Weeknotes #168 — Kathryn Joseph

A fun week. I planned my days of going into London around events that were happening there. On Tuesday we had the CEO of our division of the company visiting from South Africa, with office drinks drawing a line under the day. Then on Wednesday I wandered over to St Pancras Old Church to see Kathryn Joseph, supported by Sophie Jamieson. The venue was beautiful and both artists were incredible. There’s something delicious about going to a gig on your own; I managed to grab a spare seat in one of the front rows between two couples that had left a gap between them. I can’t remember quite how I came across Kathryn Joseph’s work. I wasn’t very familiar with her music, but what I had heard was good enough to take a punt on going to see her. I’m so glad I did. I came home feeling full of life. Live music is magical.

I’ve not been sleeping well for the past few weeks. I can’t work out why. In one of my dreams, a stranger came up to me and started asking me about things that are on my real-life to-do list. I seem to always be awake before my alarm and then try to get back to sleep again. Hopefully it will pass.

A week in which I:

Welcomed one of my peers back after a long break. We hadn’t seen each other in five or six weeks due to our overlapping holidays. There was much to catch up on.
Finished the Teams regulatory recording project after the final system user confirmed that they can access the recordings.
Kicked off some work with a colleague to look at our old voice recording archive to see whether we should just leave the system where it is, or formally move it to a read-only silo.
Enjoyed seeing us switch our London office telephony over to Microsoft Teams. We say goodbye to the unloved Cisco Jabber after three years of service. We are edging towards our vision of replacing the server room in each of our offices with a simple cabinet on the wall.
Had a number of meetings relating to our upcoming annual conference, including our internal and external project status updates and a session with the technology vendors to discuss how the on-site and online components will integrate.
Prepared a team member to look at the architecture of how we will configure ‘Internet of Things’ devices on our network, ahead of us rolling out our new digital signage solution.
Updated one of our test digital signage players with the latest Internal Communications slides and was reminded how simple it is to use. I’m excited to roll this out across our offices.
Took part in our monthly risk management meeting and reviewed all of my risks. The process that we have put in place is working well.
Reviewed a number of CVs for the Agile Coach/Product Manager vacancy that I have in my team.
Discussed our approach to revising our major incident response process.
Attended the ‘steering committee’ for our big group programme.
Joined a couple of meetings with our agile development team working on dashboards from the group system.
Completed all of the online annual mandatory training courses at work. After working in financial services for 23 years, I’m in the habit of doing them as soon as they turn up and skim reading the content to get straight to the assessments.
Enjoyed drinks and nibbles with the London office, a random coffee with someone from our Operations team and another with a colleague in New York.
Enjoyed the fourth session of The Micro Blog Readers’ Republic, an online meeting with other microbloggers where everyone shared their selection of fiction and non-fiction book recommendations.
Reviewed the 2022–2023 draft school budget ahead of our Full Governing Board meeting next week, as well as the collaborative visit report from our recent Governors In School Day.
Spoke with our school catering provider about their compliance with food standards, closing out an action that I took following our review of a school policy.
Got a couple of screws fixed in our garden decking that we had installed last year when the gardeners came to pick up their lawn roller.
Had a good week on my bike, with some indoor training sessions and a great ride out with the club on Saturday morning. There’s a joy to sitting outside the cricket club with a well-earned coffee and cake at the end.