I felt a little bit off-colour last weekend. It was like I had a mild hangover, despite not having had anything to drink. Two colleagues were flying in from Johannesburg for the week; I planned to spend every day working with them in our London office, so I thought it was prudent to take a COVID-19 test. Two tests on Sunday came back negative as did another one on Monday morning. But a fourth test on Monday evening resulted in the dreaded double red lines.

I could only apologise to my colleagues that I had spent the day and evening with. Perhaps if it was a regular week, I would have stayed at home just in case. But I was excited to see them, was looking forward to a team night out and figured that it was just some other random lurgy that was going around.

It is almost a year since I knowingly got infected for the first time. I guess this is just how life is going to be now? This time around the effects were a little worse than before, although it was still relatively mild. I was never poorly enough take any time off work, but I did need a lot of sleep and didn’t feel up to any exercise. On Wednesday night I developed a mild fever but it was gone within 24 hours. Thankfully, none of my family have developed any symptoms despite sharing the house with me. Government guidance is to stay at home for five days.

This was a week in which I:

• Spent Thursday with the Engineering management team in a strategy meeting. I was the only person attending remotely, with everyone else in a meeting room in our London office. A few of us had put together a broad outline of the meeting a few days before which we largely kept to. We dived into thoughts on leadership before moving onto strategy, bringing in a guest from the CEO office to go through the work that has been done at his level. Our plan is to have a quarterly session starting next year to look at things top-down instead of bottom-up. I’ve always liked Richard Rumelt’s Good Strategy/Bad Strategy which has this definition:

The kernel of a strategy contains three elements:
1. A diagnosis that defines or explains the nature of the challenge. A good diagnosis simplifies the often overwhelming complexity of reality by identifying certain aspects of the situation as critical.
2. A guiding policy for dealing with the challenge. This is an overall approach chosen to cope with or overcome the obstacles identified in the diagnosis.
3. A set of coherent actions that are designed to carry out the guiding policy. These are steps that are coordinated with one another to work together in accomplishing the guiding policy.

• He also talks about how to detect a bad strategy:

To detect a bad strategy, look for one or more of its four major hallmarks:
– Fluff. Fluff is a form of gibberish masquerading as strategic concepts or arguments. It uses “Sunday” words (words that are inflated and unnecessarily abstruse) and apparently esoteric concepts to create the illusion of high-level thinking.
– Failure to face the challenge. Bad strategy fails to recognize or define the challenge. When you cannot define the challenge, you cannot evaluate a strategy or improve it.
– Mistaking goals for strategy. Many bad strategies are just statements of desire rather than plans for overcoming obstacles.
– Bad strategic objectives. A strategic objective is set by a leader as a means to an end. Strategic objectives are “bad” when they fail to address critical issues or when they are impracticable.

• Presented three items at our quarterly Architecture Governance Authority meeting and got the go ahead on all three. Two of the items are applications we want to enable on our Microsoft 365 tenant and the third was for a Password Manager which I plan to roll out early next year.
• Set up our new ‘work location broadcasting tool’ which we plan to pilot over the next few weeks before making a decision on rolling it our across our organisation. It’s so simple to use, and plugs a gap in the way that the Microsoft suite works today. I also reviewed a draft agreement for our pilot which we need to finalise next week.
• Took part in a retrospective, looking specifically at the way in which my immediate team works. It has been very useful to reflect on how we go about things. We started this process a couple of weeks ago and still have one more session to go.
• Met with our Enterprise Architect for our bi-monthly catch-up and discussed an issue that I raised a few weeks ago.
• Attended an Architecture feedback session, reviewing a number of architecture decisions that were made at the highest forums in the past few weeks.
• Reviewed our options for setting up an internal blog that is accessible by the rest of the organisation. We have been looking at SharePoint for a couple of weeks but the feeling I get is that it just isn’t built to run a blog-style content management system without extensive customisation. We’ve decided to pilot using Viva Engage (previously known as Yammer), despite the very mention of it making us itch based on our experiences from years ago. There seems to be a very broad user base at our firm and it comes with a lot of blog-like features out of the box. We’ll experiment and review how it goes.
• Joined a series of very insightful meetings with our heads of Finance and Risk, as well as staff in Compliance, to talk through our thinking about our digital initiatives and get their input.
• Met with our cross-functional digital product team to talk through a presentation they have put together to gain support and buy-in for their work. We drifted into topics such as ways of working; it was useful to be reminded of the gap between how we work in technology versus the rest of the organisation. I have some follow up meetings and discussions planned off the back of this.
• Attended our Information Risk Steering Group and gave updates on a couple of initiatives that I am running.
• Met with our People and Culture, and Marketing and Communications teams to discuss a planned service provider change for employee discounts.
• Joined our weekly project meeting for closing down one of our regional offices.
• Had an unexpected view of a suburban area of Beijing through a one-on-one meeting with a colleague. Our office was closed due to a detected COVID-19 case, so he took the opportunity to show me around where he lives. It reminded me of a typical street in Queens or Brooklyn in New York City.
• Attended a division-wide town hall meeting and won a recognition award with a small cash prize.
• Couldn’t find a simple solution to get a timer to display on a Teams Room screen alongside all of the participant video feeds. I’d be interested if anyone has solved this.
• Enjoyed a Learning Hour cybersecurity presentation from a colleague.
• Loved seeing my colleagues from Johannesburg, albeit briefly. We had a brilliant night out with most of our department at the Singer Tavern followed by darts at Flight Club across the road.

• Completed and circulated drafts of our school’s Pay Policy as well as the five (yes, FIVE) UK GDPR-related policies to the Governing Board, ahead of our meeting next week.
• Reviewed most of the materials ahead of the Full Governing Board meeting.
• Read through the materials ahead of our headteacher assessment and interview day.
• Decided to change my approach to concert-going to one where I buy my own ticket and broadcast my plans to my musically-minded friends. I didn’t get to see the wonderful Kathryn Joseph on Tuesday night as I was ill. The friends I was going with decided not to go either and I couldn’t find anyone to take my three tickets.
• Missed the cycling club’s AGM as I wasn’t well. I’ve not been able to participate as much as I would have liked to, especially in the second part of the year.
• Was sent a replacement TICKR heart rate monitor by the lovely people at Wahoo after mine gave up after 11 months. I think there is a design flaw as it is the second that has died on me. The main unit is fine, but the poppers that hold the straps on always seem to get corroded.

• Turned off my mind by continuing to watch some episodes of Grange Hill on BritBox. I’m now late on in series two and have started to make notes on some of the more ridiculous aspects of the show.
• Switched off crossposting from this blog to Twitter. There’s a toxic person at the helm and I’ve decided to stop creating posts on there. I’ve recently set up a Mastodon account and the service has the feeling of Twitter circa 2009, in a good way. Years ago I deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts; I plan to keep my Twitter account in place, partly so that I don’t break parts of the web and partly so that I can use movetodon.org to find accounts of people I previously followed on ‘the bird site’.

Next week: Assessing prospective headteachers, meeting with the Full Governing Board, getting back to the office and taking a day off to spend with my wife.

Even by recent standards, this was an incredibly busy week. Things tend to slow right down at work in December as South Africa takes its summer holidays, so there’s a race to get things completed before people start to disappear. School governor meetings also came thick and fast this week, with lots of events that just happened to land one after the other.

Tiredness on Friday was hidden by my excitement of finally getting to meet the Internet friends that I have made through the WB-40 podcast Signal group. Matt Ballantine and Chris Weston couldn’t have known what they were creating when they started the show. They have brought together the most wonderful community of geeks that over the past few years have shared laughter and tears together. Meeting people in real life that I have only really known over a message group — and very occasional video call — proves to me that you absolutely can establish meaningful, supportive and productive relationships without being physically in the same the same place. It felt like a reunion, despite many of us meeting for the very first time. It’s a privilege to be part of the group.

This was a week in which I:

• Met with a colleague in our Marketing and Communications team to discuss ideas for our planned password manager rollout. I originally wanted us to go live at the start of January as people return to the office, but this is becoming less realistic as we go through our lengthy vendor on-boarding processes.
• Hastily pulled together submissions to our Architecture Governance Authority for a couple of applications that we want to connect to our Microsoft 365 tenant, along with the password manager software.
• Completed some draft slides for my boss to use at an upcoming ‘people day’ meeting.
• Met a colleague and a vendor for an interesting discussion on what was originally pitched as ‘career activism’; helping staff to take charge of their careers. The consensus is that ‘activism’ has negative connotations, so another name is in the works. Continued the discussion after the meeting and agreed that people don’t often stop to look at themselves and realise all the benefits they have of being in their current roles.
• Spent a lot of time with our Digital team as they recapped where they are with their various products, and planned and delivered an organisation-wide talk to showcase them. They have been doing excellent work on tools that should allow us to make significant improvements to our understanding of our clients. The products range from simple to complex; the latter are interesting because they will take lots of our teams into uncharted territory.
• Spent time with our CIO to structure and prepare for a strategy day that we have planned for next week. Two of my colleagues are coming over to London from Johannesburg, so we should have everyone in the same room.
• Joined a meeting with our new head of Investment Banking to get her views on our business challenges. We’ve been talking to all of the senior leaders across our part of the organisation and will continue these sessions next week.
• Took part in the weekly meeting with the Marketing and Communications, and People and Culture teams. Gave feedback on recent initiatives that we have been running internally and the impact that I think they have had on my team.
• Had a catch-up with a colleague who is stuck in a COVID-19 quarantine hotel.
• Took part in the weekly project meeting for closing one of our offices.
• Was taken out for a lovely lunch by a colleague as a thank-you for giving her some spare theatre tickets earlier in the year. I’d never been to Cafe Below before, despite having walked past it hundreds of times. It was a pleasant surprise, with delicious food in a unique setting.

• Reviewed the applications for the post of Headteacher at our school. The recruitment panel met to discuss our views and agree who we will put on a shortlist. The next step is for us to nail down the details of the assessment day and then spend a day in school observing and interviewing the candidates.
• Met with our School Improvement Partner to hear her feedback after spending a morning in our school.
• Completed our Headteacher’s annual performance review, sadly for the last time.
• Chaired our school Finance, Premises and Personnel meeting. Had a call with our school Site Manager to discuss a couple of actions from the meeting.
• Joined the HFL Education Hertfordshire Headteacher Update briefing. There isn’t a lot of good news about at the moment, particularly when it comes to school funding; the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates that the real-terms spend in schools in 2024–25 will be 3% lower than in 2010. On top of this, at least one in six children are across the county are presenting with mental health needs, with the system stressed. It really feels that there is a national crisis brewing.
• Joined a videoconference to learn about World Challenge, a 27-night expedition for children between the ages of 15 and 18. Our eldest son is mulling it over. It would be a life-changing experience, but it’s expensive. They told us that the children who do best on the trip are the ones that have strived to raise most of the money themselves.
• Finally completed the treatment on my bad tooth that started in the summer, getting my second gold crown. I need to look at insuring my head, or at least making sure my family know to extract both of them in the event of my demise.
• Made it out on Saturday morning for a cycling club ride. It was so good to see everyone again. I joined the club around this time last year, so going out in the cold and damp, with mudguards on my bike, got me thinking about how quickly the year has gone. I jumped straight back in with my usual speed group and felt pretty good as we propelled ourselves around the wet, pot-holed lanes.
• Ran the line at my eldest son’s football match. It was a cold but gloriously sunny morning in Cheddington.

• Watched the anti-climactic final F1 race of the season. Yas Marina is a good-looking place, but it rarely produces great races. As someone on Twitter recently said, “What should be the last race of the season and why is it Brazil?”
• Met some close friends for a walk around the Christmas display at Kew Gardens. The displays are beautiful. The circuit is very, very long and we had parked a thirty minute walk away from the venue; by the time we neared the end we were all looking forward to getting back and relaxing at home.

Next week: In the office all week with our visitors from out of town. Seeing Kathryn Joseph. And meeting up with the cycle club for the AGM.

This week has been a struggle. Every now and then I go through a phase of self-doubt, questioning everything I’m doing for my job and wondering whether I’m on the right track. It’s happened so many times before and it always passes, but while it’s here it feels like there’s a cloud hanging over me. Back when I started work in 1999 I quickly moved from software development to analysis and project management and that’s where I’ve stayed. But I’ve always wondered what would have happened if I had dived deeper into coding and built my technical skills.

I have a few things on my ‘big milestones’ list that I haven’t achieved yet this year. Now that there are only a handful of weeks left this year, the things not done are nagging at me. I don’t know whether it is because I’ve had to get involved in other work, or whether I just gravitate to projects and tasks that are less nebulous and easier to move to the ‘done’ pile. Having so much latitude in my job is a real blessing, but is also sometimes difficult to navigate. It will pass.

This was a week in which I:

• Met with a colleague to discuss our approach for improving management of unstructured data across Microsoft 365. This project will be ramping up over the remainder of the year and into next.
• Worked on a draft outline of a presentation for an annual senior management meeting focused on our staff.
• Took part in a retrospective for my immediate team, looking at how we work and thinking about how we can improve our processes. It was so useful to go through this in a guided way; we haven’t been this introspective in some time.
• Attended our monthly risk management meeting. We’ve made great progress in closing out some items and moving forward with mitigations for others.
• Shared an overview of my team’s remaining key deliverables for 2022 in our department meeting.
• Took part in the weekly project meeting for closing down one of our regional offices.
• Spent time with colleagues in a sister department to discuss ‘ways of work’ and how they might approach improving their culture and processes. It feels as though I am building a good rapport with the team.
• Went through our ‘ways of working’ journey so far with a recent joiner in our team. Next week we’ll look at how we can take it forward from where we are right now.
• Enjoyed a Learning Hour presentation by one of my team members on how to use the Invision web app.
• Saw our team complete a major network infrastructure change in one of our regional offices, completing the work that they have been doing across all of our locations all year. It significantly simplifies our setup and puts us in a good place to build out additional capabilities.
• Attended a ‘digital showcase’ session where a colleague presented on our API marketplace offerings.
• Attended a Better Value Sooner Safer Happier meetup on the topic of Tilting at Supertankers: Business Agility in Large Organisations. It was well-presented and well-received, but I didn’t feel as though there was enough new information in the presentation for me.

• Distributed the materials for, and clerked, our school governor Pay Committee meeting. We had lots to cover. I now need to put aside some time to write up the minutes.
• Had the privilege of seeing the Smoke Fairies play live again, for a ‘one night only’ show where they played all of their singles in chronological order. They didn’t disappoint. I first saw them live ten years ago when they launched their Blood Speaks album; they get better every time I see them. I’ve been supporting them on Patreon since they got it set up; it’s lovely to get a steady stream of home-made live performances on a regular basis in return. Getting home from the venue was a drama as the trains out of London were messed up, but it was worth it. Towards the end of the gig they played a song that was released during lockdown, No Matter How This Goes, Just Make Sure That You’re Kind. It brought back memories of what a stressful time the pandemic was. Watching live-streamed gigs from the Smoke Fairies and others was a little slice of joy.

• Did a double-take when I saw someone standing next to me that I remembered noticing at the Blood Speaks gig in 2012, as well as the Cate Le Bon Cyrk album launch that happened around the same time. It turns out that he is Roger Mairlot, known (affectionately?) as the ‘Gig Slut’, and attends hundreds of gigs in London every year. Next time I see him I will say hello.

• Finally got to take my new bike on a ride after a little break from all of the rain we’ve had. I rode out to Milton Keynes to see my eldest son take part in a Chiltern League cross-country run. It was joyous. We are going to have a lot of fun together. I can’t wait to get back to Saturday morning rides with the bike club.

• Met up with a couple of close friends on Friday night to go for a pub dinner. It had been a long time since I’d seen one of my friends in the flesh and it was great to spend time with him.
• Went to a dinner party with some friends who live a couple of streets away. They are amazing hosts and nobody went without a drink or something to eat for more than a few seconds.

Next week: A bulging diary, culminating in — at long last — meeting the people of WB-40.

A good, solid week where I got lots done. I managed to move forward with most of my projects in some way. Our unseasonably warm October has moved aside for an exceedingly wet November, so far at least. Temperatures have dropped, so we’ve switched our summer duvet over to the incredibly deep, snuggly winter one.

This was a week in which I:

• Remembered that I had a Monday 8am online meeting as my train pulled into the station at 8am on Monday. It was a bright, sunny day so I joined the Teams call on my mobile and joined on video as I walked the 40 minutes to my office. It worked well, and I was grateful for the additional hour in bed.
• Spent time with our new Head of Investment Banking to talk through an important project that we ran in 2020, getting her buy-in for some follow-up work.
• Joined our weekly project meeting for closing down one of our regional offices. Nailing down a critical path is tricky, with multiple ‘chicken and egg’ scenarios in that we still need parts of the company to be functional as we shut it down.
• Had a meeting to discuss the technical requirements of one of our regional offices. We are likely to be vacating the premises in a year or two, by which point I am hoping that we don’t need an actual ’server room’ as part of the floor plan. Our vision is to have just a cabinet on the wall with some switches and links to our wireless access points, with very little else.
• Spent time workshopping a short online talk that our digital product team will be giving in a couple of weeks’ time.
• Met with our sister company to discuss the planned tactical and strategic technical refits of our shared space.
• Created and delivered a ’learning hour’ presentation on the internal Scaled Agile Framework conference that I went to in Johannesburg in August. I deliberately didn’t spend lots of time creating new things to share, instead using the materials that we left the conference with. The talk seemed to have an impact in the team as a couple of people referred back to it in conversations later in the week.
• Informed the vendor of the ‘location broadcasting tool’ that we are ready to move to the pilot stage. We’re going to try it out across our Engineering, People and Culture, and Marketing and Communications teams to begin with. I met with representatives from those teams to show them what the tool will look like. It’ll be interesting to see the take-up.
• Had a technical session with our chosen password management vendor, talking to the Helpdesk team about what internal tool support looks like in practice. We have much to do if we are to be ready for a company-wide launch in January.
• Joined a meeting with one of the largest microprocessor manufacturers in the world. Our CTO had invited them to our office to discuss their view of trends and predictions, their roadmap, and how we are thinking about their technology. Data centre owners are sometimes our clients, giving us a slightly different perspective on things.
• Had further discussions on the design choices for an internal team blog that will be hosted on SharePoint. I spoke to friends about whether there are better platform choices, but it seems that for something internal that SharePoint is probably the right answer.
• Completed my personal annual review for 2022. Nobody likes doing these reviews, but it is just the way of things. I felt for my boss who had to complete his part of the process to a deadline while he was away on holiday.
• Raised the idea of having a formal role of Technical Product Owner (TPO) within our organisation. This was in place at the Swiss bank I worked for over a decade ago and it worked well. It was a formal title given to people in the IT organisation that meant that they were recognised as the ‘go to’ person for a piece of software or hardware. They had additional responsibilities on top of their day job that they undertook for the good of the community. It carried prestige as it meant that the person with the title was recognised as the leading internal voice for a particular technology. For example, someone might be the TPO of Business Intelligence software. They would have a day-to-day role where they used the software but were also responsible for:
  • Articulating why we as a company had chosen product X instead of — or as well as — other products in the market.
  • Coordinating licencing and ensuring we got the best deal, leveraging our scale.
  • Understanding and communicating the vendor roadmap within our organisation, and providing guidance on the appropriate versions to use.
  • Working with the vendor, bringing them into the organisation to give technical updates and increasing their understanding about how we were using their product.
  • Thinking about how we went about engaging with the product and whether it would make sense to, for example, offer the product ‘as a service’, taking away the need for others to setup their installations from scratch.
  • Act as a point of escalation on detailed technical issues and topics.
• Met with my peers to discuss the format and agenda for our upcoming strategic planning day.
• Had an in-person ‘random coffee’ with a member of our Transactional Products and Services team. I love that I’ve got to know colleagues like this through these randomised encounters.
• Enjoyed a webinar-style meeting with our new head of Investment Banking, getting an insight into her fascinating and challenging career so far, as well as her first impressions of working with us.
• Helped a colleague to see that they do not need to wait for permission to present themselves as being in a certain role. I remember years ago when I started to refer to myself as a programme manager on my email signature, as that was what I did. I owned the title and people didn’t dispute it. It felt like a big thing at the time.
• Joined the excellent monthly Teams Fireside Chat where we covered a lot of detail on Microsoft Teams Rooms. I had lots of questions, all of which were picked up and answered. It turns out that there currently isn’t a satisfying solution for adding a Teams Room to a meeting where you aren’t the organiser.
• Met with a prospective new school governor who found us through the Inspiring Governance service. It’s such a pleasure and privilege to speak to people who are willing to give up their time for an organisation that they have no prior links with.
• Finished looking into whether we should move the school’s role of UK GDPR Data Protection Officer to an external body. At the moment, with finances so tight, it’s difficult to justify the cost.
• Attended the annual HFL Education Governor Conference which this year had the theme of ‘Raising The Bar’. This has been a virtual event for the past couple of years. As much as I never like driving halfway across the county to Stevenage, I dearly hope that the next one is held in-person. I’m now of the view that there is a balance to be struck between in-person and virtual meetings; the annual conference seems like a good occasion to have people in the same room, meeting governors from other schools over a cup of coffee, despite the impact on the environment. The presentation from Jo Goodman of the Education Endowment Foundation was excellent. On Sunday I stumbled across this excellent Twitter thread which covered similar ground:

The Pupil Premium – a thread.

Here are some insights based on our experiences at @ShottonResearch using the @EducEndowFoundn‘s ideas to help 100s of schools develop their strategies. pic.twitter.com/hDRFcjp9k3

— Thomas Martell (@Martell_Tom) November 5, 2022

• Attended my eldest boy’s parents’ evening online.
• Finally took delivery of the new bike that I ordered in the summer. I was working from home when it turned up; I had to fight my urge to unbox it and start putting it together right there and then. It looks beautiful. I’m waiting for a gap in the weather to take it out for a spin, as I’m not sure pedalling it in anger on a Saturday morning club ride is the best way to start. Waiting for the right conditions feels like a poor version of a planned SpaceX launch.
• Had another short meeting with a colleague from twenty years ago, hearing more about his plans now that he has moved to Australia.
• Waited for British Gas to turn up for an appointment they made with me to fix some of the electrics in our house. They never showed.
• Ran the line at my eldest boy’s football match. Got completely soaked.
• Had our good friends over for dinner as their home renovations mean that they are currently without a kitchen. We watched the first few tracks of Joe Jackson live at Rockpalast in 1983 which never fails to blow my mind. What a band. We also ended up watching Harry Mack doing his thing in London, which had us laughing out loud at how incredible it is:

• Had our windows cleaned for the first time in a year or so. The window cleaner covers lots of our street already. It’s a shame that it has rained so much since they were done.
• Started subscribing to NowTV again so that we can watch the second season of The White Lotus. I love that we have to wait each week for the next episode.
• Subscribed to BritBox so that I can watch Grange Hill from the first episode onwards. I remember enjoying the show so much, but in reality I must have only tuned in for a few years in the late 1980s. Hearing some of the racist language on screen is shocking.
• Loved hearing a full White Stripes album for the first time at Album Club.
• Had my first mince pie of the season. Too early? It’s never too early.

Next week: The Smoke Fairies singles gig is finally here!

My overwhelming memory of this week is being overtired. Leg-achingly, eyelid-droopingly overtired. More than once, I dozed off in front of the TV and should have taken this as a hint that I needed to go up to bed, but instead I ploughed on. Before I met my wife I used to exist on very little sleep during the week, catching up by binging with lie-ins at the weekend. I’m now a reasonably early riser every day of the week, and after almost two decades I’m coming around to the possibility that my bedtime is perhaps a smidgen too late.

This was a week in which I:

• Spent time planning out the remaining work for our project to roll out a Password Manager to the organisation. As I keep saying to everyone, buying the tool and putting it in peoples’ hands is going to be the easy bit; making sure that the on-ramp is effective and continually nudging people towards the right behaviour is much more difficult. Given the amount of time required to on-board a new vendor and get a purchase order in place, and that December is around the corner, I’m aiming for a big launch in January. This will also give us time for a trial in the Engineering team, and allow us to collaborate with our Marketing and Communications team to get their help and support in making it a success.
• Created a mind map for onboarding new staff as part of our digital literacy initiative. My draft goal for the work is to “Give new joiners a great on-boarding experience, equipped to be able to work digitally and effectively from day one.” People already think that we do a good job compared to other companies, getting new staff set up with an account and a laptop on their first day, but it’s a low bar. We can do so much better. Although the root of the work is from our digital space — it stemmed from me realising that all of our new joiners will need to be shown how to use our password manager software —I’ve also been inspired by this passage from The Power of Moments by Chip Heath and Dan Heath:

Shortly after you accept the offer letter from John Deere, you get an email from a John Deere Friend. Let’s call her Anika. She introduces herself and shares some of the basics: where to park, what the dress norms are, and so forth. She also tells you that she’ll be waiting to greet you in the lobby at 9 a.m. on your first day. When your first day comes, you park in the right place and make your way to the lobby, and there’s Anika! You recognize her from her photo. She points to the flat-screen monitor in the lobby—it features a giant headline: “Welcome, Arjun!” Anika shows you to your cubicle. There’s a six-foot-tall banner set up next to it—it rises above the cubes to alert people that there’s a new hire. People stop by over the course of the day to say hello to you. As you get settled, you notice the background image on your monitor: It’s a gorgeous shot of John Deere equipment on a farm at sunset, and the copy says, “Welcome to the most important work you’ll ever do.” You notice you’ve already received your first email. It’s from Sam Allen, the CEO of John Deere. In a short video, he talks a little bit about the company’s mission: “to provide the food, shelter, and infrastructure that will be needed by the world’s growing population.” He closes by saying, “Enjoy the rest of your first day, and I hope you’ll enjoy a long, successful, fulfilling career as part of the John Deere team.” Now you notice there’s a gift on your desk. It’s a stainless steel replica of John Deere’s original “self-polishing plow,” created in 1837. An accompanying card explains why farmers loved it. At midday, Anika collects you for a lunch off-site with a small group. They ask about your background and tell you about some of the projects they’re working on. Later in the day, the department manager (your boss’s boss) comes over and makes plans to have lunch with you the next week. You leave the office that day thinking, I belong here. The work we’re doing matters. And I matter to them.

• Had my regular meeting with our Marketing and Communications and People and Culture teams. Gave them an overview of my thinking about on-boarding and the password manager initiative.
• Was given approval from our Chief Information Security Officer to go ahead with a trial of software that will give staff the ability to broadcast our intended location each day. There are just one or two more vendor on-boarding checks to do before we can proceed.
• Spent Tuesday in an all-day meeting with senior managers across our Investment Bank Technology team, watching and participating in a number of panel discussions about our strategy. It felt as though those of us that couldn’t be physically present in the room in Johannesburg still managed to contribute well to the session. We were helped by fabulous colleagues that were there who let us know in the meeting chat who was speaking. Once again I made reference to my write-up of the book A Seat at the Table, which jumps to my mind as soon as anyone utters the phrase “IT and business”.
• Met with the vendor that will be upgrading the physical door access system in one of our offices and agreed that they will give us a detailed implementation plan.
• Reviewed some new dashboards for our CRM system that show the level of interaction with the tools over time.
• Enjoyed our weekly Learning Hour session, this time with a guest host from our Financial Crime Compliance department.
• Ran the weekly all-team meeting. Along with our usual agenda, we talked about the alert from the US embassy in South Africa about a possible terror attack at the weekend which thankfully didn’t come to pass.
• Attended the weekly project meeting for the shutdown of one of our offices.
• Enjoyed meeting a colleague from our Credit Risk team in South Africa for a ‘random coffee’.
• Started using Trello again after a very long hiatus. I needed something that would allow me to easily see my main personal and school governor projects in one place. My task manager, Remember The Milk, doesn’t really cut it. Although Planview’s AgilePlace (formerly LeanKit) is the best Kanban tool around, I can’t justify spending USD 240/year; I’ve given up on waiting for a reasonably-priced licence for personal use. I already feel as though I’ve got my arms around my personal projects a little more. Last Christmas I spent some time trying to get on top of my personal workflow and haven’t made much progress beyond migrating from Evernote to OneNote.
• Caught up with an old friend and colleague from twenty years ago who has recently moved to Perth.
• Spent time refreshing the various school policies relating to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It was sad to see that we now have to refer to ‘UK GDPR’ throughout the documents as a result of Brexit.
• Welcomed my eldest boy back from his school ‘sports tour’ to Manchester. For a short while after he returned, I wasn’t the most tired person in the house.
• Upgraded my children’s SIM-only mobile plans from 20GB/month to 75GB/month for just a couple of pounds extra. Apparently, because we also have a Virgin Media subscription, these allowances get doubled. I never want to have a conversation with anyone about running out of data ever again.
• Loved hosting Album Club and sharing a recent favourite with friends.
• Had a random weeknight family dinner out at Nando’s.
• Feel like I’m starting to get my bike fitness back after a couple of weeks off. Workouts are harder than they should be, but I’m at least now managing to complete them.
• Went out with my eldest son for a Sunday morning 10k run, right before his football match where I ran the line. We’re both a bit worn out.
• Watched Boyz N The Hood (1991) with my eldest boy. The climatic scene still makes me cry, thirty years after seeing it for the first time.
• Finished watching season two of Only Murders In The Building. It’s such a delightful show. Our itch to see a bit more of Steve Martin and Martin Short was scratched by heading straight to Father Of The Bride (1991). It turns out that 1991 was a pretty good year for movies.

Next week: Finishing my annual review (already!), a school parents’ evening, meeting a prospective new school governor, and another Friday night Album Club.

Back to work in London again and back to my happy place in my home office for a few days. It’s lovely to be here again. Autumn is all around us, which means that I can start wearing jumpers when working from home and no longer need to iron the shirts that I’m wearing underneath. (Don’t tell anyone.)

The podcast backlog that built up while I was away in New York in two weeks wasn’t helped by so many ‘emergency’ episodes being released in the wake of the government turmoil. I spent a lot of evenings up late watching the extraordinary goings on in parliament and checking the news. Watching the Prime Minister fall after 44 days in office has been simultaneously filled with schadenfreude and completely grotesque; our country is in a lot of pain and I don’t see a clear route forward. The current Conservative party is unleadable. No candidate will be able to keep MPs pointing in the same direction to conduct government business in a stable way. As always, Chris Grey has a useful dissection of where we are. Despite his latest post being called Total Disarray, he ends by saying that “For only the second time since June 2016 I feel slightly hopeful.” Because we are now having to confront the realities of Brexit and Brexitism and the ensuing political and economic crisis, we may be able to start talking more openly about it.

This was a week in which I:

• Agreed on a way forward for our Password Manager project and have now asked our preferred vendor for a formal quote. Buying the tool will be the easy bit. We need to make sure that we have a good on-ramp for our staff and the capacity to nudge people towards the correct behaviours.
• Reviewed the latest architecture proposal for an Internet of Things network and agreed next steps.
• Caught up with colleagues in our People and Culture department on the clear writing course I want to schedule for our team.
• Started to pick up some additional responsibilities as our CIO is now spread across two jobs. Attended our bi-monthly meeting with Enterprise Architecture and agreed how we will go forward with these sessions.
• Handed over some small projects to our new team member in New York.
• Took part in the weekly project meeting for the closure of one of our offices.
• Caught up with our head of API technology.
• Met with colleagues in Investment Banking Technology to collaborate on ‘ways of working’.
• Enjoyed our team’s weekly Learning Hour session where one of our newest members took us through the concept of Jobs To Be Done.
• Attended a presentation by our CTO on electricity infrastructure and power resiliency. He made brilliant use of video from Google Earth to take us to various sites, explaining some of the design decisions that were made and how lots of infrastructure is operating well outside of its normal parameters.
• Watched the video from our South African headquarters celebrating our company’s 160th birthday. The quality of our internal events and their recording are both exceptional.
• Met with a sister company to talk through our approach to IT infrastructure and in particular our Microsoft 365 setup. They are at the start of the journey. The in-person meeting was coupled with an old-fashioned audio dial-in which felt like a big step back in time.
• Joined the Thoughtworks Technology Radar webinar to hear about the tools, techniques, platforms, languages and frameworks that they are thinking about. I’m wondering whether it would be useful to create our own ’hold, assess, trial, adopt’ map for the technologies we use internally.
• Booked a slot at Flight Club social darts for a team night out in November, when a couple of members of the management team will be in London. The venue is incredibly booked up for weeks in advance.
• Had a random coffee with a colleague who has relocated from Johannesburg to Cape Town. He actually lives in a small town a few hundred kilometres east, alternating each week between home and office working. It got me thinking about the displacement that we’re going through; many major cities will be experiencing falls in population and tax revenues which could send them into a downward spiral. A friend shared an excellent article from Bloomberg which dissects the situation for midtown Manhattan, illustrating the same point.
• Had another random coffee with a colleague in New York who had just got back from a long trip to South Africa and Angola.
• Attended the Chairs’ Strategic Information Briefing run by HFL Education. Their meetings are always valuable but extremely information-dense, with this one covering assessment, upskilling the board and headteacher on financial management, human resources, improving school attendance, Ofsted inspections and a number of other smaller topics. The HFL Education Governance Senior Advisor told us that she is retiring at Christmas and I will be so sad to see her go; her support has been invaluable to me over the past few years.
• Spent an evening at my son’s school to learn about the Sixth Form and get more detail on the subjects that he is interested in. I’m so jealous that he has all of this wonderful learning ahead of him.
• Had my first of two visits to the dentist to get a crown fitted to the tooth that gave me so much trouble in the summer.

Next week: Hosting Album Club again.

Two weeks away on a business trip is always a little too long. By the middle of the second week I’m always homesick, fed up of eating out for every meal. A privileged problem, I know, but it’s real all the same.

It felt like a very successful week. We on-boarded a new team member in New York and enjoyed getting to know him. We’ve been getting him up to speed with who we are, what we do and how we do it. Our office is a small but important hub for our company; various CEOs kept appearing in person throughout the course of the week.

I’ve been in love with New York since I lived there many years ago. But it now feels like a city which is going through a big change as a result of the pandemic. This is probably reflective of the wider world, felt more intensely here because of how compact everything is. Being in the city for two weeks got me thinking about how living in a particular place can influence your life; my lack of an indoor bike trainer and a five minute commute meant that I finished my trip with a gigantic podcast backlog. I had no time on a train to write. Running in Central Park was fun, but a few early morning meetings and quite a bit of rain meant that I didn’t get as much exercise as I would have liked. But I could quite easily be at the office for 7am, something that would be a struggle at home.

It was great to get on board the plane and head home again.

This was a week in which I:

• Marvelled at how the working population of New York approached a federal public holiday. Although Columbus Day is a controversial celebration, I didn’t expect to see quite as many people heading into the office as I did.
• Continued interviewing candidates for our IT role in New York.
• Joined the weekly project meeting for closing one of our regional offices.
• Reviewed our draft submission to the annual Operational Risk review process.
• Welcomed our SD-WAN vendor as guest presenters at our weekly Learning Hour session. Their product is superb and keeps getting better at a rapid rate.
• Agreed in principle to taking a radically different approach to a new Internet link in one of our offices.
• Reviewed responses from vendor to our on-boarding questionnaire. Had a meeting with them to discuss the roadmap for their product given some recent industry news.
• Agreed to take a look at whether Miro could be useful for our work.
• Pondered how expertise manifests itself as knowing what part of a process or methodology you can leave out, as well as why it works in particular cases but not others.
• Went for drinks with our local IT vendor in New York, on the 41st floor of the Aliz Hotel. It was a good opportunity to meet a number of their other clients.

• Caught up with the family finances and processed all of my trip expenses.
• Reviewed the recruitment materials we intend to use to find a new Headteacher for our school. I’m hoping that there are some great candidates out there for whom our school would be a perfect next step.
• Had a great night out in Brooklyn with my boss, who was in town for a short visit. After seeing Jo Firestone last week at Friend of the Show!, I booked tickets to see her team up with Maeve Higgins and Aparna Nancherla as hosts of the Butterboy comedy night. I have absolutely no idea why it is called that. It was a giggle.

• Tried to commit to my MUBI subscription by watching more films. The Worst Person In The World (2021) is a Norwegian romantic drama that is well worth a look.
• Continued watching How To with John Harris. A beautiful, funny dialogue set to ephemeral videos mainly in New York City.
• Kept noticing Adam Brisbin everywhere. He played an amazing gig with Indigo Sparke last week and his name stuck in my head. I’ve since spotted him on the cover of Wilder Maker’s Zion album as well as in the writing credits for two of the songs on Katie Von Schleicher’s brilliant Consummation.
• Refereed my eldest son’s U16 football match. I’m not particularly confident — or particularly great — at the job, but if volunteering means that the match can go ahead then I’m happy to do it. There seems to be a shortage of referees at the moment, which is a shame.

Next week: Back to our office in London and back to my happy place of my office at home.

The first of a couple of weeks away from home. One of my children developed an illness that was serious enough for a minor operation and a night in hospital, making me feel very guilty for being so far away. He seems to be on the mend now but it was a worrying few days. Two weeks for a business trip usually feels a little too long; by the end of the second week I’m usually missing everyone and can’t wait to get back. This time it feels worse.

New York seems a little less crazy than it did a couple of weeks ago when the UN General Assembly meeting was in full swing. I’m able to stay much closer to my office, but it’s a sad location — lots of restaurants, delis and hotels have shut, presumably due to the pandemic, leaving a couple of rows of vacant real estate. Even the restaurant in the hotel is shut and there is no room service.

I’ve tried to make the most of being in the city, going to shows and gigs that Katie Von Schleicher recommended to me as well as taking a trip to the cinema. I’ve walked for miles in the evenings, choosing to go by foot to get home instead of taking the Subway or a cab. The weekend gave me a chance to catch up with lots of school governor work and home admin, things that I would have struggled to get done in a typical weekend at home.

This was a week in which I:

• Met with the CEO of our new staffing provider in the US, giving an outline of who we are and what we do and hearing about their setup.
• Caught up with the sales representative from our main IT vendor.
• Worked with a colleague to create a snag list of items that need to be addressed in our New York office.
• Validated a physical network cabling configuration for our Networks team.
• Clarified the timeline for the closure of one of our regional offices and agreed how we will provide IT services to the few staff that remain.
• Agreed a raft of next steps relating to our management on unstructured data across our offices.
• Gave a presentation to the Engineering team on the history of our unstructured data management work and what we intend to do from here.
• Started a review of responses via our third-party vendor management system for a new tool that I want to bring into the firm.
• Reviewed alternative offerings for our planned course on clear writing at work.
• Attended the monthly Teams Fireside Chat for a discussion with lots of experts and practitioners involved in Microsoft Teams.
• Completed all of the reading and meeting prep ahead of our first school Full Governing Board meeting of the year. As the meeting was in-person, we used a small conference speaker in the room connected via Bluetooth to someone’s mobile. I’m grateful that it allowed me to dial-in to participate, but it was a flashback to a time before desktop videoconferencing. I’m so glad it’s mostly behind us.
• Took a tour of the United Nations building and was surprised at how emotional the experience was. I was going to put more about this in these weeknotes but I think it deserves a write-up of its own.

• Managed to complete a few runs around Central Park, including two at the weekend which took me along the whole six mile loop.

• Enjoyed meals out at some fun places such as:
  • Sombrero, a Mexican restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen
  • John’s of Bleecker Street, a coal-fired pizza joint in, well, Bleecker Street
  • Spicy Moon, a vegan Chinese in the West Village
  • Calabrije’s, a margarita and taco bar in Brooklyn

• Had a night out with a couple of colleagues at the Friend of the Show! show in the stunningly beautiful Sultan Room in Brooklyn. I’ve tried to look up the evening’s house band, The Dodies, as they were excellent, but can’t find any details about them anywhere.

• Went to see Indigo Sparke with support from Katy Pinke at the intimate Public Records Sound Room. I wasn’t really that familiar with either artist before I went. Sparke was celebrating the release of her new album Hysteria. I ended up randomly talking to Pinke’s brother before the show started. Going to gigs alone is a strange thing; sometimes it feels comfortable and other times less so. I think that if I had been more familiar with their work I would have felt more of a part of things than I did.

• Was grateful that Channel 4 don’t seem to block well-known VPN providers on their website, so I was able to watch their Formula 1 Japanese Grand Prix qualifying and race highlight shows.

Some random observations on New York:

• People in cinemas/movie theatres talk. A lot. It’s distracting.
• The guys riding ‘bike taxis’ are inevitably playing Michael Jackson really loudly.
• I’d love to find and read a history of the architectural infrastructure of the city, answering questions like: what was the tallest building as time went by, how steam gets pumped to the buildings, the impact of air conditioning showing up, a history of elevators etc. Twenty years ago I watched New York: A Documentary Film and I have the series on DVD; maybe I just need to re-watch it.

• Finding a good local spot to have a delicious bowl of vegan granola and a cup of coffee feels like a big win.

Next week: Putting our staffing plan into place and heading home.

A regular, busy week. Colleagues recently remarked how people seem to be falling ill after business trips. So it was with me. On Monday I felt as though I had a bit of a cold coming on. It was a long-lost, familiar feeling that I haven’t had for a few years —probably thanks to social distancing and squirrelling myself away during the pandemic. We had an office social event that evening which I didn’t feel well enough to attend. Tuesday and Wednesday I spent working from home, armed with hot lemon and paracetamol, and a big supply of tissues. By Wednesday evening I had started to feel a lot better, making it back into the office at the end of the week.

It was interesting to see my heart rate on the bike trainer when I got back in the saddle on Friday and Saturday; it was a bit higher than usual and took longer to recover than before.

Despite feeling a bit under the weather I felt as though I managed to get focused and get things done. There’s a mountain to climb, but I’m climbing it.

This was a week in which I:

• Welcomed a new member to my team in London. It’s taken months to get him on board. I’m so glad he had the patience to join us. He brings a bunch of experience and skills to the team that we don’t already have. We’re going to do great things.
• Had meetings with our regional CEO and COO to go through our signature programme that focuses on digital product initiatives. We’ve practiced the narrative through a number of these meetings and it’s interesting to see, and to show, how the dots all join up. There is an enthusiasm around the work which we need to capitalise on. Feedback was excellent and gave us some new perspectives to think about.
• Had the weekly project meeting for the closure of one of our offices. I spent time trying to decouple the work we need to do in the IT team from the real estate/lease discussions. A final timeline is beginning to emerge.
• Met to review the list of contracts associated with the office that we are closing down.
• Joined colleagues from the Office of the CEO, People and Culture, and Communications and Marketing, to talk through where we are with plans for promoting sustainable careers and digital literacy.
• Met with Operational Risk to discuss this year’s self-assessment process.
• Had a late night interview with a candidate for our vacancy in New York.
• Gave a walkthrough of our digital signage platform to a member of the Marketing and Communications team, and gave them access to make their own updates.
• Met with a colleague to discuss where we are with enabling collaboration across Microsoft 365 tenants between two of our group companies.
• Validated and closed out a change to our voice recording system with the Compliance team.
• Enjoyed an office lunch where we celebrated Heritage Day. In our offices in South Africa, staff are encouraged to come to work in their ‘traditional’ dress. I find it interesting that for my own culture, I was already in what we consider to be our traditional dress. It got me thinking about how the suit has been adopted by so many different countries as the ‘standard’.
• Enjoyed a well-timed and excellently delivered Learning Hour talk by a colleague called Get To Know Lesotho. Two people in the session admitted to not even having previously been aware of Lesotho as a country. I would love to visit one day.
• Had two lovely random coffees with colleagues in our Compliance and Client Coverage teams.
• Felt discombobulated as we had our first early morning all-team meeting. For the past few years they have always been on Friday afternoon, but we have started to alternate so that a colleague in Beijing can join them occasionally. It was lovely to have him there.
• Went for a thorough health screening, provided by my employer. I don’t have my results yet but everything seemed good.
• Migrated my whole family from Dashlane to 1Password. There are usability issues in Dashlane that have been outstanding for years, whereas 1Password seems to have come on in leaps and bounds since I last looked at it. The whole migration process took about half an hour. I haven’t noticed any issues so far.
• Spent time playing with DALL-E 2 and having my mind blown. Started thinking about the general use case of AI beyond creating pictures.

• Had my mind blown by the Internet once again, finding myself emailing back and forth with Katie Von Schleicher as she recommended New York venues and shows to me. It’s the simple connections that we make through the technology that still dazzles me.
• Watched another couple of episodes of season two of Only Murders In The Building. It’s a brilliant show, making me laugh out loud with every episode.
• Finally got around to watching the documentary about Alexei Navalny. Despite knowing some of the story, at points it was absolutely jaw-dropping. It was striking to see so many people out in support of him. Are they still as vocal given everything that has happened since Navalny’s arrest? It must be a terrifying place to be if you disagree with the regime.
• Enjoyed a lovely meal out with my family. It had been a while since just the four of us had gone out, so it was great to catch up.

Next week: Coming to America part two.

I landed in New York with such good intentions. I was looking forward to being five or six hours behind my colleagues in London and Johannesburg so that I could have some focused time on my projects throughout the week. It didn’t work out like that.

The main focus of my visit was to on-board a new team member and get him used to the culture and communication in the team. Unfortunately, by the middle of the week he was no longer working with us. We’ve had to put a contingency plan in place to get things back on track.

The city itself felt crazy busy. Everyone was in town for the 77th Session of the United Nations General Assembly and the police were everywhere. Early in the week, as I meandered my way across town to the office, I stumbled across where I think Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro was staying. (The chanting, flag-waving crowd offered me a clue.) Who are these people that turn up at a politician’s hotel singing their name? Did anyone do the same thing for Liz Truss?

Because everyone was in town, the city was super expensive. In order to save some money I stayed far from the office, at the Civilian Hotel, in what felt like one of the world’s smallest rooms. As I unpacked, I looked around to find the cupboard and couldn’t see it anywhere. Eventually, its cavernous insides were revealed to me as I closed the bathroom door. The hotel marketed itself as being new and funky — which it was — but it all felt quite impersonal and a little cheap, with daily room cleaning being an add-on that you needed to schedule.

I’ve loved New York since I lived there twenty years ago. It felt quite different this time. There were lots more homeless and troubled people on the street and on the subway. Although many people have left the city through the pandemic, presumably increasing the supply of apartments, people were telling me that their rents have been going up substantially. I wonder if this is the landlord equivalent of an aeroplane, where the people sitting up the front in business class (i.e. the tenants that stayed) subsidise the cost of the whole plane (the apartment block) for everyone else? If there are less rent payers, landlords still have to cover their costs.

I managed to get in a couple of morning runs through Central Park, which was as lovely as ever. One of my Strava-generated routes took me through Times Square, which felt like running through a dustbin. The smells and tastes in the air were horrible. To add to the fun, there are reassuring signs scattered on the different approaches to let you know that it’s illegal to enter with a gun.

Being in New York, I worked on the UK public holiday for the Queen’s funeral and missed the live event. It is already fading into memory as the government starts back up again, announcing that they are pursuing a dreadful set of financial policies that may have dire consequences. When I arrived in the US on Sunday I was getting $1.14 to the pound; by the time I left on Friday it was $1.09 — an incredible shift.¹ The Conservative Party spent a decade saying that they had to cut public spending in order to pay down government debt — all the time while interest rates were low. Now that the rates are going up, they will borrow from the market in order to subsidise our energy bills. It feels completely mad.

This was a week in which I:

• Wrote up a summary of where we are with the closure of another of our offices from an IT perspective. We will soon find out whether we need to push the work along on an accelerated timeline.
• Met with colleagues in the front office and Compliance teams to look at how we manage unstructured data in Teams and SharePoint. Wrote up a long summary of a set of actions we need to take to embed this way of working across the organisation.
• Watched a demonstration of an internal product being developed by our department, showing relevant news and social media mentions for our clients.
• Met with a vendor for a technical deep-dive on their password management solution.
• Attended a brilliant Learning Hour talk by our CTO on the topic of graphics processing.
• Raised a bunch of Kanban cards for little things that I found that need addressing in our New York office.
• Completed the new joiner and account creation forms for a team member who starts work in London on Monday. It’s going to be great to have him join the team.
• Wrote up an email for new members joining our team with links to all of the key Teams channels and other resources.
• Enjoyed an evening at Postlight, a digital product studio in New York, as they recorded an episode of their podcast. I’ve listened since episode one, so it was great to meet some of the team in person. Natalie Kurz, Head of Product Design, chaired the discussion on Thinking Inside the Box and how constraints can help and hinder product design. Natalie was a very graceful host and took the time to answer my questions after the session.

• Was sad to see that my favourite coffee shop/deli, right by our office, had closed for good. Presumably this was pandemic-related.
• Finished the draft of a letter from the school governors to say that our headteacher will be leaving us at the end of the academic year. We have a lot of work to do to find someone to fill her shoes.
• Chaired the school Finance, Premises and and Personnel governance committee.
• Missed Album Club as I was out of the country. Sadly one of our members is leaving us. It’s been a while since we had a chance to the membership.
• Ate lots of delicious vegan food. It’s so easy to find this stuff when you’re in a big city.

• Bought some new glasses. For the past few pairs I’ve bought them on the Internet, but the pandemic got me thinking more about where I spend my money. Buying them from a shop is super expensive though, especially now that I need varifocals. The staff in Vision Express were super helpful and I’m finally changing the frames I have been wearing for the past ten years. After a few years without them, I am also getting some sunglasses again, just in time for winter.
• Travelled home from New York and slept all the way.
• Cancelled a future business trip and booked another.
• Ran the line at my eldest son’s first football match of the season. The weather is perfect at the moment — sunny and not too warm.
• Enjoyed Magdalena Bay’s deluxe edition of their Mercurial World album. I don’t think it’s as tight as the original, but I’m sure it’s not meant to be. The new songs are brilliant.

Next week: Back to London, on boarding a new member of the team and getting projects back on track.

The feeling of everything being on top of me continued into this week. I really struggled at the start. I could feel myself getting frustrated and a little snappy in a couple of meetings where I felt that we weren’t being efficient, knowing that I still had a pile of things to get on top of. The weight started to lift in the middle of the week as I got a few wins under my belt and could see the work in the rear view mirror.

The pivotal moment was a midweek meeting with a vendor, long-postponed throughout the summer as key people on their side or our side were out on holiday. The meeting started off as a pitch for a sophisticated tool for monitoring the quality of audio and video calls in our organisation, but it them morphed into something very different. They are offering a tool and services that could be of massive benefit to our organisation, hitting the sweet spot for multiple projects that I need to make progress with before the end of the year. I could sense the possibilities, and feet the pressure lift from me as we talked. It’s early days, but I’m excited and feel like I have my mojo back.

Coverage of the death of Queen Elizabeth II has not abated, with marks of respect everywhere you look. It’s going to be interesting to see where the country’s opinion of the monarchy moves to once the funeral starts to fade into the past. It’s been worrying to see a handful of people arrested for minor protests, presumably under the new Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act that came into force this year.

A week in which I:

• Was given a start date for a new joiner in my team. I can’t wait to get him on board.
• Attended the weekly project meeting for the closure of one of our offices. Agreed a default timeline for when we can start to decommission the IT equipment that is in place, assuming that someone doesn’t take on the office lease sooner.
• Had a meeting with our client-facing colleagues to propose a proof-of-concept to them and seek their help in taking it to the next stage. The preparation that the team did for the meeting was well worth it as they understood the proposition immediately and bit our arms off to be involved. I’m excited for the work happening in this space.
• Joined our monthly risk review meeting, where we got our teeth into key person dependencies. It’s so difficult to build strength, depth and resiliency in a small team.
• Completed a draft response to Internal Audit for a review that they are working on. It was interesting to review our technology setup through the eyes of people that are coming to it fresh; we have already spotted a number of improvements that we can make.
• Met with a large number of people in our department to review our network risk profiles and what we should do about any identified gaps.
• Discussed and agreed our approach to an RFP that we are due to issue shortly. Was amazed at how quickly one of my colleagues could turn our discussion into an illustration.
• Was enthused by a vendor meeting where they presented something that hits all of the right buttons for an initiative that I am working on right now. Excited to see where this goes.
• Got our digital signage players showing photos of Queen Elizabeth II every five minutes in place of the usual news feeds and dashboards. We also attached a player to a Cisco Spark Board which sits idle for most of the time, mainly because it doesn’t easily integrate with anything else that we use.
• Met with a technical sales manager for one of the leading password manager vendors. Also had an initial call with a completely different vendor. The products in this space have matured so much over the past few years.
• Joined our quarterly architecture meeting where we covered the strategy for infrastructure and operations, product roadmaps and security logging.
• Had a super early 7am start in order to participate as a judge in our annual internal ‘Hackathon’ event. It was wonderful and heartbreaking in equal measure. The judging process was brutal, with a very strict 10 minute rule being applied for each presentation. I really felt for one of the teams; they presented a fantastic idea which had one critical flaw that they hadn’t seen. When you’re close to the detail on something it is hard to take a step back and see that there is a fundamental issue.
• Presented at our weekly Learning Hour meeting on the topic of card scoring in LeanKit.
• Met with another department to discuss how they use JIRA. I last used the software over a decade ago, and our team doesn’t touch it at the moment. As we look to start to develop products within our department we may get pushed down this road, so I want to start to learn a little more about it.
• Confirmed a last-minute business trip to meet a new joiner in our team, making sure he gets up to speed with the environment, how we do things and the team culture. I’ve not been to this office in a couple of years, so it will be good to see how things are going there.
• Applauded our team that completed a major IT infrastructure change in half a day over the weekend. We’ve further rationalised our hardware, moving more components into software.
• Attended an company-wide IT town hall-style webinar.
• Agreed to attend an internal technology architecture conference next month.
• Flew to New York, where I’ll be spending the week getting a new member of our team set up in their role. I had the good fortune to be sitting next to the CEO of 100 Women In Finance, a non-profit organisation that focuses on women working in the finance industry. We struck up a conversation that went on for four hours straight. I’ve been thinking about how interesting it is that we pay more for premium aircraft seating that isolates us from others, but it robs us of chance encounters like this.
• Rushed to another GoodSAM callout in my town, this time at a local bar. Fortunately an ambulance and crew were there by the time I arrived. The app offers no clue as to what you should do in this situation. Interrupting the ambulance crew is not a good idea if they are already working on the casualty. The only option I could see was a button marked ’drop call’, but I have no idea what happens in the control room when I press it. Does anyone follow up?
• Had a couple of governor meetings and worked on some draft communications from the board. Followed up on the next steps for a broadband fibre upgrade.
• Attended a revision workshop for parents at my sons’ school. It wasn’t quite as immediately practical as I had hoped, but it was good to spend some time thinking about how we approach helping the children with their work. The person leading the workshop had met the children earlier in the day; I hope that he made an impact on them and inspired them a little.
• Started watching season two of Only Murders In The Building. We’re only one episode in and I love it already. We’re giving up with the latest series of Borgen — Power & Glory as sadly it’s just not that interesting. Bring back Kasper Juul!
• Watched a drama unfold in the back garden when a baby squirrel dropped out of our beech tree while another hung on for dear life. The parent was going mad and I thought he or she was going to attack me. I managed to keep our cats away and the parent eventually rescued the fallen one.
• Had a great time at a friend’s 50th birthday party, which had a gold theme. I was worried about my trousers as the reviews said they were completely unbreathable, but it all worked out fine.

Next week: New York City, for the first time since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The number of things I am juggling got on top of me this week. Somehow the days don’t seem long enough to keep up with it all. I haven’t felt like this in a while, and it isn’t great.

To say that we’ve had a lot going on here in the UK over the past few days would be an understatement. At the start of the week a new prime minister took office. The Queen passed away a couple of days later. We now have a new King. I’m a republican, but I have been fascinated by all of the pomp and procedure over the past few days, in a similar way to how I am interested in the processes and workings of our parliament. Although I disagree with the concept of having a monarch as our head of state, I still feel the sadness of someone passing away. It was moving to see the King shaking hands with people outside Buckingham Palace; although he has been preparing for this moment all of his life, I can’t imagine what it must be like to have your mother die and it be required of you to put your work first. The Queen had been our head of state since before my parents were born, and almost a third of our population say that they have seen or met her in real life. Most of us have never seen this process in action.

After a wasted summer where the Conservative Party spent time choosing our new Prime Minister while our previous government went on holiday, it’s a worry that things will again be on hold, particularly as the cost of living crisis will reach new heights as we go into autumn.

A week in which I:

• Loved having one of my close colleagues over in London from Johannesburg for the week. As he was here, I had planned to be in the office every day, but scaled this back when I realised that he was visiting a supplier on Tuesday. Sadly, one of my other colleagues has been stuck in limbo waiting for her visa to be processed and didn’t make it. Hopefully it won’t be too long before she can join us in person for a long-planned workshop.
• Attended the weekly cross-functional project meeting for the closure of one of our regional offices. I need to put together a more detailed timeline for the technology work.
• Kicked off a project to implement a password manager for staff. Met with two of the leading vendors and chased up a third via their Marketing Director on LinkedIn.
• Started a review of our current device and network security posture and agreed a way forward for completing the work.
• Reviewed the details of a complex risk within our environment and agreed next steps to tackle it.
• Spent time whiteboarding ideas on the digital literacy initiative that I am running. There is a lot of value in the Digital Workplace Skills Framework put together by Elizabeth Marsh that I think will be useful to leverage.
• Discussed the digital literacy work with colleagues in People and Culture and Marketing and Communications, recognising that we need to work together on the implementation.
• Had a couple of long discussions about some internal products that we are developing, and the ethics of using data in particular ways. Talked about how the role of the sponsor doesn’t need to sit outside of the technology team.
• Met with colleagues to take stock of where we are with our main Engineering strategy work and agree next steps.
• Took part in a management team workshop. Realised that it had been a very long time since we had done anything like this. Agreed next steps ahead of a more formal, structured session that will take place in a few weeks.
• Had a demo of Team Today, a tool to help staff to know where people will be each day as we continue with hybrid working.
• Ran our bi-weekly management meeting.
• Met with Internal Audit to assist them with their work.
• Had a call with a new member of my team that will be joining us soon. I can’t wait to get him on board.
• Met a colleague who is helping to get an internal SharePoint Online site established to host an internal technical blog. Despite having Teams and Yammer available, it still feels more appropriate to house these posts on their own site.
• Was grateful to the Stratechery newsletter for introducing me to The Standards Innovation Paradox.
• Joined an online session aimed at CTOs on how to develop a technical vision. I didn’t stay long; I hadn’t realised that it was a round table and not a presentation, and the conversation felt very stilted.
• Had a conversation with a colleague on country-level restrictions on the use of cloud services across Africa.
• Enjoyed an excellent dinner with our London Engineering team, the first one in years. It was strange learning about the Queen’s death from a waiter an hour or so into the meal. Had fun showing some colleagues the Colorize web app that uses AI to add colour to black and white photos.
• Agreed to take another business trip in a few weeks. I can’t believe how expensive travel is right now.
• Attended a ‘Learning Hour’ session on the topic of psychics. One of the reasons that we run the weekly session is so that people can get practice at giving presentations. This was a tricky and controversial topic, explained and handled well.
• Felt nauseous as we watched the announcement of the new Prime Minister on the television at work, and even worse as some of the cabinet ministers were announced.
• Released some more books into the wild via our book drop at work. It’s been a while since I’ve used the Bookcrossing website.
• Met with the rest of the school Full Governing Board for the first time this year.
• Interviewed a prospective new school governor.
• Went to the ‘Meet The Teacher’ evening at the school where I am a governor. It was brilliant to see all of the staff together with so many parents. Events like these are so important to build the social bonds between parents and the school, and I’m so glad that we’re back to doing them again after the years of COVID-19.
• Enjoyed dinner with friends at the opening of a local restaurant’s new Sicilian dining room. Ate far too much.
• Got lots of work done on the indoor bike trainer. It was fun to take on a couple of rides where I doubted myself mid-ride whether I could finish them or not. It was very satisfying to get them under my belt.

Next week: Trying to keep my head above water, and a 50th birthday party.

And just like that, holidays are over. At least until Christmas.

I’m feeling the pressure of trying to have a strong end to the year both at work and as a school governor. There is a massive pile of things I need to get done. This week felt disappointingly bitty; I was getting things done but I felt as though I was skirting around the edges of the bigger pieces of work I need to do. I was grateful for us having a public holiday on Monday, but a four-day week didn’t help me in terms of getting things done.

A week in which I:

• Reviewed the latest draft of our Internet of Things architecture strategy.
• Reviewed and edited a document on internal network risks written by our CTO.
• Attended an Architecture Community of Practice meeting and learned about our approach to blockchain technology.
• Met with the leaders of another internal technology team to talk about their ways of working. Started to learn about how the team is set up, what they manage and how they work.
• Caught up with all of the messages, emails and Kanban board updates that had happened while I was on holiday.
• Met with the team responsible for pushing our technology innovation initiatives and came up with some ideas as to how we can work more closely together.
• Attended a Town Hall meeting, run from our Collaboration Space and dialled into a Teams meeting with our other offices outside of Africa. Celebrated our half-year results with the rest of the office.
• Had a delightful random coffee with a colleague in one of our client-facing teams. Learned about his career, including all of the different countries he has worked in over the years. We’ve now reached 4,000 coffee pairings since May 2020; I’m so grateful to Chris Weston for passing the idea my way.
• Was so sorry to hear that one of my colleagues won’t make it over to the UK for a long-planned trip next week, as their visa is stuck in the system somewhere.
• Met with our Headteacher and Chair of Governors prior to the school year starting at the end of the week.
• Created our new school governance Programme of Business document for the coming academic year.
• Arranged to meet a prospective new school governor next week.
• Wrote up the minutes to our most recent Pay Committee meeting and circulated them to the rest of the committee for review.
• Had endodontic treatment. This sounds a little fancier than saying that I had root canal surgery. I think I had been subconsciously dreading it all week. I know that modern dentistry is excellent and there was no need to worry, but the thought of having my mouth open for two hours while they did their thing was playing on my mind. It went brilliantly; the endodontist made me feel very relaxed, talking me through all of the stages of the process as we went. I was a little uncomfortable when the anaesthetic wore off but I’ve not had to take any painkillers. Next stop is back to my dentist to have a crown fitted. Take care of your teeth, people.
• Had a wonderful Saturday lunch at my brother’s house for my mum’s birthday. It was so great to see everyone so soon after our holiday.
• Enjoyed the latest Album Club night, but listened with an open mouth to some of the lyrics.
• Re-imaged a Raspberry Pi and re-installed the Pi-hole software. Parts of the operating system were too out-of-date for the Pi-hole application to upgrade. I need to research how I can keep the operating system up-to-date in the same way.
• Caught up with the washing, ironing and other admin that needed doing post-holiday.
• Registered my interest in a solar panel/battery installation for our house. I’ve long suspected that our house isn’t suitable for solar; this will be a good way of finding out for sure.
• Attended a first aid callout in a nearby town. Fortunately everything seemed fine when I got there.
• Started reading Travels With Charley: In Search Of America by John Steinbeck. I’m getting close to the end of my journey through all of Steinbeck’s works. This is one I’ve been looking forward to; I loved it when I read it as a teenager and it’ll be great to go on the journey again.
• Bought Troy Hunt’s book. I’ve listened to his weekly update podcast for years and often pass on links to his blog posts. Buying a copy of his book feels like a good way of giving something back.
• Took advantage of Bandcamp Friday to buy some new music that that was on my wishlist:
  • I pre-ordered Sophie Jamieson’s debut album Choosing off the back of seeing her support Kathryn Joseph a few months ago.
  • I also pre-ordered Magdalena Bay’s deluxe edition of their incredible album Mercurial World.
  • Samana’s Ascension hit my rule of buying an album of a current artist that I’ve played more than a handful of times on Spotify. It’s a really beautiful record. This band was introduced to me by the Smoke Fairies when they were their support act at a recent gig. I’m loving how bands I like are a gateway to these other discoveries.

Next week: A full week in the office, my first since June. The first official school governor duties of the school year. Dinner with friends.

We’ve just come back from a lovely week in Burgau, Portugal, which we spent with some of our closest friends. Our last holiday together was in 2018, so it was great to get the band back together again.

We stayed at the Ocean Blue villa, hosted by the lovely Lucy, Sean and Sophia. The villa is a perfect setup with three two-bedroomed apartments all in a row, and another with a double bed that we didn’t use. As well as the beautiful villa, they offer boat trips with paddle boarding, exercise sessions and mountain biking. The villa is located on an excellent spot near the Algarve coast which gives easy access by car to lots of beautiful beaches.

The journey there was a painful one. One small member of our party had broken her little toe a few days before, so took a wheelchair to the gate and hobbled onto the flight wearing a big protective foot brace. After having a couple of days of normality, the pressurisation of the aeroplane cabin also caused my bad tooth to go bananas. I could only focus on clutching my jaw in pain. I was worried that I would have trouble for the whole week, but the pain disappated a couple of hours after we landed and didn’t cause me any issues again until the journey back.

On the flight over, we spotted something burning somewhere in Spain, presumably a wildfire.

After spending a very hot week in southern Turkey followed by a very hot week in the UK, I figured that I was all set with one jumper (“for the plane!”) and a few pairs of shorts. I was wrong. Portugal was hot, but as soon as the sun went down it got very chilly. So chilly that we resorted to using blankets handed out by restaurants for people eating outside during the evening. One night it felt too cold to sit outside after we got back home, so we ended up in one of the apartments.

It was the first trip in a long time where I couldn’t rely solely on credit cards. Lots of businesses were cash only, which more than once resorted in us running to a cash machine after finishing dessert and coffee.

Finding restaurants was easy, but finding places which could take 12 of us turning up at once was slightly more difficult. We’d booked a couple of places in advance and another couple when we got there as we found that wandering around looking for somewhere was a bad strategy, particularly when one of us had a broken toe. We enjoyed eating lunch in Love Burgau, the beautifully presented dishes in Miam and the pizzas in Corso Pizzeria, but by far our favourite was Pizzeria D’Aldeia — great pizzas and salads, as well as almond cake to die for.

We loved the pool in the villa, which was filled with salt water instead of being treated with chlorine. The beaches we visited were beautiful — Salema, Zavial (great for bodyboarding!) and Luz — but I have a love/hate relationship with them, worrying about looking after all of our stuff, having enough shade and sand getting into absolutely everything. I had no idea about the recent history of Praia da Luz until my wife told me as we drove there that it was the location where Madeleine McCann went missing. It was strange to think about it as we sat on the beach amongst all of the other holidaymakers.

We took a half-day excursion by boat from Lagos Marina out to the ‘grottos’ to have a go at paddleboarding. It was a chilly, grey start to the day and the sea was uninviting. We soon forgot about the weather once we had anchored up, donned our wetsuits and got in the water. Paddleboarding is hard! I managed to get up on my feet without too much trouble and could paddle around quite easily, but found that I would suddenly lose my balance for no reason whatsoever. It was fun to cruise around the little caves and rock formations and to jump into the water from the roof of the boat.

That afternoon we wandered around the streets of Lagos. We’d been signposted towards the MarLe coffee van, where they serve drinks with zero waste. Once you’re done with your coffee, you can eat the oat-based waffle cup that it came in. A fun concept which I hope takes off.

For lunch, we stumbled across the excellent Poké Lagos which served wonderful bowls of goodness which we ate in the street outside.

As we walked around Lagos, one of the children had picked up a leaflet for Slide & Splash, a water park close to Portimão. It looked like a great day out, so we booked it. And then we read the reviews:

We got there early. It was very busy, but nowhere near as bad as this review made out. I remember going to Wet ‘n Wild in Las Vegas as a kid which I think had similar levels of queues. The kids managed to get on three or four different slides in the first hour and this then slowed as the day went on. It was just like being at a theme park, but wet, and without the chance of buying a ‘fast pass’ to jump the queues. The slides were excellent and we had a great time.

Mountain biking on the trails surrounding the villa was fun, although we didn’t pedal that far. It must be difficult to offer paid guided rides that are suitable for a wide variety of riders. We took the bikes along the rocky paths and ended up at an old fort where our guides handed out beers to drink in the sunshine.

Unfortunately the trip had a bad ending when one of our riders faceplanted into the floor after hitting a rock. He was very badly bruised on his hand, legs and face, and we were grateful that he had been wearing a helmet.

One of my friends on the trip is training to run the London Marathon later this year. I took advantage of this by heading out on a few early morning runs with him during the week. After running a 10k at the start of the week I was so pleased to complete my first half marathon distance. It involved climbing up a very big hill in Praia da Luz before making a gentle descent down the other side.

We finished the week with a walk around the clifftop paths close to Burgau, looking down on beautiful beaches and coves that are only accessible by boat.

We had a wonderful time and felt as though we had only just scratched the surface of the places to see. You could easily spend two or three weeks there, exploring the coast, the villages and towns.

England looks quite shocking from the air, more parched than I have ever seen it. It was lovely to see the clouds, with their promise of a little rain.

Next week: Back to work with no holidays in sight, and a root canal ahead of the weekend.

A strange, liminal week, back at work for five days between two holidays. After having such a wonderful time away with my extended family — and having looked forward to it for years — it felt sad that it was now in the past. Monday was a bit of a struggle; I travelled into the office and had a lot of meetings, which meant that I didn’t feel caught up by the end of the day.

Most of the week was dominated by my bad tooth. The pain was a dull ache at first, enough to make me start searching for dentists near the office. Most of them seemed to cost about £175 for an initial consultation with a filling at around £400–£600. The pain was coming and going in waves, so I figured I would wait and try and get an appointment with my regular dentist at home. If they couldn’t fit me in, I would then try to get seen somewhere else. But on the train home on Monday the pain became unbearable. I was almost in tears and wanted to punch myself in the face to make it stop — or at least take my mind off it. My wonderful wife met me at the train station with a pack of ibuprofen and a bottle of water. The pain relief soon kicked in.

I managed to get an emergency appointment with my dentist the next day. She removed an old filling and replaced it with a new one. Unfortunately, as soon as the local anaesthetic wore off the pain came raging back. The next day I was so grateful that she found time to get me into her dentist chair again. My tooth was reopened so that the nerves could be removed, followed by yet another filling. This time the pain faded away. The extra work means that I now need to have root canal treatment, an expensive specialist procedure that my dentist can’t do. I’m so grateful that we are lucky enough to afford it. I’ve already been to the consultant and had a 3D scan of my jaw so they know what they are tackling. Hopefully the pain will stay away for the next couple of weeks ahead of me having the procedure. Once that’s done I have to go back to my dentist to look at having a crown fitted.

A week in which I:

• Read a debrief on the physical and logical network changes that we made in one of our server rooms a couple of weeks ago. The team did an incredible job and the setup now looks fantastic. There are still some good lessons we can take to our next site.
• Met with the team creating data dashboards for use by our client-facing staff. Reflected on how important it is for us to get information about how they are used in practice as opposed to how we think they might be used. Some of the team members will be users of the dashboards themselves, so it should be easy for us to get some good insights.
• Gave a call to the prospective new member of staff that I have been trying to hire. The process has been snarled up on our side for a variety of reasons and I am conscious of it all adding up to a terrible first impression of our organisation. Hopefully it won’t be too long before we’re ready for him to start with us. It’s going to be brilliant to get a new set of skills, ideas and fresh thinking into the team.
• Joined the weekly project meeting for the shut down of one of our regional offices. Being out of the office for the past couple of weeks means that I haven’t been playing a major part in the work. So much has been done already and I’m very grateful that one of my peers has stepped in to pick up the IT actions for now.
• Tried to spend time progressing my thinking on how to tackle our Digital Literacy programme. I’m starting to relate lots of conversations with colleagues back to this embryonic piece of work. It seems that every week somebody is getting in touch for some basic pointers on an app or service that they use. Assumptions that I’ve made about what people all already know are false. We have 60–90 minute training videos that nobody ever watches. So we’re going to need to build in a series of easily-digestible basic tutorials that we send out in bite size chunks again and again. After all, every day somebody’s born who has never seen The Flintstones.
• Took part in our monthly department risk review meeting. We covered the upcoming potential ’grey listing’ of South Africa, what it might mean for our business, and what we need to be thinking about as an Engineering team.
• Watched a recording of an internal meeting all about the potential impact of the grey listing, run by a number of our senior analysts. My conclusion is that it is very difficult to predict what the impact would be and how long it would last, if and when it happens.
• Viewed the recording of a meeting I missed with one of our department heads on the challenges of his business. This was the last in a series of interviews with the leadership team where we discussed their goals, as well as what keeps them up at night. He took us through his sophisticated OneNote-based knowledge management system and explained how it gave him a massive advantage when speaking with clients. It has got me thinking about how we can socialise the techniques and thinking as I am sure there are others that would benefit from it. Two decades of Getting Things Done systems have taught me that everyone will have their own preferences, but it does help to be exposed to the ways in which other people get their work done.
• Challenged the thinking that the executive sponsor of an IT initiative cannot sit within IT. This idea is so deeply ingrained in business culture, part of the history of IT being viewed as order-takers instead of true partners. I had similar discussions about where product managers sit. The team should be the thing that matters; we should concern ourselves whether they have the skills to do what they aim to do rather than where in the organisation chart they sit.
• Reviewed a quote for external help with the major network infrastructure optimisation at our busiest office.
• Reviewed the latest technical proposal and quote for improvements to our collaboration space.
• Gave a team demo on our new digital signage solution as part of our Learning Hour series.
• Reviewed the communications that will be sent to announce the new digital signage solution at the next office where we plan to go live.
• Met with the co-founder of the Team Today application. It seems to be a good fit for solving the problem of knowing where your colleagues are planning to be, particularly now that hybrid working seems here to stay. We have a demo lined up for when people are back from their summer break.
• Formally completed the last task for our June conference when our solution vendor confirmed that they had deleted all of our data.
• Checked in with a colleague following our workshops in Johannesburg a couple of weeks ago, on the topics of how we collaborate between two different of two parts of our organisation and setting up an informal group chat.
• Caught up with all of the teams’ Kanban board changes from the past week.
• Tuner into a LeanKit demo on their new card scoring functionality. I think this can replace a makeshift ‘cost of delay divided by duration’ method that I put in place a couple of years ago.
• Agreed next steps towards providing our team with ‘clear writing’ training. A half-day course I took many years ago has stayed with me ever since and I’d love more of our team to be exposed to it.
• Enjoyed our weekly in-office ‘munch and mingle’ lunch, chatting with a colleague in our People and Culture team.
• Got sent some lovely date biscuits from a very thoughtful colleague in Dubai.
• Formally signed off on my mid-year review.
• Reviewed a letter from our Headteacher to parents that is due to be sent out before term starts.
• Agreed to do a PechaKucha presentation at a cycle club social evening. I’d not heard of the format before. You get 20 slides which advance at a rate of one every 20 seconds, so it needs to be both visual and to the point. They’ve asked people to present on topics other than cycling so that we get to learn a bit more about fellow members. My topic is going to be about the best night of the month.
• Had fun buying a bunch of new t-shirts from Printerval, Etsy and Threadheads.
• Bought new flea collars for the cats.
• Had a lovely evening out for dinner with some friends we hadn’t seen in a while.
• Got prepped for our next holiday, ironing all of the things.
• Travelled to Faro for a week away with friends. For some reason the flight nearly destroyed me with the impact it had on my bad tooth. I’m guessing the pressurisation of the aircraft didn’t agree with it. I will be taking painkillers before we take off for our journey home.

Next week: Holiday part two.

We spent the entire week in Türkiye at the Voyage Sorgun hotel with my parents, my brothers and all of our families for a long-planned and much-delayed group holiday. We hadn’t spent this much time together since we all lived under the same roof in the 1990s. It was wonderful.

The holiday had been cancelled twice before, so we were a bit concerned that the current issues plaguing travellers in the UK would see it get cancelled a third time. We’d booked with EasyJet but ended up on aircraft operated by SmartLynx, who apparently are used to increase capacity in the busier months. The plane and service was sparse, but they did the job.

I’ve only stayed at two all-inclusive hotels in the past. The first time I ended up in hospital with pneumonia so couldn’t take advantage of all of the amenities. The second time was lovely, but quite basic. This hotel was incredible, and exceeded all of my expectations.

Upon arrival, we were put into a WhatsApp group with a personal concierge whom we could message and ask for help, for example to make restaurant reservations, book taxis or check whether anyone had handed in something that had been lost. It worked very well. Usually the group is per room, but we managed to get all 14 of us into a single group so that we could all see all of the chat.

The hotel’s accommodation was at capacity, but it never felt like it. There were multiple swimming pools to choose from as well as a water park with slides that kept everyone entertained all week.

Bars were everywhere, and you could either go up and order a drink or wait for a couple of minutes for someone to come to wherever you’d pitched your towel. Everything was premium, with no ‘own brand’ or ‘soda gun’ drinks. The bars used heavy glasses and no plastic cups, and I didn’t see one get broken near a swimming pool during the whole week that we were there.

For breakfast, lunch and dinner they had the largest buffet I had ever seen, or you could choose to book and dine every night at a different themed restaurant scattered around the hotel. Ice creams and lollies of all kinds were on tap — you could have some scoops in a cone, or help yourself to a freezer full of well-known branded delights such as Magnums, Cornettos and Calippos. There was even an on-site patisserie and chocolatier where you could eat as many of the confections as you desired. It felt terribly indulgent, taking whatever food I wanted as I wandered around listening to political podcasts that are focused on the cost of living crisis, knowing that inflation in Türkiye had nearly hit 80%. It was awful to see some people pile their plates high at the buffet, nibble a little of it at their table and then wander off, leaving most of it untouched. Sadly, at the end of each session, everything that wouldn’t keep was thrown in the bin. I have no idea about the logistics of distributing the food to staff or people in the local area, but it did seem like such a ridiculous waste.

Every evening there was a different show at an open-air auditorium. The quality of the entertainment was very high, with all kinds of acrobatics and dancing. We even had a motorcycle show inside a subtly-named ’globe of death’:

After the entertainment the outdoor area turned into a thumping loud Eurodisco, with three quarters of the guests calling it a night within five minutes of it starting.

On Thursday afternoon the hotel put on a ‘pool party’ with inflatables, disco music and dancing penguins in one of their shallower pools. The highlight of this was the ‘hoverboard’, powered by the engine of a jet ski. I’d never seen this before and it was a lot of fun to watch, despite the outdated ending where Hoverboard Guy was joined by two bikini-clad women shaking their butts as he zoomed them around the pool.

I tried speaking a little Turkish while I was there and got around with a few basic phrases:

Teşekkür ederim: Thanks (te-she-ku-ederem)

Merhaba: Hello. (mer-ha-ba)

Nasılsın?: How are you? (na-sil-sin)

Iyiyim sen nasılsın?: I am well, how are you? (ee-ee-yim, sen na-sil-sin)

Hoşça kal: Stay well (hosh-cha-call)

Badem sütü: Almond milk (badem soo-too)

I never got over the look of surprise from staff when I used a phrase or two. I’m sure my pronunciation was absolutely awful and they were being very kind to me.

QR codes dominated every sun umbrella and restaurant table, allowing you to order whatever you want and have it delivered to you. This was mostly great, but in the restaurants it felt like a shame to whip out a phone in order to see the menu.

We only had one disappointing meal during the whole week, at the Italian-themed restaurant. Everywhere else was delicious. The best food was at the Turkish restaurant, but everyone had the most fun at the Greek place, with diners shaking tambourines and dancing to a live band.

The hotel was home to a number of feral cats and kittens that enjoyed being petted and being fed scraps of food by the guests. I wasn’t so keen, particularly when one of them jumped up onto a sun lounger with me. One evening, a cat decided to vomit all over the floor underneath my son’s seat as he ate his dinner. Diners at the Greek restaurant had to chase this hungry cat away who was looking longingly at their food:

Although it was hot, on a few mornings I made it out of the complex to go for a run. There was a wooded area that we could circumnavigate in an 8km loop, which was perfect.

It was a little terrifying to pass by some big dogs, not knowing whether they would suddenly start chasing after us. We slowed a couple of times to try and discourage them; they never got close as they seemed more interested in the passing vehicles than our legs:

One morning we took taxis to the nearby ancient town of Side. The archeological remains are stunning. Unfortunately it was brutally hot and everyone was feeling it after just a few minutes of walking, so they sought respite in the multitude of fake clothing stores nearby.

The hotel extended out into the sea via a couple of piers that were covered in sun beds. Next to these was a company selling various water sport experiences. The children (and some of the adults) enjoyed a couple of banana boat rides and a parasailing trip.

We had such a wonderful time on our holiday. It’s a cliche, but the time goes so fast and the whole trip felt like it was over as soon as it began. I loved spending time with my nephews and niece, and felt as though I got to know them properly for the first time as we had lots of opportunities to sit together and chat. I didn’t realise quite how fabulous they are.

The journey home was long. Our flight was delayed by an hour, most of which we spent standing at an inadequately-sized departure gate. We then had to wait at the baggage carousel for 90 minutes before our suitcases started to appear. All part of the fun of travelling this year. COVID-19 seems to be a distant memory for most people; there were a few masks here and there around the hotel, but probably 98% of people didn’t wear them.

Sunday was spent putting things away and getting ready for a week of work. I seem to have developed a toothache which is stopping me from sleeping, so that’s top of my list of things to get sorted out on Monday.

Next week: Back to work for a week, and trying to fix my toothache.

I spent most of this week in Johannesburg. The main purpose of my trip was to attend a three-day workshop with the aim of rebooting the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) within our company. A few years ago it was the shiny new thing, but for a number of reasons it has faded away. It feels as though we are trying to climb out of the ‘trough of disillusionment’ up the ‘slope of enlightenment’ of the Gartner hype cycle:

I hadn’t been to Johannesburg since 2018 and it was so good to be back. Our company headquarters are there and it is great to be immersed in a place where the organisation has such a significant role to play in peoples’ lives. Of the 30 or so colleagues at the workshop I only knew a couple of them, and nobody very well. Our facilitators were amazing, with two of them leading the sessions and another acting as a scribe, resulting in a collaborative piece of work being emailed to us just a couple of hours after we finished. We have a bunch of actions to follow up with as a group and none of them feel unrealistic or overreaching.

On Thursday I spent the day in our head office with our immediate team, meeting a whole bunch of people in person for the first time. They all travelled in to say hello and enjoy a fabulous team lunch together. It was so lovely to reconnect with my colleagues, our company and Africa again.

A week in which I:

• Agreed to take an action to look at how we can effectively collaborate across Microsoft 365 tenants with a company that we recently acquired.
• Took the decision not to roll out our digital signage solution to one of our smaller offices. They use their screen to watch the news on occasion; they agreed that putting signs in their face would be overkill.
• Continued to try and navigate the process to on-board a new contractor to the team.
• Pondered how the sunk cost fallacy applies to hotel breakfasts. They are always a set rate of around £10–15, most of the time I just want my usual bowl of muesli, but I end up eating fruit, toast, mini muffins, bowls of fruit, eggs and everything else even when I don’t really want them, because £10 for a bowl of muesli seems excessive.
• Felt good to be reconnecting with the worlds of software development and ‘ways of work’ through the workshop. I felt as though I could contribute to the topic despite SAFe not being a big part of my current day-to-day reality. I took the opportunity to explain about our little-known and sometimes misunderstood part of the company that sits outside Africa.
• Ate a lot of junk food for dinner. Being away from home and an aspiring vegan meant that choices were limited.
• Tried samp for the first time. Absolutely delicious.
• Was the first person to go through Heathrow Terminal 3 immigration on Friday. I woke up at 3:30am as we started to descend towards the airport. The flight back from Johannesburg never used to get in so early; as a result of the pandemic there are a reduced number of flights and I think the airline needs to use their early slot to avoid losing it.
• Spent Friday working from home in a bit of a daze before driving down to a hotel near Gatwick airport, ready for an early flight on Saturday. We have a holiday away with my parents, my brothers and all of our families which we are finally embarking on after a couple of cancellations — the first time because the travel company went bust and the second time due to the pandemic. It’s going to be amazing to spend so much time with everyone for the first time since we were teenagers. I’ll be able to avoid that feeling of always leaving shortly after arriving when we meet up. Being able to spend time together is such a luxury. From Wait But Why:

I’ve been thinking about my parents, who are in their mid-60s. During my first 18 years, I spent some time with my parents during at least 90% of my days. But since heading off to college and then later moving out of Boston, I’ve probably seen them an average of only five times a year each, for an average of maybe two days each time. 10 days a year. About 3% of the days I spent with them each year of my childhood.

Being in their mid-60s, let’s continue to be super optimistic and say I’m one of the incredibly lucky people to have both parents alive into my 60s. That would give us about 30 more years of coexistence. If the ten days a year thing holds, that’s 300 days left to hang with mom and dad. Less time than I spent with them in any one of my 18 childhood years.

Next week: Holiday!

I wish it would rain. It’s been so hot and dry in the UK, with some parts of the country already taking measures against the drought. I took the photo above as I walked through the village of Potten End on Thursday. Usually this village pond is full of water; it was a shock to see it so dried up.

Work felt a bit of a struggle this week as I couldn’t seem to shake an overwhelming tiredness. I found myself needing to eat something in meetings where I was taking more of a back seat role just to keep my eyes open. I have a few weeks coming up where I’m in workshops and taking a few days off, so I tried to focus to get things into a good state before the turbulence kicks in.

A week in which I:

• Attended an Architecture Deep Dive into our cloud computing setup. Moving the IT assets of a large organisation from an on-premises setup to the cloud is a fascinatingly difficult problem, with multiple approaches and tradeoffs to be navigated throughout the work.
• Along with our CTO, completed and delivered a virtual presentation to the Architecture Community of Practice on the work that we have done over the past five years. It felt as though the presentation went down well, but it was difficult to gauge as not many people had their cameras on. Hopefully it is the start of more collaboration with the teams across the Group.
• Created the Kanban cards for our work to shut down one of our regional offices, and reviewed the consolidated milestones for the work across all of the other departments. Discussed the approach to planning with the project manager. Recruited a peer to get involved with representing us at the project management forums as I won’t be able to make the meetings for the next few weeks.
• Reviewed the plan for the second phase of a physical infrastructure change in one of our offices. Getting this work completed will be a massive win, vastly simplifying our physical architecture in line with our new design.
• Had a very insightful conversation with one of our executives as part of our work to understand more about the challenges faced by our business. We are using the information as input into how we can extend our digital capabilities to best effect. The discussion went for double the time it was booked for and gave us lots to think about.
• Attended a de-brief of our annual Investors’ Conference that took place at the end of June.
• Met with our divisional CIO who was visiting our London office. Demonstrated a Meeting Owl Pro camera as part of a hybrid meeting with him. We’ve sent one of our cameras to Johannesburg for the purpose of lending it to our colleagues there, enhancing our experience when colleagues get together in a room over there.
• Met with a vendor that we use for our mobile phone contract to discuss their broader offerings.
• Had our monthly catch-up with our head of Operational Risk.
• Met with a colleague in our Wealth Management team for a random coffee. It’s great meeting people for a second time as you get straight into a meaty conversation.
• Re-qualified in First Aid at Work again. I’ve been a first aider on and off for the past twenty years or so and only let my training lapse when I was working for my own company as a contractor. Embedding the knowledge over a long time frame is very useful, despite that knowledge changing over time to follow current best practice. The changes due to COVID-19 might have been appropriate in March 2020 but are a little silly and outdated now, advising you to put a towel or piece of cloth over someone’s face so that they don’t breathe on you when you administer CPR chest compressions.
• Decided to take a two hour walk home from the training session instead of getting a taxi. Regretted wearing jeans after ten minutes of the journey.

• Took my son to the Watford Open track meet. He managed to get a new personal best in the 1,500m which he was very pleased with.
• Enjoyed the much delayed instalment of our International Album Club with some friends and colleagues from work. I’d never heard of Joe before, let alone listened to one of his albums. The modern version of R&B is not the sort of thing I’ve explored much. It took me back to similar music of the past and it was great to hear something different. Very enjoyable.
• Spent Saturday prepping for a business trip, my first since I came back from New York in February 2020. Shirts ironed, bags packed, travel checklist checked. I flew to Johannesburg overnight on Saturday, not sleeping very much. I wondered how much thought goes into the acoustics of an aircraft cabin layout — I seemed to be able to hear every conversation that was taking place from the front to the rear galleys. I may need to give the ear plugs a go on my way home.
• Enjoyed a lovely Sunday afternoon with the family of a friend from work. We had lunch out and then tea and cakes back at their house, playing air hockey and table football with their young boys and making friends with the lovely family dog. They were very gracious when I thought we might put the final of the UEFA Women’s Euro 2022 on. I’m so glad they were! A fabulous day.

Next week: An in-person workshop on agile software development practices, meeting some of our team for the first time, rounding out the week back at home and packing once again.

Three years ago, on a business trip to Dubai, I took this photo of the weather forecast on my hotel TV screen. I remember sending it to friends to show them just how crazily — unbelievably — high the temperatures were. It never crossed my mind that this short time later we would see those same temperatures in the UK. Monday and Tuesday were hot. Alice Bell’s tweet captured my mood perfectly.

I feel sick. It’s not the heat, it’s what it means.

— Alice Bell (@alicebell) July 19, 2022

I stayed at home for the first few days of the week. The train companies had advised us to stay at home. Services had been reduced to two trains an hour, running slowly over potentially dangerous track. We managed to keep our house at a relatively cool 27°C but my home office is like a greenhouse; I had to keep the door open, and only had a fan blasting warm air at me for any kind of relief. The cats weren’t impressed, stretching themselves as long and low as they could in order to cool down.

I felt as though I got lots done this week, managing to get focused quickly when I was at my desk. It’s been a week of ideas, many of which I’ve had to jot down with the intention of working them out as blog posts sometime soon. This weekend I’ve had to spend some time at my desk to close off a few things as I’m about to enter a few weeks where I’m going to be short of time.

A week in which I:

• Worked on a presentation for our Group ‘Architecture Community of Practice’ forum that myself and our CTO have been invited to speak at next week. We are going to tell the story of the work we have done over the past few years. I’m excited about sharing it with the teams across the organisation. We’ve had a first run through and will have a final check-in on Monday.
• Met with the team developing a series of interactive dashboards to be used by our front office staff. Thought about the need for ‘rules of the road’ that everyone sticks to, i.e. ensuring that all staff regularly and consistently capture data in the source systems so that the dashboards are as useful and insightful as they can be. If you work for the police, you know that there is a minimum standard of documentation that you have to complete such as writing up incident reports; my assumption is that not doing this would be negligence or misconduct. The challenge is in moving the organisation towards a similar minimum standard, changing the culture so that this data capture is something that we just do.
• Spent time talking through a compliance issue with an in-house application that we are developing. Hoping that my contribution was useful and may help unblock things so that we can get the tool in front of people as soon as possible.
• Met with colleagues in the People and Culture team to discuss the work I have been preparing for our Digital Literacy programme.
• Took part in the first internal project team meeting for the work of closing one of our offices. This first meeting was to agree the processes that we will follow, as well as the artefacts that we intend to use.
• Reviewed and discussed the outcome of our interviews of senior leaders in our part of the organisation that we undertook as part of our digital journey mapping. Agreed how we would feed the results back to the Executive Committee.
• Went live with our new digital signage system in London, getting the Raspberry Pi devices installed on each of the monitors in our office. I wrote up a Teams post to explain what we’ve done and how it works, as well as asking for feedback on the information that colleagues want to see on the displays. The devices also arrived in our office in Asia this week; it has been interesting to understand and deal with a number of challenges that come about specifically due to the location. Hopefully we will have them up and running in the next few days.
• Updated the security design and end-user notes for our mandatory regulatory audio recording system following an agreement to make a small change to the setup.
• Went through the draft proposal document for how we will manage ‘Internet of Things’ devices on our office networks.
• Reviewed the latest formal quote for upgrading the door access system in one of our smaller offices, comparing it to a quote we received months ago. This project has taken an extraordinary amount of time for the work that is required, with lots of back-and-forth with vendors. Agreed next steps to try and get the quote reduced.
• Gave another IT team an introduction to LeanKit and explained how we came to adopt it a couple of years ago.
• Attended an online internal town hall-style meeting on the topic of being Human First. Gave some feedback to colleagues in London who were promoting the event.
• Met with our audio/visual equipment and services vendor to review our latest requirements for our London office and agreed next steps.
• Booked flights and a hotel for my first business trip since February 2020.
• Enjoyed an insightful presentation on the automation of our travel processes.
• Completed online First Aid at Work training ahead of my in-person requalification course next week. It’s been a while since I’ve held a certificate and I’m looking forward to being qualified again.
• Had a lovely random coffee with a colleague in the Investment Banking team.
• Completed an analysis of technology spend in the primary school that I support as a governor, and put forward a plan for work next year. The school have already taken this forward with our current and planned technology support vendors.
• Agreed to look at becoming a Strategic Leader of Governance for Herts for Learning. It is a volunteer role where I will get to mentor and give advice to Chairs of school governing boards across Hertfordshire. I hope it is not quite as tough as the SLOG acronym suggests.
• Enjoyed ‘shoegaze night’ at the latest Album Club.
• Have had the song Perfect Man by Rufus Wainwright whirling around my head. I don’t think this song gets anywhere near the recognition it deserves — it’s a genius piece of work which happens to be both melancholy and funky at the same time. I can’t believe it’s been a decade since it came out.

Next week: Presenting at the Architecture Community of Practice, a summer social at work, attempting to requalify as a First Aider, a debrief from our recent conference and preparing for a trip.