A much better week than the one before. The melancholic fog had dissipated and things felt much more normal. I had a lot to look forward to this week as on Tuesday I was finally going to see a live band again. Just before the pandemic struck I had been increasing the amount of gigs that I had been going to and like so many other things this came to an abrupt halt. I had bought tickets to the gig in early 2020 and it was originally scheduled for that October. This then became April 2021 and eventually landed on February 2022. The evening didn’t disappoint; the bands, the venue and the company were all wonderful and the evening resonated with me throughout the rest of the week. It felt impossible to be COVID-safe with so many people packed into such a small space and so many of them, including me, not masked up as we had a drink. I guess we’re just going to have to be comfortable with being a bit uncomfortable for now.

My boys were both off school for their half term holiday. They took a trip with my wife to their grandparents on Monday, so I was home alone for the evening. It’s been a very long time since I was the only one at home. Heading out to work early for my commute on Tuesday, getting back very late from the gig after everyone was asleep and then heading out again the next day before they were all up was strange; it used to happen so much in the old days and now it was an exhausting novelty. I was very grateful to be back at home on Thursday and Friday to finish the week.

This was a week in which I:

• Took on responsibility for managing the IT component of our company’s flagship annual conference, to be held in our offices in June, which will be hybrid for the first time. This week we had presentations from technology vendors who will take on the bulk of the technology work. Gave a brief update to the steering committee at the end of the week.
• Took part in a couple of kick-off meetings for a programme to look at our office locations ahead of the leases expiring in a couple of years’ time. There are so many permutations of what we might end up doing, and it’s difficult to imagine exactly what an office should look like 2025.
• Met with the IT management team to discuss a challenge with part of our end-user support model and agreed a way forward.
• Reviewed where we are with our Windows 11 pilot and agreed next steps to move across to the new platform during the course of this year.
• Wrote a document on what the user experience should be for our largest meeting spaces in our London office. We’ve had technical difficulties with the rooms since they were commissioned, partly due to not having had the opportunity to thoroughly test them before the pandemic hit, and partly due to them being too complex. I’m hoping that we can do something that will simplify the technology while still giving staff as good an experience as possible.
• Reviewed the success criteria that we will use to evaluate two different digital signage platforms before implementing one in the next few weeks.
• Ramped up trying to get our mandatory compliance recording for Teams in place. We have a few administrative issues to close out, along with some technical tweaks and some staff communications to draft.
• Ran a review of our Team Charter, a year after we first put it together. I tried using the 1-2-4-All Liberating Structure using breakout rooms in Teams. Given how little time I had to prepare, I was quite pleased at how well it went. Running the session in this way definitely generated more feedback from some of the less vocal members of the team. The team largely felt that the Charter was good as it was, but I made note of some suggested minor updates.
• Reviewed the first iteration of some management information dashboards being put together as part of the big group programme. Discussed how we can use a two-weekly iteration plan to get into a rhythm of delivery.
• Had an excellent long one-on-one meeting with the CIO, reviewing and agreeing how we approach the change portfolio for the rest of the year.
• Attended a webinar on  Joined-up Leadership for Effective School Resource Management.
• Woke up to a red ‘danger to life’ weather warning on Friday. Watched the garden furniture wander around the garden as Storm Eunice hit on Friday. I flinched a couple of times as branches from the tree above my office broke off and hit the roof but we got through it largely unscathed. Unlike, it seems, this bar in Hove.

Of course the daft arseholes at Rockwater Hove haven’t secured their outdoor furniture properly. This could have killed somebody. pic.twitter.com/MQc1mxbbHb

— KJL (@kerryjeanlister) February 18, 2022

• Found myself on a severely delayed train for the first time in years. Fortunately it made it to the station before my destination before stopping. My friend’s wife kindly came to pick us up, saving us from what turned out to be a 55 minute delay.
• Went to change my bike wheel early on Saturday morning from the one I use on the indoor trainer to my outdoor one, only to find that I had a flat. I changed the inner tube but didn’t have time to do a full investigation of the source of the problem, and assumed that it was just an old tube whose time had come. My son and I rode down to meet the rest of the club riders and just as we were about to roll, I found myself with another flat. It looks like I picked up a tiny flint the last time we went out and this had made holes in both of the tubes. My son got to go out with the group but I had to walk home to find and fix the problem. Time for a new tyre.

Post Storm Eunice club ride turned into an obstacle course! pic.twitter.com/1eSfklSuug

— Berkhamsted Cycling Club (@BerkhamstedCC) February 19, 2022

• Enjoyed taking advantage of the modern world. Last Sunday evening I was thinking about how I am always the idiot in the suit when I go to gigs after work. Determined to avoid this, I ordered some brown shoes and black jeans that I thought I could get away with wearing in the office. Both items were delivered to my house by the middle of the day on Monday. I try not to buy things for same or next day delivery as I assume the environmental cost is higher than waiting, but it’s amazing to be able to do this on the rare occasion I need it.
• Tried an escape room for the first time. My wife found one locally and thought it would be a fun thing for the family to all do together on Sunday afternoon. Surprisingly, we broke the escape time record! Once we got out of the first chamber and through to the second one, we found a cabinet in the corner with the room escape key on view for us to see. The cabinet was bolted with a four-digit combination lock. While everyone else went about solving the various puzzles in the room, I went straight for the lock and carefully listened and felt my way to the right combination. I felt like a character from a 1960s heist movie. The guy on the front desk then came to see us and showed us all of the puzzles that we skipped. As the game was to try to escape as quickly as possible it seemed like a good strategy, but felt a bit of a hollow victory.

Next week: Another couple of days in the office. Ramping up the pressure on the Q1 project milestones as we are already halfway to the end of the quarter.

Last week I started sleeping poorly, waking up at a random hour of the morning before my alarm went off. This week it seemed to get a little worse. Many years ago during my time at university I had my first, and worst, brush with a poor period of mental health. Occasionally I feel an echo of this. I’ve been feeling very down, but frustratingly can’t work out what the root cause is. There’s probably more than one. Most of the week was tinged with a feeling of melancholy, not enough to be debilitating but enough for me to know that something was up. It feels as though it is passing so I’m hoping for a better week ahead.

Things are ramping up at work and I feel that I am a critical link in the chain for a number of our ‘must do’ projects. We’re still on track for everything that we said we would do, but I need to keep focused so that this remains the case.

This was a week in which I:

• Had a discussion with our management team about how we can look at plugging a gap in our team’s architecture skills.
• Discussed an approach for further simplification of our network and IT infrastructure stack and agreed next actions. This has rapidly become one of our highest-priority projects due to the vendor licence and support costs it will help us to avoid later in the year.
• Reviewed our stance on digital meeting technologies that colleagues want to use based on client preference.
• Had a catch-up call with our key contact at our main IT vendor, ensuring we are aligned on a number of in-flight projects.
• Undertook a detailed review of a proposal and quote for significant physical infrastructure changes for one of our offices. It involves re-cabling the floor, implementing modern UPSes, decommissioning unnecessary patch panels and installing environmental monitoring equipment.
• Took part in a kick-off meeting with an external vendor ahead of our external conference planned for June.
• Attended a talk from our CIO where he ran through his thinking and aspirations for our team for this year and beyond.
• Met with colleagues in South Africa who are managing work on a large shared platform to discuss and align on the progress that we have been making.
• Spoke to a colleague who is responsible for an offshore development team to understand what agreements we have in place as part of the setup.
• Took part in another discussion on our office-based audio/visual solutions and looked at how we can simplify the setup whilst improving the experience. I have an action to start off a paper-based testing/walkthrough document for how we expect the rooms to work in the future. It’s amazing how much complexity can be increased by each additional variable.
• Met with our head of Cybersecurity to run through updates to his quarterly roadmap and Kanban board.
• Heard someone say that our organisation is “the least toxic place I could be working”, and had to agree with them. I feel so fortunate to be part of the company.
• Had a lovely ‘random coffee’ with one of my close colleagues.
• Spent time reading about ‘web3’ and started to write a post for our internal Teams channel for our part of the company. It turned into a blog post that I figured I would test in public first. (If I’m wrong about anything, I hope someone will point it out.)
• Attended our school Full Governing Board meeting, having got all of my preparation work done at the weekend. This time I managed to complete a couple of my actions straight after the session.
• Joined a meeting where the school’s Improvement Partner reported back on her deep-dive into Maths. These sessions are so valuable; we get to hear from someone external to the school on how things are actually going, where the school is excelling and what we need to focus on.
• Attended a couple of school webinars, including an Introduction to Procurement sponsored by the Department for Education and a HfL session on Edtech in the Primary Classroom.
• Enjoyed an evening of music courtesy of an Album Club with some close colleagues. We’re at the end of the first round and the host’s choice didn’t disappoint; we listened to Interpol’s Turn On The Bright Lights which was completely new to me. It seems as though it defined a sound for the next decade or so with many other bands being influenced by it.
• Had our main bathroom repainted. If anyone can tell me how to get teenage boys to remember to open the bathroom window and take shorter showers, I am all ears.
• Woke up on Saturday intending to join the cycling club for the weekly ride but was put off by frost on the cars in our street. Having come off of my bike on black ice many years ago I am very risk-averse, and won’t go out if there is even a teeny inkling that there may be ice around. I made do with a session on the indoor trainer, which I’ve come to enjoy nearly as much as getting out.
• Took my youngest boy to go and watch Watford play Brighton and Hove Albion at Vicarage Road. It was a shame that the home side lost, but it was fun to go and we enjoyed our afternoon out. Our seats weren’t the best as our view was partially blocked by a TV camera but it didn’t matter too much. My ticket was £30 and my son’s was only £5 which seems like good value for a Premiership match.

• Spent a chunk of my time at the Watford match watching the assistant referee as I knew I would be running the line myself at my eldest son’s match the next day. I was curious to measure how much exercise this is; it turns out that over the course of an 80-minute match, nearly 50 of those are spent moving around. I thought it would be higher.

• Finished off After Life. It felt like it was probably not a good show to binge watch. There were moments of poignancy and other times where the main character wasn’t believable. I’m not sure if you need to have seen the show first, but the out-takes of seasons 2 and 3 on YouTube nearly had us in tears of laughter.

Next week: The welcome return of Learned League, and heading to a gig for the first time in two years.

A good week where I felt as though I kept my focus on the right things and got stuff done. It started terribly on Monday; I got down to the kitchen to find that the cats had decided to wreak havoc while we slept. After cleaning up the mess I had no time for breakfast if I wanted to make my train. Just as I was about to leave the house the zip on my backpack broke. So I jogged down to the station, clutching my bag in front of me as I went, and spent my commute trying to find a replacement backpack that wasn’t going to necessitate remortgaging the house.

This was the first week that we restarted our ‘hybrid working’ experiment, where we are expected to be in the office around 50% of the time. I went in on both Monday and Wednesday. After my handful of days in the office at the end of last year it no longer feels like a novelty. The free meals and a coffee from the on-site canteen that were in place throughout the pandemic have now ceased, which will be interesting in terms of their impact on staff experience and whether people now choose to go and buy their meals outside.

Although the week felt productive, I’ve been sleeping poorly and it has taken its toll. Sitting here on Sunday evening I’m really feeling it. I’ve always been late to bed; most evenings I get a second wind and have to force myself to go up the wooden hill. I’ve managed to get the bedroom light out by midnight most evenings and I think I need to keep trying to push this earlier.

It’s gotten cold and windy here in the UK and has felt pretty wintry. January felt warmer than usual and lulled me into thinking that spring is around the corner. Snow on Friday morning was a sharp reminder that we’re still in winter.

This was a week in which I:

• Refined our 2022 roadmap with input from our Operations and Cybersecurity teams.
• Got a second digital signage player up and running. It has been very beneficial to soak-test the devices as we found that our first display had a memory leak; after waking up at 7am a couple of the display components would consistently crash around 4:20pm every day. The fix is simple; we’re now refreshing the rogue component on a regular basis in order to free up memory. We’ve still got some way to go to prove to ourselves that they would be a robust solution for the five global offices that we are responsible for, but we’re on the right path.
• Learnt a lot from a presentation given by our CTO on the evolution of our SD-WAN network and what the future looks like. The whole team were invited to attend and it feels like we now have strong alignment on what we plan to do to further simplify things this year.
• Had a brilliant one-on-one discussion with the Head of Enterprise Architecture for Technology and Operations. A recent meeting with a big group of internal technologists raised a lot of questions in my mind about a significant strategy initiative that we are undertaking, but I felt as though I was alone. It turns out that my questions were valid and I’ve been asked to join a strategy session later this month.
• Met with the team that are working on some reporting dashboards for our part of the organisation as part of the big group programme.
• Closed out on a number of contracts and purchase orders, keeping us on track for our project deliveries this year.
• Reviewed our risk log with my peers in our monthly meeting.
• Took part in a meeting with a CIO adviser from Gartner on ‘building the digitally dexterous enterprise’.
• Made great strides with testing our Teams mandatory compliance audio recording solution. After getting the recordings to show up on Monday, I spent time familiarising myself with the end-user experience from as many angles as I could think of, as well as the experience of the person who has access to the playback portal. I have lots of questions and actions to close out on before we can go live.
• Joined the first Teams Fireside Chat session. In the invite the hosts had said that the presentation part of the session would be recorded and the recording would stop before Q&A. I looked on in horror when I realised that my testing of our Teams mandatory compliance recording tool meant that everyone saw a purple recording banner way before the other recording started, and after it ended. I pointed it out during the Q&A session and we actually had a very useful discussion about it; it was fascinating in that almost everyone dismissed the notification without reading it.
• Met with the son of one of my colleagues who has recently got himself qualified with Microsoft and CompTIA courses and is looking for his first employment break into the world of IT. I really love explaining what I do and took some time to go through the world of portfolio, programme and project management, with a little Kanban thrown in as well.
• Met with an old colleague for the first time this year. We’re scheduled to catch up every few weeks but the meeting tends to move around. It’s always great to reconnect and find out what has been going on with her and her part of the company.
• Had a lovely ‘random coffee’ with a colleague in our New York office who is from Argentina and lived in Manchester many years ago.
• Learned never to ask “if anyone has any good jokes” when trying to fill time before a meeting starts.
• Attended a couple of DfE-funded seminars on school resource management. The first was on the topic of school estate management and the second gave an overview of integrated curriculum and financial planning (ICFP). I haven’t put time aside to properly digest all of the material, but it is great to know that so many excellent resources exist to assist with these topics.
• Caught up with a set of actions that I had taken at the last school Full Governing Board meeting, ahead of our next session on Tuesday.
• Kept an eye on the goings-on in parliament. It felt as though we got two ’Prime Minister’s Questions’ sessions this week with the release of the Sue Gray ‘pre-report report’ on Monday and the regular session on Wednesday. Jonathan Pie’s Opinion piece in the New York Times sums up the situation quite well.
• Went out for dinner at the Dog and Partridge in Sunninghill on Saturday night with old friends. Great company, average food.

• Did a whole week of indoor bike trainer riding due to the club ride being cancelled again. Next week it is currently predicted to be -5°C overnight so it’ll probably be the same situation.

Next week: More days in the office, many school governor meetings and an Album Club.

A busy week, broken up by my first day in the office of 2022. Officially we restart our ‘hybrid working’ pilot from next week, but the office has been open throughout the latest restrictions for anyone that wants to use it. I missed my morning exercise, but made up for it by walking to and from the office instead of using the tube, a 40 minute journey each way.

It feels that this is going to be the year of getting on with things. My boss took his first business flight in almost two years, which is a real return to previous times. Through some combination of optimism and fatigue we seem to be reaching the point where ‘the new normal’ is almost here. Masks seem to be on their way out, but I’m going to keep wearing mine on the train and in other enclosed spaces.

The start of the week seemed stressful; I woke up at around 2:30am on Monday and 4:30am on Tuesday with lots on my mind. Usually I fall asleep super quickly and sleep right through to my alarm. By Wednesday things felt back on track.

This was a week in which I:

• Updated our budget and financial forecast to classify our work into ‘operations’, ‘projects’ and ‘products’. I also put together some draft materials on how we distinguish the different types of work and our approaches to them. Things seem to be crystallising around these ideas and things are falling into place.
• Spent a lot of time chasing up outstanding work on our various in-flight projects. I’m pushing things quite hard this year as I am keen to meet our planned roadmap dates in the first two quarters. We have some work we want to complete by the middle of the year to avoid renewing support agreements and licences for legacy technology. One day lost on a piece of work can have a knock-on effect to a number of other projects, so it’s important that everyone is pushing to get tasks done as quickly as possible.
• Reorganised our team’s Kanban board to ensure that anything we have committed to delivering in Q1 is clearly signposted, as well as items that are on the critical path for committed deliveries later in the year.
• Took part in the successful test of a configuration change that allows us to join Zoom meetings from our Teams-enabled meeting rooms.
• Got one of our Raspberry Pis up and running in our office as we try out a new digital signage solution. I want to leave it running there over a number of days and weeks to see how it performs over time. A new metal case with a heat-sink seems to have improved the temperature and performance of the Pi and it’s all running well so far.

• Met with our telephony migration vendor to review our comments on their detailed statement of work, and agreed next steps.
• Attended a meeting for our big group programme where I learned that the way in which the pipeline of work will be organised and managed is being realigned.
• Took part in a reference call for a vendor which we are thinking of using to help us with our annual conference. It’s amazing that people are are happy to give up their time to talk about their experience with a vendor, and so valuable in terms of getting some real-world insight.
• Decided to skip a couple of meetings where I was likely to be purely an audience member and I knew that the sessions would be recorded. I skim-watched the meetings later and took some notes and screenshots for the wider team, which felt like a much better use of time.
• Attended a superb ‘learning hour’ session, where one of my colleagues gave a presentation on how technology has massively improved the quality of life for her family. She has a young son who is diabetic, and they use a number of different tools to monitor his blood sugar level, automatically administer insulin and monitor his health over time, all via Internet of Things-connected devices. The whole talk was completely fascinating.
• Had a lovely ‘random coffee’ with a colleague that I hadn’t spoken to in some time.
• Met with a small group of fellow WB-40 podcast listeners to discuss how product thinking can be applied to internal products, and physical infrastructure. We didn’t reach any profound conclusions, but it was great to talk the problems and goals through. The WB-40 community is such a wonderful thing to be a part of.
• Took up the role of Finance, Premises and Personnel Committee Chair at school once again and ran our latest meeting. I have some carry-forward actions that I still need to complete over the coming weeks.
• Attended another excellent briefing from Herts for Learning, this time on the school curriculum and the role that governors have to play. As usual, there is so much to think about.
• Had a great time at Album Club #131, listening to El Camino by The Black Keys. Lots of the club members had heard it before but it was completely new to me. It was a classic Album Club evening, with lots of laughs, great music and very generous hosting.
• Took a trip with Mat to Deco Audio in Aylesbury to buy some second hand records. It was just like our teenage years, when we used to head to The Rock Box in Camberley to browse the CDs. Compared to back then, it’s great that I can now afford to buy more albums, but there was something about really thinking hard about a purchase and squeezing the joy out of the few that I owned that is now a little lost.
• Enjoyed the mild temperatures on our Saturday morning cycling club ride. The previous couple had been cancelled due to freezing temperatures so it was great to get out again.
• Got out for a run for the first time since Christmas. It felt like a more efficient use of time than spending 90 minutes on the indoor bike trainer. I’m not looking forward to having stiff legs tomorrow.
• Ran the line at my eldest son’s football match. A brilliant 3-0 win for them on a stunning astro pitch.
• Watched season one of After Life. I don’t think Ricky Gervais is the world’s greatest actor, but the story had some interesting angles which made me laugh out loud multiple times and was also moving in places. I’ll definitely line up season two.

Next week: Back to the office more than once, pushing forward with our burgeoning project portfolio and preparing for our next school governor meeting in a couple of weeks’ time.

A regular week, full of meetings once again. It feels as though I am still struggling with the ratio of ‘meetings attended and actions picked up’ versus ‘time spent closing out the actions’. Next week looks a little clearer so I am hoping to get back on track.

At the end of the week I was acutely aware of being able to decide how I felt about things. I’d been working hard all week and still had lots to get done, but it didn’t feel like it was crushing me — I could just choose to be grateful to have lots to do and that I was making progress. This year has brought a renewed sense of optimism which I am trying to hang on to.

This was a week in which I:

• Had a very successful, long-awaited meeting with one of our in-country CEOs, agreeing proposals to implement a meeting room videoconferencing upgrade and network change in their office. Scheduled and had a number of follow-up meetings off the back of the decisions to ensure that colleagues across the organisation understood the implications of what we had agreed.
• Attended a number of meetings relating to our flagship conference that is scheduled for the summer. It’s great to be involved so early on. The past two years have been virtual conferences and it was entirely in-person before that. This year it will be hybrid. I thought that holding hybrid meetings was difficult, but a hybrid conference is a whole different ball game. I know we’ll make it a big success — we always do — but there’s a lot of hard work to be done between now and then.
• Joined a kick-off meeting with a new team member who will be working on a series of MIS dashboards for us on one of our key platforms.
• Had a demo from another digital signage vendor. Based on what we’ve seen, we now have two different platforms that could foot the bill of being a global platform for us, powering our in-office displays across our five offices. I’m planning to go into the office next week to get the Raspberry Pi-based platform up and running so we can see how it performs over a number of days and weeks.
• Met with our account managers for our main IT platform to discuss our planned transition to Teams telephony in two of our offices.
• Walked our team through the planned delivery roadmap for the year across all of our areas. It generated some excellent discussion about how we may want to reprioritise some of the work over the next few quarters.
• Met with an external consultant to brief them on a real estate project that we are kicking off, and to request a proposal for how they would approach it.
• Attended a very early morning Programme Increment (PI) planning session for one of the streams of the big strategic group-wide programme. I’m grateful that most of my overseas colleagues are in South Africa and we don’t have much of a time difference, but 9am there is still 7am here which makes for a very long day.
• Joined an internal update briefing from our Governance and Control and Cybersecurity teams.
• Had our final management team workshop on team effectiveness, this time covering the topic of resilience.
• Enjoyed an excellent internal presentation on the capabilities of Microsoft Defender.
• Met up for a one-on-one with the last colleague to come back from their Christmas break. It’s great that we now have a full team once again.
• Had a random coffee with a colleague that joined us during the pandemic. I hadn’t realised until recently that they are also a LearnedLeague player, and from what I can tell they are much better with their general knowledge than I am.
• Had a chat with a colleague about their financial situation and how they can manage it going forward. Over the years, I’ve preached to many people about how life-changing the You Need a Budget (YNAB) app has been for us. I may put together a short internal presentation for our team on the topic.
• Did some preparation for our school Finance, Premises and Personnel Committee meeting next week. I still struggle with fitting in keeping up with all of the school governor work around everything else in my life and have a few actions outstanding from the last meeting. It’s been a tough first couple of weeks for our school given the level of COVID-19 infections amongst staff and pupils. Although the government are behaving like the pandemic is over, it most definitely isn’t.
• Spoke to Deco Audio about the best way to get CDs, SACDs and Blu-Ray audio to my analogue amplifier. They don’t recommend doing anything other than buying a decent CD player. I have a cheap one that I bought 20 years ago, but the tray has stopped working. I need to decide whether to get it repaired or to save the money towards something new.
• Took my eldest boy to the orthodontist. It’s strange how open-ended the work is; they aren’t able to tell us when it will all be done. I remember the same thing when I was a child, going to appointments every few months and constantly being told to ‘wait and see’.
• Changed the rear brake blocks on my eldest son’s road bike from the standard ones that came with the bike to Swissstop Full FlashPro BXPs. I’ve only ever changed brake blocks once before and struggled to get these on due to there not being enough clearance between the brake and the rim. A quick call to my wonderful local bike shop told me what I needed to do. My son’s yet to try them out but from what I can tell they seem to rival F1 cars for stopping power. I’m glad it’s the rear brakes I’ve changed.
• Didn’t manage to get out on the bike this weekend. The weather looked very cold and I’m not one for chancing it when there’s a possibility of ice. Our club ride was cancelled on Saturday. The indoor trainer is so attractive given that I can be on and off in a set time, have very little chance of a puncture and don’t need to clean the bike afterwards.
• Spent a couple of hours on Friday night picking up my son and his friends from Vicarage Road after the Watford v Norwich game. It sounded farcical, with 15 minutes of injury time due to some of the floodlights going out, but the pundits arguing that it was still bright enough to play.
• Spent a few hours in the garden clearing up the mountain of leaves that fell last autumn. It’s been so wet since late last year that I’ve not been able to get out and do it before now. In the process of vacuuming up half a foot of leaves at the rear of the house I came across a furry paw of something that had expired some time ago. I nearly jumped out of my skin, wondering if it was a large hare or a small cat. Fortunately it turned out to be a very smelly dead squirrel. I’m so glad I cleaned up the leaves before it started getting warm again.

Next week: A school governor meeting, my first trip to the office of the year, and trying to use as much of my free time as possible to catch up with meeting actions and keep the momentum on our key initiatives.

The first full working week since Christmas, with many more team members back at their desks. Monday and Tuesday felt very different to last week in that they were packed with meetings; by the end of Tuesday I felt that I had just been collecting tasks and not getting any of them done. Thankfully meeting-free Wednesday is still a company initiative at work and I could use the time to catch up with everything.

I tentatively got back on the indoor bike trainer on Monday after my vaccine-related illness and had an easy week of spinning every day. By Wednesday I was feeling pretty much 100% match fit.

This was a week in which I:

• Took part in a couple of reset meetings for one of our Engineering teams who are looking to shake things up for 2022. This precipitated some interesting discussions about product management for internal products and how there is a dearth of information out there on how to go about it. It was lovely to be invited along to act as a sounding board for the team.
• Had a governance meeting with the CEO of our office in the Middle East, reviewing the changes and finances for the past year and looking at changes that we plan to deliver in 2022.
• Completed the architectural reviews for our new door access system in one of our offices, paving the way for implementation.
• Took part in our bi-monthly Information Risks group and got some useful input on the preferred way to configure an audio recording system that I’m working on, and to hear more on how we handled some recent security-related risks.
• Revised my proposal for security groups for the audio recording system and reviewed it with a couple of the key teams.
• Updated the slides that we are using for a meeting with one of our country CEOs next week. It’s been some time since we spoke and we have a lot to get through.
• Had a series of successful 1:1 meetings. I’ve gone back to the discipline of writing down agenda points throughout the week and keeping my meeting notes in the same place, making the conversations much more valuable beyond relationship building. As part of sorting out my digital life I’ve landed on one place to take meeting notes and it’s really helping me to stay focused.
• Rebooted our weekly ‘learning hour’ with a brilliant talk from our CTO on things he had learned from setting up a trading floor.
• Also rebooted my weekly staff meeting with a standing agenda, which seemed to go well.
• Had a good ‘random coffee’ with our Chief Risk Officer. We’re heading for our organisation’s 3,000th coffee in a couple of weeks’ time.
• Attended a useful short webinar from the NGA on An introduction to the board’s role in environmental sustainability. We’re moving this up the priority list in our school so it was great to get some insight into what’s out there that we can leverage.

• Worked with our school Office Manager on the proposal for moving to a new Management Information System, and circulated a summary to the rest of the Governing Board.
• Rode the 105km Westerley Winter Warmer reliability ride with my eldest son. We had to get up and out early to drive to the start for our 9:12 start time. It was cold, foggy and damp, but quite some way freezing with no rain. We’ll take it!

• Enjoyed the third Album Club with some of my colleagues from work. The ‘host’ picked the brilliant Cold Fact by Rodriguez, and eloquently told us the back story of the album when we paused halfway through. I love Album Club as it’s some time spent listening to music where I don’t feel guilty that I should be doing something else. Great album, great company, great evening.
• Booked tickets to go and see Aldous Harding at the Barbican in March. Having had COVID-19, and with three vaccinations behind me, I think it’s time to start getting out to gigs again.
• Was shocked at the ending of Dexter: New Blood but absolutely loved the series. We then moved on to, and completed, The White Lotus which was equally brilliant.
• Watched Playing By Heart (1998). I saw this a couple of years after it came out and it looks amazingly dated now. Despite (or maybe because of) having so many stars — Gillian Anderson, Sean Connery, Angelina Jolie, Dennis Quaid, Madeleine Stowe and even Jon Stewart — it falls flat. I think it just tries to do too much.

Next week: The first two crazy early morning meetings of the year, a management team masterclass and trying to push forward with all of the open project loops.

I had my COVID-19 booster vaccine on Friday, 29 days after having tested positive for the virus. This Moderna jab (now seemingly named Spikevax‽) completely knocked me for six. I spent a lot of Friday night awake and shivering in bed and the whole of Saturday oscillating between freezing and boiling, drifting in and out of sleep between doses of paracetamol. I wandered off to bed at about 7pm on Saturday night and didn’t get up for twelve hours. My fever has now gone but I’m sitting here still feeling spaced out and groggy. This is the the most ill that I’ve felt in years.

It’s been frustrating to be incapacitated as I had a long list of things I wanted to get done this weekend, but I am grateful to get an immune system boost while the virus is circulating around the country in such crazy numbers.

The news that the Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer tested positive for the virus for the second time in three months is worrying. At some point the pandemic becomes endemic, but at what level? Will we all just be catching the disease over and over again?

This was a week in which I:

• Took advantage of a break in the weather to chalk up the first 100km bike ride of the year with my eldest son. It was the furthest either of us had ridden in some time, and I was proud of him getting to the end. Our route took us directly past the flight path into Luton Airport.

• Felt good being back at my desk, ready to grab the reins of 2022 and get a lot of stuff done this year. The children went back to school a few days later which wasn’t good from a sleep perspective; they were still up late mooching around the house when I was trying to wrap things up for the day. I managed to deal with all of my new emails and Teams messages within a day, made possible by working in a small team, in a company where most people go on holiday at exactly the same time.
• Completed a review of all of my open projects, as well as my team’s entire Kanban board of work.
• Baselined our department budget for 2022 so that we are able to track variances throughout the year.
• Started thinking about the list of key documents and artefacts that we need to review in the first few weeks of the year, including our Team Charter.
• Reviewed the backlog of suggested topics for our weekly team learning/presentation session and encouraged colleagues to think about moving forward with some of them.
• Met with the internal technical team to review and agree next steps for putting Teams mandatory compliance call recording in place.
• Reviewed a matrix I put together on the monitoring, support and maintenance of all of the components in our infrastructure environment and agreed some next actions for areas where we have gaps.
• Reviewed the delivery goals for 2022 put together by our Networks team.
• Reviewed initial proposals for reconfiguring our audio/visual setup in our meeting rooms. We’re still at a very early stage in determining our needs, given the small number of weeks that we have been back in the office using the rooms since the pandemic struck.
• Created a first draft delivery roadmap for 2022 for our department as a whole.
• Spent some time reading and digesting On Industrialization: A Technology-Driven Path To The Next Generation Organization by Simon Wardley. Interesting, but not surprising, conclusions.
• Published the first set of ‘random coffee’ pairings for 2022. Since May 2020 we’ve had over 2,900 randomly-selected pairs across our part of the organisation and I don’t see it stopping anytime soon.
• Finished my Evernote to OneNote migration. It took me days to review the 6,500 notes and get them down to just over 5,000, and the process to export and import them was a multi-day affair as well. I’ve now turned off my premium auto-renew in Evernote and have a few months to make sure that I’m not missing anything before I delete all my data there.
• Watched The North Water. Beautifully shot, but one of the bleakest stories I’ve seen in some time. Colin Farrell was incredible, and almost completely unrecognisable from previous roles.

Next week: An almost full compliment of colleagues at work and a return to the normal schedule of things.

After the fun of our Christmas weekend we spent this week mainly at home, and generally indoors. Here in the UK it has been unseasonably warm but also very rainy, which has limited how much anyone wanted to get out of the house.

I’ve tried to be productive over the past couple of weeks, but as always I never feel as though I have done as much as I wanted to by the time the holiday is over. I also don’t feel quite as rested as this time last year, but I’m ready to get back into a routine of work again. When I left work at the end of 2021 I had mapped out the tools that I use in my digital life with the intention of getting things in a good starting state for 2022. I’ve barely scratched the surface with getting organised, so I’ll have to continue the work during the year.

This was a week in which I:

• Got back on the indoor bike trainer again and went out on a long run, rounding out my year of exercise. For me, working from home during the pandemic has been transformational for my physical fitness. In 2021 I managed to do something on nearly 70% of the days of the year, and this doesn’t include the times that I walked to and from my office as part of my commute.

• Had a family day out in London to see Circus 1903 at the Southbank Centre. Although it was almost sold out when we booked it, the seats were probably only about 75% full which I assume is a result of the pandemic. We all loved the show and marvelled at the incredible circus acts, including Florian Blümmel who did unbelievable things on a bike. We ate out at a nearby branch of Ping Pong and it was good for the boys to try some new cuisine.
• Had a wonderful birthday on New Year’s Eve at the house of some close friends. A deluxe karaoke machine had been installed as a Christmas present which was literally music to my ears. We had so much fun singing the night away, but it was all over far too quickly.

• Got up relatively early on New Year’s Day for the first weekly ride with Berkhamsted Cycling Club. My eldest son made it out too and we had a lovely ride, yet again meeting more people that we didn’t know already. Due to COVID-19 and Christmas we hadn’t been out with the club for about a month and it was a joy to go riding again.

• Took my eldest son for his second COVID-19 vaccination. My youngest son is still yet to get a vaccine due to having had the virus recently and I’m still a week away from being able to have my booster for the same reason.
• Finished reading the brilliant East of Eden and indulged my enjoyment further by watching the movie and reading a book of Steinbeck’s notes that he made as he wrote the novel. I’ve now got to decide what to read next; more Steinbeck indulgence or something non-fiction that will focus my mind on work?
• Reviewed the 6,500 notes that I have accumulated over the past decade in Evernote. I ended up deleting around 1,000 of them. The rest I am in the process of exporting and moving over to OneNote. This is one of the steps I am taking to try and simplify my digital life, and in this case cut down on costs too. I already pay annually for a Microsoft 365 account and will no longer need to pay for Evernote once I stop using it.
• Watched a lot of TV with my wife, finishing off the latest season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, completing Only Murders In The Building, continuing with Dexter: New Blood and starting The Tourist.

Next week: A final day off with plans for more outdoor cycling, getting back to work and finally getting my booster vaccine.

My COVID-19 quarantine finished just in time for the Christmas break. Monday was a rare day where I was the only person in the house not at work or school. My wife’s school had decided to close a couple of days early due to the pandemic so she only needed to work on Monday morning. She joined me for lunch at home and an extremely indulgent hour or two in front of the TV.

This Christmas week has been a bit of a return to the normal of previous years in that we’ve been able to visit our relatives. The biggest difference is that socialising has been limited in the run-up in order to try and keep ourselves virus-free. We’ve done our lateral flow tests numerous times and nobody in our group seemed to have it, so hopefully we’ve escaped the clutches of the virus for now.

Many people seemed to have ramp down their socialising in a similar way. I assume that this must have caused major problems for bars, restaurants and other entertainment venues with reduced takings in what would normally be a peak time of year. One of my friends who has recently had the virus sent me pictures of a tragically near-empty gig at the Roundhouse. If there’s no government directive to close, I guess the show must go on as the artist, promoter and venue would lose even more money otherwise.

This was a week in which I:

• Enjoyed a wander around town, running errands, stocking up on Christmas food, getting a haircut and buying some last-minute presents.
• Spent a lot of my week trawling through the some 6,500 notes I have accumulated in Evernote, with a view to transferring them out to OneNote once they are in shape. This is step one of my latest quest to sort out my digital life.
• Had a Christmas Eve wander around Ross-on-Wye. I’ve been there so many times, but every time I look I notice something new. This time it was ancient almshouses that the plaque tells us were repaired in 1575. Apparently they were built in the 14th century and are still inhabited today. I don’t think I had ever noticed the inscription on the Man of Ross House either, despite it sitting in a prominent spot in the town.

• Had a wonderful Christmas Day with a bigger group than usual of my extended family. After five minutes of arriving at their house I wasn’t hungry for the entire rest of the day. Wonderful food and great company.
• Went out for a couple of Christmas runs. I’m now walking around like a very poor excuse for a John Wayne. It would be great to keep up with a bit of running so that this doesn’t happen every time. I’ll try and weave it in around my indoor cycle rides when I can.
• Ploughed my way through most of East of Eden, the latest in my chronological journey of John Steinbeck’s works.
• Enjoyed watching Mare of Easttown. A great story, superbly acted, with some unexpected twists. We also started watching Only Murders In The Building, which is great just to see Steve Martin and Martin Short together again.
• Worked my way through the first few Billy Joel albums after receiving a beautiful vinyl boxed set for Christmas. I know his most famous songs but have never listened to one of his albums, so it’s a new adventure. So far so good. It was interesting to read about his first album being such a mess from a mastering standpoint; the version I have sounds fine to me.

Next week: Another week off. Hoping for a break in the rain so that we can get back out on our road bikes after forced hiatuses due to COVID-19 and Christmas. A planned family day out in London. And I’m turning 45.

This week was continued in isolation after my positive tests for COVID-19. I am so fortunate that my symptoms were mild. By midweek I felt as though I was ‘over the hump’ of the illness and more or less back to normal. It coincided with a relatively easy week on my indoor bike training programme and I managed to get back in the saddle again.

Working for a company with headquarters in South Africa, December is always a quiet month which gets progressively more so as the calendar moves towards Christmas. A number of people in the team took advantage of the SA public holiday on Thursday to start their Christmas/summer holidays early, and some team members in London decided to follow their lead.

The quiet time gave me a chance to catch up on my project work. Having lots of time to myself also precipitated one of my occasional digital crises, where I find myself questioning my whole workflow for getting things done. I was useful to write it all out on a whiteboard and identify where things aren’t working. I have identified some actions to sort it out and am hoping that I’ll get a chance to make progress with them over Christmas. I’ll try and write up my thinking.

I now find myself coming out of isolation and having a rare day off coming up where everyone else in my family will be at work or school. It’ll be interesting to venture into town and see how busy it is given the ongoing massive rise in COVID-19 cases here in the UK. It still feels like we are walking on eggshells as we head towards Christmas, with nervousness as to whether we’ll be able to travel to see our families.

This was a week in which I:

• Reviewed the latest iteration of the architecture document for our door access upgrade in one of our offices.
• Restocked the backlog of Kanban cards relating to the projects under my name, including the door access upgrade, mandatory compliance call recording for Teams and a migration to Teams telephony in two of our offices.
• Reviewed a long list of items to get done next year in our office in Asia along with our local team member there.
• Caught up with our key IT infrastructure vendor on a list of outstanding actions across a number of projects.
• Met with another vendor of digital signage software and had a demo of their system.
• Continued a small amount of tinkering with the digital signage that I have up and running on a Raspberry Pi. To fully test it I need to take it into the office and ‘soak test’ it for a period of time, which now won’t happen until next year.
• Met with a new member of the team who will be working with us in 2022 on TableauCRM development.
• Reviewed our department risk board along with the rest of our management team.
• Had a ‘random coffee’ with a colleague working in our Global Markets team. We had met through the random pairing system before, but roughly 18 months ago. It was great to catch up again.
• Cancelled my Sky Sports subscription for the F1 off-season. I’ll be calling again in 90 days to re-enable it when we’re ready to go racing again.
• Joined a bunch of other people from the WB-40 podcast Signal group in the running of the World Cup of Biscuits. Plain old shortbread controversially came out on top.
• Created my first page of a knowledge base section on this site, with more to follow.

Next week: Out of quarantine in time for Christmas. Continuing to prioritise getting my digital life in order.

It was inevitable, really. I had a late night on Wednesday, staying in the office after work to remotely attend a school governor meeting. On Thursday I woke up feeling a bit rubbish, but put it down to my late night and the general lethargy that everyone I talk to seems to have right now. As I was due to head into the office I did a lateral flow test before breakfast; it came up negative so I figured it was just fatigue. In the office I felt peaky all day, keeping my suit jacket on because I felt cold and generally not feeling myself. My colleagues suggested it could be anything else other than COVID-19 as there now seems to be other illnesses circulating again. I left work on time and did another test as soon as I got home, but this time it was positive. A lot of Thursday night was then spent messaging people I had been in close contact with, and sending my apologies for events I was due to attend.

I’m now a couple of PCR tests in and haven’t heard the results of either of them, presumably because the testing facilities are busy once again. On Saturday I had a flurry of text messages from the NHS telling me that all four of us need to isolate until the end of Tuesday due to suspected close contact with the Omicron variant. The rules seem to be changing so even if I find that I’ve got the new variant myself it’s not clear when the rest of the house will be allowed out.

With Omicron looking to have an indoor R rate of 60 (yes, sixty) and two doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine offering zero protection against getting a symptomatic infection from it, it is looking very dicey to go anywhere this close to Christmas.

The illness itself has thankfully been very mild. I’ve had a little bit of light-headedness, a sore throat, and generally felt quite tired, just like with any other kind of lurgy. I even decided to go on the turbo trainer on Sunday for an hour; it was interesting to see that my heart rate was around 10bpm higher than it usually would be. My wife managed to get to a walk-in booster clinic on Saturday and so hopefully she’s better protected against catching it from me or anyone else.

There’s only one week of work left before I have a couple of weeks off for Christmas, and I’m going to be spending the next few days entirely at home.

This was a week in which I:

• Was so happy to see the team go live with our new IT infrastructure stack in the final city that we support. We now finally have all of our five offices live on our new infrastructure, four years after the programme started. They did an incredible job to work around some last-minute difficulties.
• Agreed a high-level approach for venturing into in-house software development and data science within our team. There’s lots to think about as we end the year, and I’m excited for what we could be working on in 2022.
• Prepared for IT governance meetings with the CEOs of two of our country offices. One of the meetings was moved to January but the other went ahead successfully.
• Met with our audio/visual vendor to review issues with our current meeting room setup from a technology perspective and agreed next steps to move us towards a better solution.
• Met with peers a couple of times to discuss our approach to our strategic vendors and any risks we have to manage around them right now.
• Experimented with Yodeck and piSignage on two Raspberry Pi 4s as potential digital signage solutions. Yodeck seems very simple to use and has tons of features such as auto-emergency warnings and the ability to see remotely exactly what is being output on each monitor. piSignage was far from intuitive and I discounted it within a few minutes of using it.

• Attended a monthly update from our Governance and Control and Cybersecurity teams.
• Took part in another Team Effectiveness workshop with the leadership team in our department.
• Enjoyed a fascinating talk from our CTO on microprocessors, business and geopolitics.
• Attended our business unit’s year-end ‘town hall’-style meeting, a hybrid session with people joining from six cities around the world.
• Loved hearing reflections on 2021 from the whole department in our final team meeting of the year.
• Joined a ‘Digital Showcase’ meeting for a demo of a new tool being offered to clients.
• Spent a number of hours reviewing a myriad of documents ahead of our school Full Governing Board meeting, the last one of the year. Originally we were due to meet in person and go for a meal afterwards but we shifted it to an online meeting as soon as news of Omicron started to spread. Given that I tested positive the day after the meeting, this was a great move. Hopefully we can get together early next year. We welcomed a new governor to the board and said goodbye to two others. Governor recruitment and retention is a never-ending job.
• Picked up a new Apple Pencil for my iPad. I’d been using a capacitive stylus again for the past few weeks and it doesn’t begin to compare to the Pencil.
• Expanded the suite of KP105 smart plugs in the house to remotely control more of our things. I’ve had a problem with our video doorbells occasionally going offline when the Wi-Fi gets choppy, with the only solution being to turn them off and on again. Having these plugs means that I can remotely power cycle them to get them back on the network.
• Spent a lot of time in front of the F1. I don’t think I’ve ever been so excited for a race as this one. Sadly I think that the result wasn’t fair, and I’m sure we’ll be talking about the race and World Championship result for weeks and months to come.

Next week: The last working week of the year. Hoping to see out the rest of my COVID-19 infection trouble-free, and keeping my fingers crossed for everyone we’re meant to be catching up with over Christmas.

The combination of the calendar flipping over to December and the feeling of deja-vu from the new growing presence of the Omicron COVID-19 variant meant that this week felt like a slog. One of my Internet friends described it as having a browser tab in your head whirring away, burning CPU cycles and causing your cooling fan to spin up without knowing exactly which tab is causing it. I know exactly what he means. Lots of friends and colleagues reported feeling the same way. There are only two weeks of work remaining and it feels as though people are hanging on for a break.

We’re suddenly in the depths of winter here in the UK, with freezing cold temperatures, overnight snow and days where the sun never quite makes it out of bed. I’ve had the oil heater on in my home office and have tried not to heat the house when everyone else is out at school and work.

This was a week in which I:

• Continued to think about the ideas in the book A Seat At The Table. Wondered if a logical conclusion from the ideas in the book is that IT as a department largely disappears and is integrated with the individual business teams.
• Took part in a workshop to tackle the latest thinking on our department’s strategy.
• Watched with delight as our team completed the work to get Teams telephony up and running in another of our offices. Incredible teamwork at odd hours to get it up and running.
• Revised the detailed cost profile for moving to Teams for telephony in the two remaining offices that are still on the old platform. Submitted the final documentation for some prerequisite work to enable mandatory compliance recording before we go ahead with a move. Caught up with colleagues on a vendor proposal to do the work of the migration.
• Reviewed the latest quote for a replacement door access system for one of our offices.
• Created and submitted a timeline showing the key events from our department’s perspective for one of our locations. This is the second of five that I need to create over the next week or so.
• Took delivery of two Raspberry Pi 4s and accessories. We plan to experiment with some cheaper digital signage solutions than the one we started piloting last year pre-pandemic.

• Met with the COO of one of our offices to talk through some administrative/IT challenges.
• Agreed some changes to our remote access protocols.
• Heard that my employer will be implementing a mandatory COVID-19 vaccination policy, at least in the country where it is headquartered.
• Had my final one-on-one coaching session as part of the team effectiveness work that we have been doing. It was super useful, and uncovered some things that I hadn’t been conscious of.
• Attended the latest quarterly LeanKit product update. Their format is excellent, going through a reverse-Kanban ‘done’, ‘doing, ‘to-do’ list. I’ve been thinking about how we could potentially reuse this format internally to present our work to a wider audience.
• Enjoyed a random coffee with a close colleague that I work with every week.
• Heard the sad news that we lost a governor from our school governing board for personal reasons. We’ve now got some important roles that we need to distribute across the rest of the team.
• Attended the school Pay Committee meeting. I’ve taken on the role of clerk of the committee so now have some minutes to write up.
• Joined the latest Herts for Learning Headteacher Update. As usual, they crammed information into every nook and cranny of the meeting and didn’t waste a minute. It’s so hard to put the time aside to go into all of the topics in sufficient detail.
• Booked in two plumber visits over the next couple of months to fix a small leak and to service our boiler.
• Dabbled with some Christmas shopping. As usual, my wife has got us organised and we only have a couple of people left to purchase gifts for.
• Bought our Christmas Tree and put it up in the kitchen. Decorated our house in the usual way, with tinsel everywhere. We seem to be packing the decorations away and getting them out again so quickly now. It’s slightly terrifying.
• Had two wonderful dinners out, on Friday with some old friends at The Greyhound in Wigginton (GIGANTIC portions) and then on Saturday with more friends and our collective entourage of children at the newly reopened and refurbished Crystal Palace in Berkhamsted. I feel so well-fed after this weekend.

• Enjoyed another Saturday morning of cycling with my eldest son and the Berkhamsted Cycle Club riders. I love being out on my bike, and it’s great to have a reason to get out so early on a Saturday.

• Ran the line for my eldest son’s football match at Sarratt. Possibly the muddiest line in history, causing me to ballet my way around so that I didn’t end up a laughing stock on the floor.

• Heard a Steely Dan album for the first time, thanks to Album Club.
• Finished The Beatles: Get Back. What a fantastic programme. Eight hours was the right length.

• Watched the brilliantly exciting Saudi Arabian F1 Grand Prix. I’m so excited for next weekend’s championship decider.

Next week: A management workshop and a year-end event at work, the last school governor meeting of the year, a visit from a plumber and we find out who the next F1 World Champion will be.

The working week only lasted until Thursday as I took my first day off since the summer. The children were off school on Friday, so we had decided to use their long weekend to go to Bristol in order to meet our five-week old nephew/cousin. He is beautiful. It is always so lovely to meet up with them, and great to see how well they are coping with their new addition.

On Friday evening we wandered from our hotel over to their house for dinner and then Saturday saw us pottering around Bristol for a few hours, meeting up again to enjoy a pizza lunch at the Left Handed Giant ‘brewpub’.

Our late Saturday afternoon journey home was a cruise-control affair until we hit the M25. An accident happened about half a mile ahead of us; we watched in horror as Waze started to add to its estimated arrival time in gigantic chunks. Fortunately, both the accident and the delay ended up not being too bad. We started moving again just as I was contemplating how we would manage a cold overnight stay in the fast lane, toying with the question of who in my family I might have to eat first.

The first few days of the week were hectic both at work and in my school governor role. My wife and I usually meet up to watch something on TV at the end of the day but it wasn’t until Wednesday that we got together.

On Wednesday one of my boys spent some time in the hospital to get his back checked out after landing badly in football practice. Happily it was just bruised. It is amazing how quickly the ‘broken telephone’ works its magic, with people texting to ask us whether he was ok after breaking his back!

This was a week in which I:

• With one of my colleagues, reviewed a slide deck that they have put together for an upcoming meeting. I realised in the moment that I love doing this kind of work.
• Had an introductory meeting with a vendor that specialise in technologies and business tools that we are looking to expand our footprint in. Unfortunately it overran and I had to leave the meeting just as we were getting to the practical detail.
• Met with the vendor we are working with to replace a door access system in one of our offices. It is so much better to get on the phone instead of emailing back and forth.
• Refined my slide deck on compliance recording based on feedback from a colleague.
• Discovered that two recently-purchased servers are missing components that we need to get them up and running. I am hoping that the parts are in stock with our vendor and it won’t introduce a significant delay to one of our key projects.
• Put together some communications, one for our CEO and another for the whole office, ahead of a move to Teams telephony for one of our sites over this weekend. The team have been working very hard to make the switch a success. I’m looking forward to hearing feedback from staff once they get to use it.
• Had a meeting to agree our licencing approach for one of our videoconferencing solutions as it comes up for renewal.
• Dealt with some technical difficulties with one of our key meeting rooms as a five-hour executive workshop began. We managed to get the hybrid meeting going with the help of the new Owl cameras, laptops and a lot of chargers. We configured a pair of Owls together for the first time and the effect was pretty good. All of the attendees said that the new cameras had a positive impact on the event. We’re now thinking about how we can make them a permanent feature in the room, possibly even replacing the traditional videoconference camera that we have at one end of the space.
• Used one of the Owls to run a very successful relaxed hybrid meeting in our office collaboration space. I think they are going to be very popular for any large meeting.
• Wrote and published an introduction to the Owl cameras on our business unit-wide Teams channels. I love how Teams has introduced blogging to organisations via the back door.
• Updated our detailed support, monitoring and maintenance spreadsheet to reflect where we are with our new infrastructure across all of our sites. The next step is to discuss the gaps we need to address and agree how we will close them.
• With my peers, took part in a leadership workshop based around the CliftonStrengths exercise that we completed a few weeks ago.
• Met for a ‘random coffee’ with a colleague in the Wealth Management team who joined the company during lockdown last year.
• Had a wonderful impromptu office lunchtime discussion that ultimately ended up with us discussing psychological safety. It’s interesting how often our lunchtime chats end up getting very deep and meaningful or putting the world to rights, and it says something about us as a team that we feel comfortable to have these kind of discussions.
• Prepared for and chaired our Finance, Premises and Personnel Committee meeting at school. A colleague has taken over from me as Chair, but they couldn’t make the meeting so I stepped back into my old role.
• Met with our School Improvement Partner to hear feedback from her visit to the school. They school as so much to be proud of and it was great to hear that reflected in her update.
• Completed our Headteacher’s annual review and set objectives for the coming year.
• Heard someone say the phrase “the woke agenda” as if there is actually such a thing.
• Enjoyed a couple of random rounds of mini golf at Jungle Rumble in Bristol.

• Made it up and out on Sunday morning to run the line at my eldest’s football match only for it to be called off within five minutes of us arriving. The ground was rock solid and unplayable. The right decision but a shame that they didn’t get a game.
• Finished watching Squid Game. Yes, it was gory, but it was also profoundly thoughtful and moving in places.
• Worked my way through and episode and a bit of Get Back. It’s everything I would have wanted it to be. I was more than a little obsessed with The Beatles as a teenager and had read about, but never seen, their Let It Be film. With most musical documentaries I always want them to be longer and more indulgent, so eight hours of this seems about right for my tastes.
• Started reading East of Eden, continuing my journey through the work of John Steinbeck. I haven’t read this one since I was a teenager. A forward-thinking uncle bought me a copy for Christmas one year and I remember it feeling epic and important even though I probably didn’t fully appreciate it.

Next week: Another busy week, and dinner with old friends.

There was a lot going on this week. I had too many late nights and early mornings, and must have had a lot on my mind as most mornings I kept waking up an hour before I needed to. By Friday evening I was frazzled, but I still managed to get my son and I up early on Saturday morning for the weekly cycling club ride.

At work my department has an agreement to go in together every Wednesday. This week I couldn’t make it as I had been asked to join a workshop starting at 7am and had to go to school for a meeting in the late afternoon. I topped and tailed the week with days in the office instead. It felt good to be there on Friday as I had a few physical things to get done in the office, taking delivery of some new equipment and getting it set up. It made a change from the days where I’ve felt I needed to be in the office just to reach a time quota.

Reading Ton Zijlstra’s weeknotes about COVID-19 entering his house in the Netherlands¹ made me realise how different things are in different places. He has been prepping for a call from the track and trace team, a concept that I haven’t thought about for a while — is track and trace even still a thing in the UK given that close contacts of confirmed cases no longer need to isolate here? Mask wearing on public transport seemed to drop off a cliff this week; no more than half of the people I encountered on my commute were wearing them. In a coffee queue in London, someone used ‘air quotes’ when talking about COVID-19 as if it didn’t exist — it seems that while this is a marginal view, it is far less marginal than it used to be.

This was a week in which I:

• Started the week with an unwelcome gift from the cats. Whoever told me that cats make great pets as they generally look after themselves must have been thinking of something else.
• Had a number of very useful discussions in the team about how we go from being the IT infrastructure team to being able to add value ‘higher up the stack’. There is lots to be done. Reading A Seat at the Table was useful for thinking about this.
• Picked up a new project relating to our organisation over the next few years that needs to be planned ‘from right to left’.
• Participated in our quarterly IT architecture review forum and approved the proposal for some new software infrastructure at each of our sites.
• Reviewed the current data for cost recovery to our part of the organisation for the big group programme.
• Reviewed a draft standard for software and firmware updates.
• Reviewed a subset of our team’s risk log relating to backups and restores.
• Saw the team finish failover testing and complete their preparation for moving to Teams telephony at one of our sites, and prepare for some physical infrastructure work at another site. We still have a lot to get done in the closing weeks of this year.
• Joined two town hall meetings on the same day, one with our Engineering/IT colleagues across the globe and another with everyone in our division of the company. The push to go back to the office is strong.
• Abandoned the all-day workshop where I was a remote participant as it was too difficult to take part.
• Took delivery of three Meeting Owl Pros and spent time setting them up. I used one for a meeting on Friday afternoon to good effect and plan to get colleagues outside of IT to use them next week. Our main goal is to try and make hybrid meetings less painful for remote staff, and from our limited experience they do seem to go some way to achieving it.
• Retired my four-year-old iPad and got up and running with a new iPad Pro. The magic keyboard is a very cool piece of engineering, and I’m loving the new trackpad.
• Watched a talk by one of my colleagues on the project to implement Aadhaar, a unique identity number in India which has vastly reduced costs for businesses that use it.
• Had a superb one-on-one coaching session, the third of four. We covered a lot of ground. It is so useful to have someone independent to talk to about challenges at work and to reflect on things that I can do differently, and where I have already achieved some of my goals. I have the final session booked in for a couple of weeks from now.
• Attended a Meetup on Use-Cases or User Stories… or Both?. The presence of Mike Cohn drew me in. Conclusion: both are useful in the right hands in the appropriate situations.
• Joined a webinar to get an overview of Microsoft extended detection and response (XDR). It was a perfect length, with just enough information to get the gist of the toolset without all of the details.
• Attended the school where I am a governor in order to hear from all of the subject leads to understand whether they have a knowledge and/or skills focus and why, what schemes are used and what the strengths and priorities are. It was an invaluable session. The distinction between knowledge and skills was particularly interesting — for science, for example, skills have been much harder to teach remotely and therefore there is more catching up to do. I wonder if this observation is equally applicable for adult remote working too?
• Took part in a vision, mission and strategy session for the school with fellow governors. Every time I have been involved in this kind of work the definition of those terms has always been unclear; there seems to be a myriad of interpretations out there. Despite those challenges, we had a good conversation about how to reorganise the work done so far and how to take it forward.
• Met with Joe McFadden and Olivia Partington of CarbonThirteen to discuss the Climate Emergency and how we are approaching it as a school.
• Enjoyed a brilliant club ride with yet another wonderful group of people on Saturday morning.
• Ran the line for two football matches in a row on Sunday. I love it when both of my son’s matches are local and the timings work out like that.
• Watched the second and final part of Ed Balls’ documentary on social care. It’s a whole world that I didn’t know or think much about prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Spent time fixing broken YouTube embeds on this blog. Something changed in WordPress which meant that anything with a youtu.be URL didn’t render so these all needed updating to the equivalent youtube.com URLs.

Next week: A packed working week, more school governor meetings and a day off to meet the newest member of our family.

A really busy week where I felt I was juggling lots of things, but never to the point where it felt out of control. I spent Monday and Wednesday in the office and had one or two chance meetings which wouldn’t have otherwise happened, but there were very few people in on either day. The trains are getting busier with each passing week, but are still quite a way from being as full as they were pre-pandemic. People are getting on with things, which make notices about COVID-19 from my children’s school to say that they are re-introducing more safety protocols quite jarring to read.

I had to spend a few evenings catching up with small pieces of work that I had promised to complete by the next day, including prepping for more school governor meetings. My working week finished with two consecutive 7am meetings with teams in South Africa, the first of which that frustratingly got cancelled at 6:59am. Starting that early meant that I couldn’t go on my bike first thing, but I made up for it with a rare evening session on the turbo trainer.

Our Virgin Media Internet service has been very flaky in our street this week. Going to the office on Wednesday meant that I avoided a lot of the issues. Despite the frustration of dealing with their customer service processes, I was still reflecting on the fact that our IT is more resilient when we are dispersed. In our company, this outage impacted only one person, whereas an ISP failure to one of our offices may impact everyone working there.

This was a week in which I:

• Ran a short review of our department’s delivery roadmap and checked how we are progressing with items scheduled for this quarter. We’ve made big strides this year with our ‘ways of working’ and I’m developing some views as to how we can improve it further as we head into 2022.
• Ran two more meetings on our Teams recording proposal. We’re now at the point where we’ve agreed what we want to do and it is with me to write it up and circulate the draft.
• Completed the business case for implementing Teams telephony in two of our locations. It will pay off in the long term even before we factor in the better user experience and decreased complexity of our environment.
• Joined a meeting to discuss a data protection law in one of our locations.
• Had a number of meetings relating to firewalls and routing on our network and agreed next steps both from a technical and a process perspective.
• Was pleased to hear that the pitch we gave at the end of last week for our big group programme has been taken up by one of the senior leaders on the team. If we can get something up and running it could have a big benefit to all of our clients and internal teams.
• Met with colleagues to discuss how we can add capacity to a delivery team that would be dedicated to us, without necessarily funding a whole person.
• Continued reading A Seat At The Table by Mark Schwartz. Reading the book comes at a perfect time for me as I am looking at how we try to refocus the role of IT at our organisation and bring everyone else along on the journey.
• Had an impromptu discussion with a colleague about a project we ran in London last year, and the gaps that remain in our other locations. The gaps present a good opportunity to leverage the ideas that IT is not a ‘contractor’ or ’order taker’, but can work collaboratively with people in other teams.
• Was given a demo of a digital signage solution. We are looking at replacing what we have in our main office with a view to rolling out the solution to all of our offices globally. There seems to be a whole range of functionality and prices out there. We are in the process of purchasing a couple of Raspberry Pis with PoE HATs to experiment with.
• Watched an interesting talk given by our CTO on The Importance of Core Infrastructure.
• Had my work laptop migrated to Windows 11 in order to test it along with a number of other people in the team. It’s less of a jump than it seems from the screenshots in the media; at first glance it looks like Windows 10 with the task bar icons centred. The improvements are subtle, but seem good so far.
• Joined a PlanView webinar on Agile Planning Across Disparate Teams and Tools. PlanView seem to lean in heavily on using TaskTop as an integration tool, which seems to do an excellent job.
• Had a ‘random coffee’ with the newest member of our support team. It was good to spend some time with him.
• Had a catch-up with the Headteacher and Chair of Governors at the school where I am a governor. I am always in awe of the work the school staff do and how undervalued their roles are. They are incredible.
• Joined the rest of the school Governing Board for a meeting on prepping for Ofsted, collectively answering a number of questions that had been gathered together from various sources by our Chair.
• Took part in a meeting to discuss the draft results of a Hertfordshire County Council Commissioned School Visit. This was a deep-dive into our management of our Pupil Premium allocation. It was a positive meeting; it was very useful to get outside scrutiny and feedback.
• Completed the Modern Governor training module on the Pupil Premium.
• Reviewed the draft terms of reference document for our planned school Curriculum Committee.
• Reviewed the Governors Programme of Business for the year with the Chair.
• Scheduled a school Pay Committee meeting.
• Met with an online friend that I know from the WB-40 podcast Signal group and one of his colleagues to discuss environmental sustainability in schools.
• Solved a problem with my Ubiquiti Unifi Protect cameras where they didn’t seem to be capturing events consistently. It looks as though they need to be set to ‘always record’ after a recent software update.
• Took delivery of a new sofa that we ordered in July after we found that the previous one wouldn’t fit in the house. We weren’t expecting it until Christmas, so it’s a great result that it’s already here.
• Spent some hours in the garden gathering up the mass of leaves that were already scattered across our back lawn. I’ll have to repeat the process in a couple of weeks once the rest are down.
• Refereed a football match for the first time in years. There seems to be a shortage of qualified refs and we struggled to find one for Sunday’s Under 15 game. I put my hand up because I thought it would be better than one of the managers doing it. I was nervous, and spent an hour on Sunday morning watching YouTube videos to remind myself of some of the details. The match went really well and I ended up enjoying it.

• Enjoyed a Saturday morning club ride. It was damp, and I ended up with my first puncture in many months on my way up one of the climbs. Despite needing to change the inner tube, we still made it back to the cafe for coffee and cake at the same time as everyone else.

• Enjoyed Album Club #129. Not an album that I would ever pick up and listen to on my own, which made it a perfect choice.
• Watched a few superb music programmes on iPlayer. I first finished off Soul America which I had started watching last year. When Nirvana Came To Britain was superb; it is shocking to see how small their window of fame was. The first two episodes of The 80s – Music’s Greatest Decade? with Dylan Jones have been enjoyably fresh, with lots of footage beyond the usual clips that get brought back for this kind of show. Trevor Horn at the BBC is an excellent tour through so many of the songs that he was involved in (although not all of them are my cup of tea and I did end up skipping a few.)
• My wife and I have also been making good use of our Now TV subscription with Dexter: New Blood, Succession and Curb Your Enthusiasm all appearing on our screen throughout the week. It’s a novelty to have to wait for new episodes to be released each week again.

Next week: Another typically busy week, with more school governor meetings and a couple of days in the office.

Clocks in the UK went back by an hour at the weekend, which means that mornings will be a little brighter for a few weeks. The downside is that it is already dark at five o’clock. I’ve always liked the winter months. The cooler temperatures have been great for walking from Euston to my office in the City of London without feeling too hot and bothered by the time I get there. Now that I’m no longer paying for a season ticket, it saves me a £2.40 tube fare every time I walk.

It felt like a big week work-wise, with some thoughts about how I need to spend my time differently to make a bigger impact on the organisation. I need to find some time in the coming weeks to articulate what’s in my head and see if it can be turned into something actionable.

This was a week in which I:

• Put together a short pitch deck for how we want to change a fundamental experience for our clients, and presented it in a three-hour ‘reboot’ session at the end of the week. The work is part of the big group programme we are participating in. My colleague who would usually deliver the presentation was on holiday, so it fell to me. Unfortunately I had lost the notes I made last week and so had to put together the materials from memory. It went well, but it looks as though we are going to need to think more about how we can do the work ourselves instead of someone else taking the ball and running with it.
• Attended a Design Authority meeting for the big group programme.
• Had another detailed discussion on the prerequisites for moving to Teams telephony in two of our country offices. Agreed a long list of actions to follow up on ahead of the next meeting on Monday, and tried to close out on the ones that I own.
• Reviewed the terms and conditions for a compliance audio recording vendor.
• Agreed an approach for cutting over to Teams telephony in the office where we already have a project in progress.
• Met with Internal Audit to discuss our approach to Cybersecurity and IT Risk.
• Took part in a management team workshop as part of the CliftonStrengths programme that we are participating in.
• Had another one-to-one coaching session. I’m enjoying the interactions and having the time to reflect.
• Saw plans that the team have made to make our office guest Wi-Fi accessible through a QR code that will be shown on the desktop background on our staff laptops.
• Attended an interesting internal presentation on IT Operations.
• Watched a webinar on using the LeanKit advanced reporting API via PowerBI.
• Caught up with almost all of my random paper notes accumulated through meetings in the past couple of weeks, and resolved yet again not to leave it too long before getting through them in the future.
• Renewed my website hosting for another three years. It feels expensive to do it in one go, but given that this site has been around since 2004 I’m unlikely to give up the writing and posting habit just yet. SiteGround have been brilliant since I moved there three years ago. This time they gave me a referral link valid throughout this month for three months’ free hosting for anyone that uses it.
• Got my MacBook Pro back from Apple after sending it away for a battery replacement. The laptop is four years old and the battery had started to complain and cause some erratic behaviour. £205 got me a new battery including pickup from my house by UPS, transport to the repair centre in the Czech Republic and delivery back to my house again. From a note I found in the box it looks as though they have also replaced the top part of the case that surrounds the keyboard. It feels like a new laptop and I’m very pleased.
• Updated our school’s Pay Policy for 2021–2022 based on the new template and circulated the draft to the Governing Board.
• Spent some time updating our draft Schedule of Financial Delegation for school. I hadn’t realised that an updated template existed for this until I stumbled across it. We’re broadly in-line, but will need to review a couple of key changes at our next meeting.
• Plunged into sharing a couple of recent blog posts on LinkedIn. It’s been interesting; there is a much longer tail of interaction than when sharing on Twitter. I had been nervous as it felt as though I was making a link between my work and personal lives, but the experience was a positive one. It was lovely to have a couple of people that I could talk through the pros and cons with before trying it out.
• Took a trip to Deco Audio with a friend who is in the market for a hi-fi. Sadly the budget didn’t quite stretch to the £26,000 Avantgarde Acoustic Uno XDs. There’s something special about going to a hi-fi shop that makes me feel like a kid again.

• Had a lovely night out for dinner at Zaza in Berkhamsted with some old friends. I haven’t laughed so much in a long time.
• After the washout of last weekend, got out and about again for a cycle club ride. A friend joined us for a trial ride and he’s keen to sign up so hopefully I’ll see lots more of him in the future.

• Ran the line at my youngest boy’s football match. It was quite a big loss, but fun nonetheless.

• Have been enjoying Munya’s new album Voyage to Mars which came out this week. Looking forward to getting a vinyl copy sometime next year.

• Finished season 2 of Ted Lasso. The characters are so brilliant and we’ve thoroughly enjoyed it.

Next week: Another busy one with two more days in the office, plenty of work meetings and a few governor sessions too. Plus Album Club #129.

My youngest son finished his COVID-19 isolation on Tuesday, so I was back in the office on Wednesday and Thursday. The family enjoyed having time off of school and work due to half term. The week wiped me out, but the terrible weather meant that I got to have two lie-ins on Saturday and Sunday; I couldn’t face going out cycling in torrential rain on Saturday, and the kids’ football was cancelled on Sunday. I feel wonderfully rested ahead of another busy week.

The trains are getting much busier now, and the journey home during rush hour seemed like a return to normal passenger volume, with no seats available.

This was a week in which I:

• Agreed with the internal and external teams that the latest iteration of our network topology will be the one we use for the final site in our programme, before going back and implementing this updated design on the sites we have already covered.
• Reviewed a draft service agreement for monitoring and maintenance of our IT infrastructure in the latest office that we completed our build. Only one more to go, hopefully by the end of this year.
• Met with a potential new vendor to help us with a physical door access project. Reviewed a draft proposal that they put together following our meeting.
• Reviewed a draft project proposal for software to control our in-office TVs.
• Reviewed a written proposal for implementing RADIUS controllers across our sites.
• Collaborated on preparing for a presentation I need to give next Friday as part of our big group programme. I have all of the notes and now need to prioritise bringing a draft to life in the next couple of days.
• Took part in one of the steering committees for the big group programme, as well as a regular funding meeting.
• Joined a discussion with our Legal team on software to manage contracts and other legal documents.
• Ran one of our bi-weekly change approval board meetings, stepping in due to absences in the team.
• Took part in a monthly Kanban board review with our Governance and Control team.
• Gave a talk to our internal team on various ‘typography tidbits’ that I have picked up over the years, such as the history behind certain characters and how to use interrobangs, en-dashes, em-dashes, non-breaking and zero-width spaces.
• Joined an online ‘town hall’ at the start of the week to hear from three of our senior leaders.
• Had another useful one-on-one session with an external coach. I’m wrestling with how I can ‘plant a flag’ when my interests are broad and general. I have no idea how to pitch myself or what I do, but it seems important to try and do this.
• Spent time thinking and discussing how that we can plant our flag as a team. I have some ideas, but I don’t have the bandwidth to spend enough time on them right now. Started reading A Seat At The Table by Mark Schwartz to see if there is anything there that an help.
• Enjoyed two Album Clubs in successive evenings. The first with three colleagues from work, listening to Prophesy by Nitin Sawhney. The second was our regular Club, revisiting Achtung Baby by U2. Sitting down and focusing on listening to music is so wonderful, and it’s great to have these dedicated, regular spaces to do it.

• Enjoyed an impromptu Sunday lunch out with my family at Rosanna’s in Berkhamsted. Avocado chilli sourdough toast with poached eggs was just what the doctor ordered.

• Had a ton of children come trick-or-treating to our door. My wife had perfectly judged the amount of sweets to buy, and we ended up with just a couple left.
• Subscribed to NOW TV in order to watch series three of Succession. Our TV subscriptions have multiplied over recent weeks and we’ll need to cull them again once we’ve finished watching our current favourite shows. Ted Lasso and the 11th season of Curb Your Enthusiasm are keeping us busy.

Next week: Another hybrid week juggling a couple of days in the office with a need to get some work out of the door by Thursday.

My recent journeys to the office came to a juddering halt this week when my youngest son had a positive COVID-19 lateral flow test result. We quickly booked a PCR appointment for that morning and ended up with a positive result the next day. His symptoms weren’t too bad, but enough to justify some time on the sofa with a duvet. He’s stuck in the house until Wednesday and I can’t go back to the office until then.

The shame about it is that he was offered a vaccine through school a few weeks ago, but something went wrong which meant that he and a lot of other children in his year didn’t receive it. I’ve heard that it was due to the massive (unanticipated?) demand and/or how long the process took, but nobody has told us directly.

I’ve also spoken to my grandmother this weekend; she told me she’s yet to be offered a flu jab or COVID-19 vaccine booster shot, despite being in her 90s. With the numbers of cases, people in hospital and deaths all increasing here in the UK, it doesn’t bode well.

The rest of the family all thankfully tested negative on both our lateral flow and postal PCR tests. I didn’t feel 100% for a couple of days this week, with a general malaise, but now I’m back in the wild again it could have been anything. I am very grateful for the vaccines.

Not going into the office did mean that my week was more productive, with almost a full day on Wednesday put aside to work on writing a draft paper to be taken to one of our governance committees. Since publishing a post a couple of weeks ago about the pros and cons of returning to the office, I’ve had some conversations which have got me rethinking my assumptions. I need to put some time aside to write these thoughts up.

This was a week in which I:

• Welcomed a new nephew to the family. It’s been a while since there was a new addition. His photos are super-cute, and we’re all looking forward to meeting him.
• Put together the first draft of a slide deck to be taken to our firm’s Governance Committee, on the topic of mandatory Compliance recording. There’s a lot to unpack, and I learned so much through the process of putting it together. It got me wondering about how the Engineering/IT team in an organisation has to be made up of generalists who collectively know enough about all of the other parts of the firm in order to support and partner with them.
• Reviewed and made some edits on our regular report for our company board.
• Was contacted by the head of one of our departments to look at a SaaS application that they want to use for our year-end town hall meeting.
• Had a Friday evening all with one of our country CEOs and caught up with all of the recent personnel and structural changes there. Heard that he has been having a poor experience with his home Wi-Fi and dropped him a note with some suggestions for upgrading to a mesh system.
• Unusually, only had one meeting this week on the topic of our big group programme. Caught up on how data take-on is being implemented and what the rollout approach is.
• Got set up with an external telephone number in Teams as part of a pilot. I’ve used it to make a few calls and so far it has been superb on both the desktop and mobile.
• Raised an issue relating to our Teams meeting rooms and how long it takes for the join button in each room to become ‘active’ once someone schedules a meeting there.
• Joined the second CliftonStrengths Team Effectiveness workshop for our Engineering team. I felt as though I got a bit more out of this one.
• Attended one of the most incredible webinars that I have ever been to, on the topic of Creating a trans-inclusive culture hosted by BIE Executive in association with Fighting With Pride. I hadn’t expected to take so many notes! The stories shared really opened my eyes to experiences of the world that are so very different to my own, and what things I need to think about doing to promote inclusivity.
• Took a call from someone surveying clients of my financial advisor, and gave some honest feedback.
• Enjoyed a lovely ‘random coffee’ with a member of our team whom I work with every day but have yet to meet in real life.
• Spent a couple of hours on Saturday putting together a ‘lightning talk’ on typography tidbits, to be delivered next week. I am really looking forward to delivering this.
• Signed off on my tax returns and paid the accountant.
• Ordered a replacement battery for my four-year old MacBook Pro. I had advice that I may want to think about getting a new laptop instead, but I’m not willing to splash out right now. The service from Apple costs £204. For that money, they sent a UPS box sent to my home for me to package up my computer and send it off to the Czech Republic to get its new battery and be sent back to me again. Being both a Mac and Windows user I much prefer using the latter; if it wasn’t for the integration with my mobile devices I might think about switching next time I upgrade.
• Joined the Herts for Learning Chairs’ Strategic Information Briefing. The agenda is always so packed that the two hours fly by. We had updates on finances, cybersecurity, Prevent, improving board diversity, HR, the HfL Chairs’ Network, the role of evidence in supporting a Pupil Premium strategy and an assortment of other items. I need to process my notes to extract all of the actions.
• Had a bit of an up-and-down week on the bike. Events seemed to conspire against my turbo attempts at the start of the week. Unexpectedly Working from home was a big help later on though, and I ended up going out for two lovely rides at the weekend. It was nice to spend more time with my eldest boy. He’s getting faster!

• Had my eldest son attend a health screen through the charity Cardiac Risk in the Young, arranged through his football team. They do amazing work and we’re grateful that he was able to be checked out.
• Finished season one of Ted Lasso. It’s one of the funniest shows I’ve seen in a very long time and we’ve been loving it. Great characters.
• Finally completed reading The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914. As good as it was, it’s been refreshing to pick up something new.
• Bought a vinyl copy of McCartney after the Super Deluxe Edition blog alerted me to a great deal. I’ve loved this album for decades and it is great to have it in my hands again.

Next week: Back in the office again, catching up with my overdue document reviews backlog, and two album club evenings.

A pretty regular week, with another couple of days in the office. On Wednesday I had another reminder of the ‘before times’ when the train turned up at the station and zipped right on past me due to being only two-thirds of the size that it was meant to be. Cue me running down the platform and being stuffed into a sweaty carriage with the other lucky commuters.

The garden is letting me know that autumn is here; we’ve had a few leaves falling down and await the first big windy day to strip them all from the trees.

This was a week in which I:

• Took part in a Friday afternoon workshop on the big strategy questions facing our team and how we think we can hone our mission statement for the coming years.
• Picked up a couple of new short projects, one in our Cybersecurity space and another relating to the physical infrastructure in one of our offices. My team’s workload is maxed out from now until the end of the year.
• Reviewed an updated specification for implementing Teams-based telephony in two of our offices. Asked for reviews from the other internal sub-teams that are involved in the work.
• Continued follow-up work on mandatory call recording.
• Presented the initial proposal for Teams-enabled conference rooms in one of our offices and agreed follow-up actions to revise the plans.
• Reviewed a proposal for monitoring and maintaining our conference room equipment as well as the quality of our voice and video experience globally, and agreed follow-up actions with the team.
• Had a follow-up meeting on a network routing issue and agreed how we will tackle it.
• Took part in a technical discussion on the implementation of authentication technology for our most remote offices, and agreed a simple high-level solution.
• Agreed to terminate an old leased line Internet connection in one of our offices.
• Took part in our monthly risk review meeting. Completed a blog post about how we use LeanKit to facilitate our risk management process.
• Had a broad discussion with a senior manager about what ‘digital transformation’ means and the risks of being left behind as the world changes.
• Caught up with a week’s worth of Kanban board updates across the entire team.
• Attended a talk on the strategy of our Infrastructure and Operations team.
• Watched a ‘town hall’-style demo of a new in-house built software suite that solves business problems we were working on nearly a decade ago. The way in which the old project had gone about things, with a system that had a monolithic architecture, was a textbook example of how not to do it. It was amazing to see the current team doing so many things right using a modern agile methods and a much more incremental approach to the design.
• Was rightly told off by a colleague for having enquired about their family for the third or fourth time and not remembering what they had told me before. I am terrible at this. I spent a few minutes re-looking for a personal CRM system where I can store this information and look it up again. Contacts+ looks good, but the data that you store is accessible by their employees. I’ve settled on using CardHop for now, which is a little step up from the built-in Contacts app on iOS/iPadOS.
• Had a representative from Owl Labs come to our office to give us a demo of the Meeting Owl Pro. The technology is impressive, and offers a significant upgrade for the experience of someone attending a meeting remotely where most of the discussion is happening between participants in a meeting room. It has a camera facing a 360° mirror to obtain a panoramic shot, and then zooms in on up to three places in the panorama from where sound is emanating. It’s not perfect — the video quality is relatively low and the remote participant needs to ensure that Teams shows the incoming video stream in its full width — but it was impressive all the same. I am hoping we can obtain some devices and see how they can work for us as hybrid meetings become much more common again.
• Had a random coffee with a colleague in our Wealth Management team who only joined us six months ago. It’s always interesting to hear about what the experience has been like to move companies when everyone has been out of the office.
• Had an online conversation about whether calendars are openly visible or showing ‘free/busy’ only at work. There is a lot of merit to having an open culture where everyone can see what everyone else is up to, with private appointments being tagged as private, but if you don’t start from that place it would be a massive shift to flip the bit from closed to open. In these days of online calls I would also be concerned with random people having access to digital artefacts that go along with the meeting, such as whiteboards and chats.
• Had a wonderful lunch with an old boss, having not seen him since the start of 2020. He’s from Beijing and has been on assignment here in London for the past six years; talking to him about current events always gives me new perspectives.
• Met with a couple of school governor colleagues to refine the draft vision work that we started some months ago. I was glad to find that it was in pretty good shape and only needed a couple of tweaks. Next step is to socialise it further with the team.
• Joined the 16–17mph group for the Saturday morning club cycle ride as my son was away attempting his Duke of Edinburgh bronze award. I managed to hold my own, particularly up the hills, and only got dropped by some of the riders as we pummelled our way on a long drag back into town. Fun!
• Ran the line for my youngest boy’s football match away at St Albans. A fantastic end-to-end match which they won 2-1.
• Had a wonderful dinner out at Thai Cottage with friends we haven’t seen in a long time.
• Caved in and bought the Bluetones’ Expecting to Fly boxed set and the reissued Return To The Last Chance Saloon. I love these albums. They were definitely one of ‘my’ bands back in the mid-1990s. Having the b-sides from the era of the first album on vinyl is a dream come true — the songs are superb. The pressings sound amazing and I’m glad to have added them to my collection.

• Made a concerted push in my effort to complete  The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914. I’m over 90% done, with nearly 300 highlights made, and I’m now on the final chapter. There is a lot to unpack.
• Mowed and fed the lawns. I find it very difficult to judge whether I’m I under- or overdoing it with the ‘feed and weed’, so I’ll guess I’ll find out in a couple of weeks.
• Started watching Ted Lasso after hearing so many people talk about it, including one of the FT business podcasts that I regularly get in my feed. We’re six episodes in and I love it.
• Received a wonderful gift from Sharon O’Dea in the Netherlands, home of Tony’s Chocolonely. Such a wonderful random thing to do, via the WB-40 podcast Signal group. Thank you!

• Bought a fancy new expensive watch (minus the fancy and expensive) after mine stopped working just after midday on Monday.

Next week: Another couple of days in the office, workshops and coaching, two school governor meetings and an Album Club.