A short week, as I took Friday as holiday to spend some time with the boys and my wife during their half term holiday. For the four days I was working I couldn’t shake a general feeling of malaise, and that I and everyone around me is treading water as we wait for the pandemic to pass. By the end of Thursday I was so grateful that it would be the last day at my desk as I was feeling pretty horrible.
This was a week in which I:
- Had an good introductory call with an internal architect who may be able to help out our team on a temporary basis.
- Saw demonstrations of three different automations and software solutions built by our team. All of them are genuinely exciting, and will make significant differences to our colleagues.
- Spent time, including Sunday afternoon, refining the slides and narrative for the ‘new ways of work’ session I am running next week.
- Discussed our roadmap for kicking off our involvement in a giant programme of work being run by the wider Group. Got buy-in from a senior stakeholder for him to represent us at the appropriate forums.
- Caught up with our People and Culture partner to brief them on the plans for our new team member in Beijing.
- Attended a meeting to move us a step closer to getting our Architecture Governance Authority in place.
- Started to look at options for in-room videoconferencing without any cables between the conference table and the monitor, camera, mic and speakers.
- Had a random coffee with a colleague in New York. It’s been a year since I was out there rolling out our new infrastructure; the fastest, slowest year ever.
- Enjoyed my day off by starting it with a run, having a car-park based McDonalds breakfast with the family and going for a walk around Tring reservoir.
- Reached 50 films in our family ‘round-robin’ movie night by watching Space Sweepers (2021) (also known as Seungriho). It looks beautiful and must have had a massive budget, but it lacked a certain something.
- Had a wonderful time at the 10th anniversary Album Club evening. As well as the incredible biscuits and beers from Left Handed Giant that were distributed to everyone in the club, our host had organised a lyrics quiz and we enjoyed the thoughts on music provoked by Songversations. A brilliant evening.
Next week: Lots of early starts, including one for our next management workshop on the ‘new ways of working’ that has been cooking for some time. More interviews for our Head of IT Infrastructure and Operations role, and a Herts for Learning Chairs’ Strategic Information Briefing.
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