Weeknotes #308 — Look Sharp!

This week was a bit too much. Last week’s relatively slow start had lulled me into a false sense of security, so it felt as though reality hit me hard this week. There was so much going on both at work and at home. It felt as though I picked up more things than I put down.

This was a week in which I:

• Wrestled with the trains. My usual morning train was cancelled until the final couple of days of the week due to a points failure somewhere on the line. The next one rolled into the station with a fraction of the carriages it normally has, so I had to run down the platform to catch it. We were standing, squeezed together from the start of the journey. After a quarter of a century of commuting I actually quite enjoy it — it’s where I write most of my weeknotes — but not when the service starts to fall apart.
• Prepared for and ran our programme steering committee meeting. Preparing the pack was a useful exercise for me to get my head around where we are at after a flurry of activity at the end of last year. I spent a couple of hours at the weekend writing up the minutes as I know that there won’t be any time to do this next week and didn’t want it to be hanging over me.
• Also finished off the preparation for next week’s management team offsite meeting over the weekend, confirming the final agenda and sending it out to my colleagues.
• Met with the CEO and Office Manager for one of our regional offices for a review of the services provided by our department, and our plans for this year.
• Bumped into another of our regional CEOs who was visiting our office ahead of an offsite meeting. We discussed the potential provision of a technology in his office and agreed a plan to gather some more information before making a decision.
• Handed over background documentation for a document management project that we would like to make progress with this year.
• Met with our audio/visual consultants following last week’s trial of demo equipment in one of our boardrooms. The Integrated Systems Europe conference is just around the corner, and we’re hoping for product announcements that will help us with our large shared meeting rooms. The solution that we tested may be more suited to another space that we’d like to improve.
• Met with our real estate services consultancy firm to review their proposal to support us in 2025.
• Caught up with our sister company on their revised draft schedule for their office renovation and maintenance.
• Reviewed lots of CVs from recruiters for the vacancy in my team. I also hosted one of the recruiters when they came to visit our office. The CVs are getting closer to what we’re looking for and we have a couple of interviews lined up for next week.
• Joined our architecture governance meeting and reviewed proposed changes to some of our technology infrastructure. The changes are deep in the weeds, but should result in a smoother experience for all of the staff working in our offices.
• Had a career coaching session with my executive partner at a technology industry analyst firm. Thinking about what I would like to spend my time doing if there were no constraints was an interesting exercise. Very early in my career I fell into project management, but I’m a geek at heart and sometimes wish my role was more technical than it is.
• Had my regular meeting with our account manager at the same technology industry analyst firm.
• Made a plan to bring in Rob O’Donoghue to talk to our department about neurodiversity, covering the talk that I saw him give at the Gartner Symposium/Xpo at the end of 2023.
• Had our monthly operational risk review meeting.
• Discussed the needs of one of our departments that fields a large number of staff queries. What was initially pitched to me as a conversation about AI ended up with us deciding that a rule-based chatbot would be more suitable.
• Met with the Product Owner of Planview AgilePlace for a demo of possible new features. We took the opportunity to give some extensive feedback on the tool. It’s been an excellent tool for us over the past few years and it’s so lovely to be able to give feedback directly to the person in charge. Another example of the magical Internet.
• Spent many, many hours trying to find a suitable venue for dinner to celebrate our programme’s success and to thank our team. After a slow start to my search I soon realised that I had to cast a wide net. I spent time running around the City of London to look at venues that were in the running; this proved to be invaluable as I found rooms that looked great on the web were inaccessible or located next to the restaurant toilets. I now have both a venue as well as a newfound respect for our Marketing and Communications team who have to do this kind of work as part of their day job.
• Enjoyed a wonderful Learning Hour meeting where our CTO talked to us about SpaceX, Starlink, and their status in Africa.
• Hosted the latest WB-40 Album Club. I’d struggled to make time to think about what to play, and picked Joe Jackson’s debut album Look Sharp! at the very last minute. I was very happy with my choice. There are so many great songs on there.
• Had a frustrating experience at a stationery shop. My wife had ordered a few packs of coloured pencils to give as prizes to children in a school art contest. Her order was sent to the shop close to my office so that I could pick them up. When I got there and showed them the order on my phone, they asked for a physical copy of her ID, which I didn’t have. I asked whether I could just buy some more, but they said that the packs they have are put aside for my wife’s order. I asked whether I could call her and ask her to cancel her order, putting the packs of pencils back into stock. Apparently that wouldn’t work either, as the process takes a while. So, I walked out without the pencils.
• Felt so sorry to hear about the passing of Tony Slattery. In 1994 I saw him being brilliant, live on stage, at a taping of Whose Line Is It Anyway?. His reappearance a few years ago in What’s the Matter with Tony Slattery? was so shocking and sad. Poor guy.
• Enjoyed this week’s in-person Album Club. I’d heard lots about Big Country over the years but had never knowingly heard any of their songs, so this was a great opportunity to listen intently. I’ve now tried it, and made up my mind that I didn’t like it.
  

Media

Podcasts

• An excellent interview with someone on the NHS front line. It sounds as though being an emergency medicine doctor is a role that you would only do for the love of the job.
• The Standard Bank In-Market Insights podcast is excellent. The latest episode covers the relationship and geopolitics between China and Africa.

Articles

• Local police forces are launching an initiative to tackle drivers who pass cyclists too closely. This article is from 2018, but the scheme is being rolled out in Hertfordshire soon. Lots of drivers don’t understand that when overtaking they need to use the whole of the other lane as if they were overtaking a car. A couple of months ago I was involved in an extremely narrow pass that just had a couple of centimetres between me and the car.
• I love that I joined and support the IndieWeb.Social Mastodon server. Timothy Chambers takes such a thoughtful approach to running the instance; his recent decision on posts federated from Threads is no exception.
• Interesting reflections on Elon Musk by Sam Harris.
• I had a conversation in the office last week about whether it’s better to read AI-generated summaries of books or to not read them at all. I don’t know what the answer is. This Bluesky post serendipitously turned up in my timeline.
• I’ve worked in the City of London for 26 years. Bank Junction has always felt like a special place. A London Inheritance gives a fascinating overview of its history.

Video

• Interesting video from the MIT Sloan Management Review on how forcing employees back to the office is the best way to lose your top talent. People want to work together in person, but it should be left up to individual teams to decide what is right for them.

• Spent a baffled 45 minutes watching the first episode of season two of Severance. This recap of season one was exactly what we needed to remind ourselves of everything that happened. We’d forgotten nearly everything.

• Started watching The Breakthrough, a drama about a double murder in Sweden that went unsolved for 16 years.

Web

• Some people’s moral compasses are completely out of whack. Who thought this was a good idea?
• It was interesting to read that Scott Yoshinaga has exactly the same problem as me when trying to syndicate his blog posts via micro.blog whilst using CloudFlare to protect and speed up his website. I’ve ended up turning CloudFlare off for now, which sadly feels like a defeat.
  

Next week: Visitors from South Africa and an offsite meeting.