focusing on the agenda I also picked up lots of feedback on the direction that the teams need from me as Programme Manager. I finished the week with a renewed sense of purpose and clarity on what needs to get done. We are going to need to be super-focused as a team in order to deliver the work to the agreed timeframes and we need to start now.
I had my least successful week ever in terms of connectivity, with far better access from my hotel room than from my client’s office. All travellers within our part of the firm have difficulties when they visit the head office and it was useful to feel their pain myself. The programme we are running will fix the issues, but it is some months away from delivering and we need to continue to do enough to minimise the current problems. Not easy when the team is small and there is a lot of future-state work to do.
Our software rollout continued to go very well. I had an early wake-up on Tuesday morning to take a call with the team. We needed to navigate a miscommunication — and subsequent misconfiguration — that dated back a few weeks, but luckily it wasn’t anything too serious. It was another reminder of just how difficult communication can be, particularly with physical and language barriers in place. The team on the ground running the rollout have been doing a great job, and overall it is our smoothest deployment yet. They still have another week to go and I am hoping that they will have a good amount of time to focus on showing people how to utilise some of the new tools as opposed to just dealing with issues, and it looks like this is on track.
Following my spot at the ‘meet the teacher’ evening last week, I had a parent of a very young pupil get in touch to find out more about being a governor. It’s always such a pleasure to talk to people about the role and I haven’t yet found anyone who has been put off by anything I’ve told them. Hopefully we’ll meet up for a coffee and informal interview in a week or two to take things further.
I got back from my trip on Saturday morning to find a number of new vinyl albums waiting for me. Getting music through the post is another unexpected joy, and it was very exciting to unwrap the discs. I spent a lot of the weekend with the turntable spinning my slowly-expanding collection as we pottered about the house. So far my experience with buying records from Discogs has been really good and the records have been just as described. It has got me thinking about what albums make good purchases — do you buy things you think you might like, or commit cash only to those that you know that you do? I can see Spotify being a place where I discover new things and I can then support the artists I like by buying their albums.
Next week: Crunch time to get ourselves organised with budgets and plans, and school governor meetings start again.
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