Weeknotes #162 — The fault in our boilers

The spring that sprung to life in the UK last week seemed like a false dawn, as the warm weather was replaced by a cold snap. On Tuesday we had our boiler serviced for the first time since the pandemic started and felt very pleased when it was given a clean bill of health. A couple of hours later, we stared in disbelief when it wouldn’t fire up. Despite our best efforts, we couldn’t get an engineer to come and look at it for a couple of days. At this point we found that the immersion heater wasn’t living its best life, with a socket that got too hot to the touch and an electricity arc when we turned it on or off. We managed to get enough hot water in the tank to last for the first day, but when it tripped the circuit breaker we figured that it was game over. For the first time since I was a child we resorted to flannels, soap and cold water instead of showers the next morning. I spent the day feeling like I hadn’t woken up properly, pondering how my family and I would fare if real hardship ever hit us. Perhaps you just quickly adjust and get on with it.

I spent only one day in the office this week, a relief after the four days I spent there the week before. I had a variety of in-person meetings which made it feel worthwhile being there. I’m still a big believer in giving people as much autonomy as they need with the expectation that they will make good decisions, but if there has to be a set number of days in the office, one or two is more than enough.

I have a couple of weeks off work over Easter and a lot going on. For the first time in a while I had an acute sense of pre-holiday panic, with a number of late nights to try and complete as many of my commitments as I could. It’s never good enough, but I got myself into a place where I felt as though I could walk away from the keyboard for a while without any major open loops.

A week in which I:

• Engaged with staff that were recently impacted by a technical implementation to check how they are getting on. Instead of one-to-one conversations and emails, I’ve experimented with setting up a chat group in Teams for this purpose. I also spoke to the vendor to discuss how other firms are using the functionality, and relayed my findings back to the team. By tackling it head on it seems to have taken away some of the noise, but it is still early days. The departments that depend on the system being in place are happy with the approach.
• Ran a short training session with our Compliance and Legal teams on the new tool.
• Took part in a meeting to discuss our status, options and approach for a lease expiry for one of our offices. There are so many variables in the equation, not least of which is what an office will look like and be used for in the next couple of years.
• Along with the other teams involved, decided to go back out to the market to try and find a technical partner for our upcoming conference. We made some minor revisions to the brief and re-issued the request for proposal. The submission process will close a day before I am back from my break.
• Was delighted to see how quickly our first agile team has taken to the work ahead of them, and the level of understanding that they have about the processes. They are quickly getting to the point where they will be able to get a minimum viable product out of the door, which is very exciting. I was also struck by how much non-technical staff know about the affordances of user interface components, such as radio buttons and multi-select dropdown lists.
• Discussed the bigger picture of our agile development work and how we will manage our portfolio.
• Reviewed our quarterly roadmap in our all-team meeting, reflecting on what we achieved in the first quarter and what lies ahead. We’re largely on track; a couple of deliveries didn’t quite make it over the line but we also got things done that weren’t due to be completed until Q2, so I’m calling it a draw.
• Started to pull together a more detailed milestone plan for the team. I have a first draft, but we’re either going to need to prune the items we are tracking or split the view across a couple of pages.
• Met with a colleague in our HR team to discuss their project on the topic of ‘sustainable careers’. Working for a small part of a large company has so many advantages; career advancement may not come in the classic form of a promotion, but instead the opportunity to experience working and collaborating across so many areas of the organisation.
• Had a recurring thought about how to get the organisation working out loud more, and what the barriers are. Remembered Euan Semple’s quote that “no matter what you are trying to achieve social media adoption happens one person at a time and for their reasons not yours”. I’m happy to lead by example — weeknotes would be great to get going internally — but being a pioneer can be tricky. Maybe I just need to write a Teams post about it in the same way that I started my weeknotes a few years ago.
• Got asked the question “Did you make a difference today?” by one of my close colleagues. I think they were reflecting on their own day but I love the question — responding to it made me feel like I was creating weeknotes.
• Reviewed the licencing and support for our Cisco estate ahead of our latest renewal. It was invaluable to have an expert in the room to guide us through the myriad of line items.
• Met with one of the vendors we are considering for our digital signage solution to continue the process of on-boarding them.
• Discussed our approach to a ‘first responder’ scenario, where someone in the team discovers a critical outage. We’re planning on running some crisis simulations later this year.
• Was very pleased to see the welcome return of one of our key team members after his holiday. A couple of critical items have been on hold for a little while which we can now try and make rapid progress with again.
• Had a lovely random coffee with a new member of our Distribution and Loan Syndication team, a South African who recently moved to the UK.
• Got my annual goals into our performance management system.
• Had a school Full Governing Board meeting. At nearly three hours, it felt like a long one. It’s difficult to know how to shorten the meetings without impacting on the breadth of topics and critical questioning that we cover. The headteacher and staff continue to do an incredible job, and I’m always left wondering how they manage it. I wish there was something significant that we could do to improve their wellbeing.
• Made further edits to a letter from the Governing Board and circulated it for review.
• Wished my lovely eldest boy a happy 15th birthday. The years have flown by.

Next week: A much-needed break, away from the keyboard.