A good week where I felt as though I kept my focus on the right things and got stuff done. It started terribly on Monday; I got down to the kitchen to find that the cats had decided to wreak havoc while we slept. After cleaning up the mess I had no time for breakfast if I wanted to make my train. Just as I was about to leave the house the zip on my backpack broke. So I jogged down to the station, clutching my bag in front of me as I went, and spent my commute trying to find a replacement backpack that wasn’t going to necessitate remortgaging the house.
This was the first week that we restarted our ‘hybrid working’ experiment, where we are expected to be in the office around 50% of the time. I went in on both Monday and Wednesday. After my handful of days in the office at the end of last year it no longer feels like a novelty. The free meals and a coffee from the on-site canteen that were in place throughout the pandemic have now ceased, which will be interesting in terms of their impact on staff experience and whether people now choose to go and buy their meals outside.
Although the week felt productive, I’ve been sleeping poorly and it has taken its toll. Sitting here on Sunday evening I’m really feeling it. I’ve always been late to bed; most evenings I get a second wind and have to force myself to go up the wooden hill. I’ve managed to get the bedroom light out by midnight most evenings and I think I need to keep trying to push this earlier.
It’s gotten cold and windy here in the UK and has felt pretty wintry. January felt warmer than usual and lulled me into thinking that spring is around the corner. Snow on Friday morning was a sharp reminder that we’re still in winter.
This was a week in which I:
- Refined our 2022 roadmap with input from our Operations and Cybersecurity teams.
- Got a second digital signage player up and running. It has been very beneficial to soak-test the devices as we found that our first display had a memory leak; after waking up at 7am a couple of the display components would consistently crash around 4:20pm every day. The fix is simple; we’re now refreshing the rogue component on a regular basis in order to free up memory. We’ve still got some way to go to prove to ourselves that they would be a robust solution for the five global offices that we are responsible for, but we’re on the right path.
- Learnt a lot from a presentation given by our CTO on the evolution of our SD-WAN network and what the future looks like. The whole team were invited to attend and it feels like we now have strong alignment on what we plan to do to further simplify things this year.
- Had a brilliant one-on-one discussion with the Head of Enterprise Architecture for Technology and Operations. A recent meeting with a big group of internal technologists raised a lot of questions in my mind about a significant strategy initiative that we are undertaking, but I felt as though I was alone. It turns out that my questions were valid and I’ve been asked to join a strategy session later this month.
- Met with the team that are working on some reporting dashboards for our part of the organisation as part of the big group programme.
- Closed out on a number of contracts and purchase orders, keeping us on track for our project deliveries this year.
- Reviewed our risk log with my peers in our monthly meeting.
- Took part in a meeting with a CIO adviser from Gartner on ‘building the digitally dexterous enterprise’.
- Made great strides with testing our Teams mandatory compliance audio recording solution. After getting the recordings to show up on Monday, I spent time familiarising myself with the end-user experience from as many angles as I could think of, as well as the experience of the person who has access to the playback portal. I have lots of questions and actions to close out on before we can go live.
- Joined the first Teams Fireside Chat session. In the invite the hosts had said that the presentation part of the session would be recorded and the recording would stop before Q&A. I looked on in horror when I realised that my testing of our Teams mandatory compliance recording tool meant that everyone saw a purple recording banner way before the other recording started, and after it ended. I pointed it out during the Q&A session and we actually had a very useful discussion about it; it was fascinating in that almost everyone dismissed the notification without reading it.
- Met with the son of one of my colleagues who has recently got himself qualified with Microsoft and CompTIA courses and is looking for his first employment break into the world of IT. I really love explaining what I do and took some time to go through the world of portfolio, programme and project management, with a little Kanban thrown in as well.
- Met with an old colleague for the first time this year. We’re scheduled to catch up every few weeks but the meeting tends to move around. It’s always great to reconnect and find out what has been going on with her and her part of the company.
- Had a lovely ‘random coffee’ with a colleague in our New York office who is from Argentina and lived in Manchester many years ago.
- Learned never to ask “if anyone has any good jokes” when trying to fill time before a meeting starts.
- Attended a couple of DfE-funded seminars on school resource management. The first was on the topic of school estate management and the second gave an overview of integrated curriculum and financial planning (ICFP). I haven’t put time aside to properly digest all of the material, but it is great to know that so many excellent resources exist to assist with these topics.
- Caught up with a set of actions that I had taken at the last school Full Governing Board meeting, ahead of our next session on Tuesday.
- Kept an eye on the goings-on in parliament. It felt as though we got two ’Prime Minister’s Questions’ sessions this week with the release of the Sue Gray ‘pre-report report’ on Monday and the regular session on Wednesday. Jonathan Pie’s Opinion piece in the New York Times sums up the situation quite well.
- Went out for dinner at the Dog and Partridge in Sunninghill on Saturday night with old friends. Great company, average food.
- Did a whole week of indoor bike trainer riding due to the club ride being cancelled again. Next week it is currently predicted to be -5°C overnight so it’ll probably be the same situation.
Next week: More days in the office, many school governor meetings and an Album Club.
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