Weeknotes #160 — Saddle bag

A really busy week which felt like a taste of what’s to come. Despite rising COVID-19 case numbers in the UK, travelling to the office for a couple of days this week felt as though the world had got almost completely back to normal, with packed trains and busy London pavements. I’m finding being in the office to be quite a sensory overload for most of the time; I find myself struggling with the fact that everyone has unfettered access to my ears and can feel my heart rate being a few beats per minute higher. Next week I’ll be in the office almost every day and am anticipating feeling quite toasted by Friday. Another theme of this week was a few frustrations that have crept into things at work which I need to try and manage in a positive way.

This was a week in which I:

• Found out that we have three ’town hall’ style hybrid meetings to run next week. We spent some time developing a plan for configuring the equipment we will use in our collaborative meeting space and need to have a final run-through before the first session scheduled for Monday lunchtime.
• Ran a couple of training sessions to show colleagues what will happen when we switch on mandatory compliance audio recording in Teams. Everyone needs to know about it as they may find themselves on a recorded call because another participant has recording enabled.
• Reviewed an updated technology vendor briefing for our planned conference in June. Spent time testing and reviewing some of the invites that will be going out shortly and met a new team member who will be working on the conference project in the Marketing team.
• Investigated different ways in which we can obtain TV streams for our planned digital signage. It’s interesting that you seemingly can’t (yet?) buy a private stream that doesn’t involve hardware at any site of the way. I was hoping there would be an equivalent to a private URL that you can only access from a specific IP address that gives you raw channels for the cost of a commercial subscription. In the age of fast Internet, why do we need satellite dishes and decoders?
• Discussed how we can on-board one of the digital signage vendors given the relative sizes of our organisations and the heavyweight nature of our process.
• Agreed the next steps for rolling out Windows 11 across our laptop estate.
• Joined a number of internal and external meetings relating to lease expiries for some of our offices that will happen in a couple of years time. It’s an exciting project to be part of.
• Attended our Information Risk Steering Group and agreed some changes to further reduce our risk of data loss.
• Joined the monthly overview of what’s happening in our internal Governance and Control team.
• Hosted one of our business teams who took our whole team through their business strategy for the year and what areas they think we can help with.
• Had a delicious posh lunch with our London team in one of our client meeting rooms.
• Chaired the latest Finance, Premises and Personnel committee meeting at school.
• Spent some time talking to the brilliant people at HfL Governance Services. I’ve called on them a number of times over the nine years that I have been a school governor and are always my first thought when a tricky issue arises.
• Drafted a letter from the school on behalf of the governors.
• Finished watching the latest season of Drive to Survive on Netflix, just in time for the start of the new Formula 1 season. I didn’t enjoy it as much as the previous seasons and wonder if the format is already getting a little stale.
• Enjoyed having a friend over to watch the first race together.
• Had a good cycle club ride, at a slightly slower pace than the rides last weekend. My saddle wedge bag broke in two places as I went up a hill early on in the ride. I had to work under the pressure of the rest of the group watching me as I tried to reattach it to my bike just enough to last the rest of the route.

• Wrestled with getting my thoughts together on Violent Borders. Writing a blog post on something I’ve read really does help to get my head around the topic.

Next week: The majority of the week in the office, and another Album Club.