Commuted into London on Monday and Wednesday, the first time I’ve gone in on multiple days in one week since March 2020. A day in the office is exhausting, partly because of the early starts to get there on time, and partly because of all of the distractions that come with being around so many people again. On both days I barely made a dent on my to-do list, and was grateful to be back home again the following days where I could be more productive.

There is an assumption that being together with colleagues is unquestionably better in some sense, and this is an assumption that I have shared. However, I’ve been pointed at the work of Liz Stokoe who is a Professor of Social Interaction at Loughborough University. She debunks the myth that “93% of communication is non-verbal” by asking how we can hold conversations in the dark or develop relationships via the telephone, and states that “(in)effective communicators are (in)effective communicators regardless of modality.” I’m still thinking deeply about this, and how I feel much closer to my colleagues that have always been physically remote to me as we have worked together through the pandemic. I’ve ordered Liz’s book, Talk and have added it to my reading list.

This was a week in which I:

• Vowed never to stay late in the office to attend an optional video meeting again. Being on a Zoom call with Simon Sinek was pretty cool, but with a late finish and a reduced train service I was home way past dinner time. I missed my family.
• Started thinking about the discipline of Service Design as it applies to our business, spurred on by some ideas from our CIO and discussions I have had with the members of the WB-40 community. On their recommendation I have picked up a copy of Lou Downe’s Good Services and hope to get around to reading it shortly. I’m interested in how things differ when the client expects a ’white glove’ service and won’t just be serving themselves via a webpage.
• Joined a meeting with one of our senior business leaders to review the roadmap for the big group programme, its impact on our part of the organisation and how we plan to take it forward. We received so much useful feedback that will help shape the work over the next few months.
• Had a meeting to discuss how we will resource this work.
• Met with a cross-functional team to review our WAN routing strategy.
• Completed some template slides for our 2022 priorities, to be submitted to our business function CIO.
• Attended a ‘masterclass’ on setting learning objectives and linking them to training in the various HR tools.
• Reviewed our draft Operational Risk self-audit ahead of its annual submission.
• Ran a cross-functional meeting to look at mandatory compliance recording and how it fits into a world where there are so many ways of people speaking to each other. I have some follow-up work to do before we meet again in a couple of weeks’ time.
• Reviewed the first draft of our revamped department financial forecast for 2022.
• Picked up a new project to move our endpoint monitoring and antivirus to a new platform over the next few months, and allocated it to one of my team members.
• Had a one-on-one coaching session as part of a broader team effectiveness process within our department. I haven’t had any coaching for quite a few years and it was great to have someone to bounce things off of again. I have some homework to do before the next session in a couple of weeks’ time.
• Took part in a workshop with the rest of the department as part of the same team effectiveness work, based on our CliftonStrengths assessments.
• Attended an update session run by our Corporate Services department to get up to speed with all of the work being done in that space.
• Watched a ‘town-hall’-style overview of a digital solution put in place by our Investment Banking team in South Africa.
• Received an update on our approach to third-party risk management.
• Published two weeks’ worth of Wins, and got our weekly random coffee pairings sent out.
• Joined our school Full Governing Board meeting in-person, at the school, for the first time in 18 months. It was lovely to meet some of the new governors that I have only previously met via Teams. In preparation, I had to review the latest version of Keeping Children Safe in Education as well as a crop of policies. I agreed to continue as vice-chair for another year.
• Had a lovely catch-up call with an ex-colleague that I hadn’t spoken to in a couple of years.
• Enjoyed another Berkhamsted Cycle Club ride on Saturday morning with my eldest son. We tried running in the 15–16mph group this week and had no problems keeping up. The early morning mist was stunningly beautiful, and I spotted a fox as we journeyed along a country lane. We finished the ride with a coffee and croissant at Musette Cafe in Aldbury, before a trip to the local bike shop for a quick tune-up and to buy some mudguards ready for winter group rides.
• Took a trip with my wife to Tring to visit Our Bookshop. They opened in September 2019 and I had bought a few books from them during lockdown via their Bookshop.org website. I was a bit disappointed with how small the shop felt compared to the photos, but they seemed to be doing a fantastic trade with a constant stream of people wandering in. We popped by Musette cafe on the way home for a coffee and cake, my second visit that day.
• Mowed the back lawn, possibly for the last or penultimate time this year as the days draw in.
• Bought a vinyl copy of Designer by Aldous Harding, which sounds superb. The album is my current obsession, and I find myself singing the songs all the time. The videos are striking in a way that I haven’t seen in many years.

• Was very happy to find that Magdalena Bay’s debut album Mercurial World was released on Friday. I bought it without hesitation when it was announced, but will have to wait a few weeks for the vinyl to turn up.

Next week: Another couple of days in the office, a strategy session and meeting another ex-colleague for a catch-up.

A normal week, full of more meetings than usual. Wednesday in the office was good for collaboration but not that great for getting things moved on.

This was a week in which I:

• Ran an internal review of our team’s roadmap, checking how well we did in Q3 against what we said we would deliver, and reflecting on how we take any lessons from this into future quarters.
• Met with colleagues who are establishing a Teams mandatory compliance recording capability, with a view to using it within our part of the organisation.
• Met with Procurement to discuss and agree principles and processes for purchasing IT consultancy in the future.
• Had a one-on-one with a colleague in Beijing, the day after the team completed the new network infrastructure implementation in that office. It was great to know that our connection was flowing through all of our newly configured equipment. Updated our submission for the next local governance committee meeting to reflect that we have now got most of the back-end infrastructure work completed.
• Reviewed the proposed DNS strategy for our part of the organisation.
• Met with our Internet Service Provider in Dubai to discuss our current and future needs in that office.
• Had meeting with a vendor to clarify some details on our planned move to Teams for telephony in London and Dubai, and the support of our telephony infrastructure in all of our offices.
• Had an initial discussion with our head of Operational Risk on our annual self-assessment, and walked through the tools we use to manage our operational risk on an ongoing basis.
• Joined a meeting to discuss our organisation’s ecosystem and platform strategies.
• Had an introductory meeting with an external consultant who is helping us with formulation and articulation of our strategy. Followed this up with a one-on-one meeting later in the week to explore some ideas.
• Met with one of the steering committees for the big group programme and had an update on the architectural approach. Designing and customising a system to be used across so many countries and teams is no simple task. Also reviewed our own internal plans for delivery.
• Attended an interesting talk given by one of our team members on Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), neither of which I previously knew about. DKIM uses DNS to store public encryption keys so that email can be verified as having come from the sender, which seems like a clever idea to me.
• Watched a presentation and demo on a new client-facing part of our website.
• Met with our Marketing and Operational Risk teams to agree a short update to all of our colleagues on the new data loss prevention tool that we rolled out.
• Had a virtual ‘random coffee’ with our Company Secretary. I’m looking forward to bumping into him as we spend more time in the office in the coming weeks.
• Met up with an ex-colleague from our Marketing and Communications team. It was so good to see her, and to reminisce about the work we collaborated on a couple of years ago.
• Published my thoughts on returning to the office, something I had been working on for the past few weeks and thinking about for even longer.
• Interviewed a prospective new school governor. It’s always exciting when somebody new expresses an interest.
• Completed one of our tax returns for the year.
• Reviewed and filed all of my personal scanned documents from the past two years. I need to make this a weekly habit to avoid it becoming a multiple-hour job in future.
• Decided that our wasp nest had to go. The noise inside our house was getting so much louder, and the entrance to the nest was directly overhanging our elderly neighbours’ garden. Chris from Approved Services Pest Control fixed it for us about an hour after I called him.
• Picked up a new road bike for our eldest boy. His recent growth spurts resulted in him outgrowing his old one. I love it that it’s something we can do together, so we decided on an early Christmas and birthday present for him. It had its first outing on the Club ride on Saturday and he seems very pleased with it.
• Ran the line for my youngest boy’s football match. I was so glad that we played on the dry Sunday instead of the washed-out Saturday. They lost for the first time this season but I am sure they will be able to take a lot of lessons from the game.
• Completed my year’s programme of TrainerRoad cycling and started a new one. My training has ramped down a little bit as I have replaced my Saturday and Sunday turbo sessions with a Cycling Club ride and the boys’ football matches. It’ll be interesting to see how much fitness I can keep as we go back to the office.

Next week: Returning to the office for multiple days in the week for the first time since March 2020, an in-person school governor meeting and a Zoom call with Simon Sinek.

I was determined to grab hold of this week and take control of it before it grabbed hold of me. Last week’s lack of my usual exercise routine had me feeling worn out by the time Friday evening rolled around, and I didn’t want to let it happen again. By Friday this week, I had done my usual sessions on the turbo trainer and was ready for another early morning Cycling Club ride on Saturday. On Sunday I ran the line at both of my boys’ football matches, one after the other. By the time I plonked myself on the sofa to watch the Formula One on Sunday afternoon I was ready for a rest.

Cold early autumn mornings were burnt off by the sun and were followed by beautiful warm afternoons. A late summer gang of wasps have moved into a roof cavity of part of our recent extension, but they are as out of the way as can be so we just plan to leave them there. They’ll go eventually, and whatever nest they have created may deter another group from using that same space in future.

The UK seems to have gone bananas again, this time over perceived fuel shortages. I’m grateful that we’d filled up before the news spread that companies were having to ration supplies to their filling stations. Going through town on Sunday afternoon I could see that stations were shut, presumably now out of fuel. It feels like we’ve been living in a cycle of crazy news for the past five years; I’m not sure how much of it is because I follow things much more closely versus the world, and particularly the UK, actually going potty. It’s probably both.

We’ve had a letter home from my childrens’ school to say that they are moving back to having more of a COVID-secure protocol in place, with the return of masks in communal areas and the suspension of assemblies. I know that they are doing everything they can to keep school going, with as many children in school as possible. It feels like a very fragile situation.

This was a week in which I:

• Agreed a plan to terminate a leased line Internet link in one of our smaller offices, saving additional costs.
• Started to look at different approaches for moving to Teams for PSTN calling in one of our offices after receiving a vendor quote for running the service. Strategically we want as many things delivered ‘as a service’ as we can get, but not if it is substantially cheaper to run them ourselves.
• Spoke to one of our regional door access technology vendors in order to refine their quote.
• Spent more time discussing the top-down thinking for our big group programme, how it will impact our part of the organisation and how it will be presented to senior colleagues.
• Reviewed a template to be submitted up the line on our priorities for 2022.
• Completed a series of 360° assessments on my peers as well as my manager ahead of some group and individual coaching sessions.
• Went to the office on Wednesday for the third week in a row. There were more people on the morning commute but happily a greater percentage of them were wearing masks. The journey home was something else though. The office is definitely starting to get noticeably busier, with many people joining various Teams meetings from there throughout the week. This week was good for bumping into lots of different members of the team as well as business colleagues from wider areas and having those impromptu chats that don’t happen at home, but another reminder of the challenge of trying to get things done in an open plan space.
• Joined a ’town hall’ meeting with our regional CEO and members of his management team. It had been a while since we had one and it was great to see so many people again. The team running the session gave a tour of our London office via Teams on a mobile phone, and it struck me how much confidence our colleagues now have in both the tools that we have given them and how to use them effectively. We did worry when the camera wandered through areas of the building where we have no Wi-Fi, but it all held together.
• Used a meeting room to put the Logitech Rally equipment through its paces. We had only installed this equipment a few weeks before the first lockdown in March 2020 as part of our office refurbishment and I want to get familiar with it. The technology is excellent, and we are looking at how we can expand its use so that we can join more than just Teams meetings from the devices.
• Caught up with all of the recent work items raised and completed across the team’s Kanban boards.
• Completed the background reading and then chaired our first school governor meeting of the year, our Finance, Premises and Personnel Committee. A governor colleague has said that they are willing to take up this Committee Chair role, so I am stepping down from this position after many years. We also received a very useful update on the latest School Development Plan.
• Reviewed the draft minutes for the FPP Committee and completed most of the actions that were assigned to me.
• Took delivery of a new dishwasher, the second to make it up the driveway after the delivery guys dropped the first one. Doing the washing up was a novelty for a couple of days, but I am grateful that we’ve automated most of the process again.
• Hosted the first Album Club with three other guys from work, via Teams. I played Joe Jackson’s Night And Day album from 1982. As requested, they didn’t hold back on their thoughts on the record. I’m loving any excuse to sit down and listen, really listen, to music at the moment. Looking forward to hearing what the next host will play.
• Had Friday night dinner at a friends’ house. It’s so lovely that we don’t need a babysitter anymore and can just nip out for a couple of hours, safe in the knowledge that things will be fine at home.
• Enjoyed another Saturday morning out with my eldest son and some lovely cyclists of Berkhamsted Cycle Club for a club ride.
• Bought a bunch of records from a market stall in town. They were all £2 to £4 each so I figured I could take a gamble. Some are better quality than others, but they all seem quite well-used. I’d been after a copy of the Bee Gees’ Spirits Having Flown for a while. Sadly the title track jumps, so unless I can repair it I’ll have to stick with the digital version. What a beautiful song.

• Continued to plough on with The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914 by Richard J Evans. It’s very interesting and well-written, but I feel like I have been reading it for ages. I’m looking forward to some lighter reads and a little bit of fiction again once I’m done.

Next week: An incredibly meeting-heavy work week, the final one before we start to go back to the office more regularly in London.

A really busy week where I generally felt quite tired for the majority of the time. Partly this was due to lack of exercise; I missed my Wednesday session due to going into the office, on Thursday I had to be up and ready for a scheduled delivery at home and on Friday I prioritised sleep, having had people over to my house until very late the night before. I drew a line under the week at 6pm on Friday and went out for a much-needed run.

This was a week in which I:

• Turned my explainer on how Azure Information Protection works into a set of slides. I then used Zoom to record me giving the presentation, and uploaded it onto an internal Teams channel. Hopefully it will go some way to reducing the number of issues my colleagues have been having. I really enjoyed putting it together, with a few photos from Unsplash and animated GIF ‘screenshots’ created with SnagIt.
• Attended our monthly Information Risk Steering Group.
• Met with our chosen vendor to review the technical implementation document for rolling out Teams telephony in one of our offices in the next few months.
• Took part in our monthly department Risk Management meeting. Noted that we don’t always need to wait for a technical risk mitigation; sometimes just raising awareness with people is enough to start to reduce our risks.
• Attended our quarterly Architecture Design Authority meeting and reviewed a proposed Infrastructure and Operations strategy.
• Joined a workshop on our network’s DDI (DNS, DHCP and IPAM — yes, I can’t believe there is an acronym for a set of acronyms) setup. We agreed a direction of travel, which should ultimately result in a third formal iteration of the design we started out with in 2018.
• Spent another Wednesday working in London. There were more people on the commute with fewer masks, and more people in the office. Our team have now decided that this is the best day for us all to be in, given that we now have a Wednesday ‘meeting free’ policy.
• Hosted a talk by a colleague to our internal team on the Equity Sales business. It was very interesting — there was so much material and so many questions that we ran out of time.
• Joined a number of meetings relating to our big group programme. Had further discussions on the business case and timeline for the work, as well as how it fits into our broader objectives.
• Attended a ‘digital showcase’ meeting on our renewable energy project funding platform.
• Was delighted to see one of our biggest sub-teams getting on top of the contents of their Kanban board; the results shown on their cumulative flow report is a tribute to all of the hard work that they have been putting in.
• Had a random coffee with a colleague in our Wealth Management business.
• Completed my CliftonStrengths assessment as part of the Team Effectiveness work that we are doing. I can see myself in the results, but I am not sure if this is because the assessment is ‘accurate’ or that it is designed to feel this way to everyone no matter what their results are. It’ll be interesting to see the results from the rest of the team and start to discuss them.

• Started using a Logitech MX Master 3 mouse in my home office. It’s absolutely lovely, not least because it allows me to switch between Bluetooth connections with my work PC, iPad and home computer at the touch of a button. I’m still learning its features, and accidentally discovered the handy audio and video mute buttons in Teams while I was on a call.
• Attended two online webinars in succession on Tuesday night and started reflecting on my life choices a few minutes into each. Unless the speaker is incredible, the topic is deeply interesting, or there is a high degree of interactivity, I find myself quickly losing interest at these events. Pre-pandemic, when we went to Meetups in person, if the presentation was poor there was at least the promise of networking afterwards. Mostly I sat there wondering why I was taking part live when I could put the recordings into a ‘watch later’ queue. However, once I had turned up, it was difficult to leave without being rude.
• Nearly took delivery of a new dishwasher after our previous one died following 11 years of what felt like constant use. The delivery guys took our old one away and then dropped the new one on our driveway before it even got to our house. We’ve had to get through a few more days of washing up by hand while we wait for its replacement to arrive next week.
• Took my eldest boy for his regular orthodontist visit.
• Having formally joined Berkhamsted Cycling Club, went out for an early morning club ride with my son. There were only four of us in our group but it was a lovely ride. A misty start gave way to sunshine on a day that made you feel grateful to be alive. I’ve picked up some official cycling tops for the club so next week we will look the part as well.

• Ran the line for my youngest son’s football match. They won 4-1 which now means that they are top of the league. It felt like a fraught match, with so much shouting from the coaches and players, but the boys did brilliantly.
• Had our garden contractors come and replace the pieces of turf in our back garden that didn’t ‘take’ when they put them in the first time. Laying turf in a heatwave is not a great idea.
• Spent some time on the lawn, applying a pet-friendly ‘feed and weed’ mix in what I hope is the right quantity. I should be able to see in three to four weeks.

Next week: Trying to put some time aside for strategic thinking, if I can extract myself from the day-to-day. Plus our first school governor meeting of the year.

An unusual week, not least because I finally made it back to my office in London after a year and half of working from home. To be back felt simultaneously novel and familiar; it’s amazing how quickly we adapt when things change.

On Monday I felt very run down and tired, and wondered if it was because I had been overdoing my riding and running. Cycling around Silverstone had been much tougher than I expected. I lost a lot of salt, and other than the one electrolyte-filled drink that I brought with me and drank as I cycled, I didn’t do anything to replenish it. Things improved throughout the week, but I never managed to properly catch up with rest.

This was a week in which I:

• Spent time face-to-face with our CIO and a couple of my peers to assess where we are and to start to form ideas about where we need to go in the next few months. Two hours was just long enough to get lots of material out of our heads. The next steps are to let it brew a little and then try to shape it in the coming weeks.
• Started to deal with some end-user issues relating to Azure Information Protection. We’ve put it in place primarily as a ‘speed bump’ to protect against data loss with external parties, but my gut is telling me that we need to provide more training than we have done so far. A small number of people have mentioned issues to me, but I am sure the pain is being felt more widely as I know most people work around problems without reporting them.
• Took part in a discussion on how we protect material non-public information in one of our key systems.
• Had a couple of meetings with sub-teams on the big group programme to discuss where our part of the organisation is and what our plans are for the next few months.
• Reviewed the cost structure for the big programme with our internal team.
• Delivered a talk to our Engineering team an internal body of knowledge that our staff should aspire to learn. I’ve put together a document with an outline that I am hoping the team will collectively own and update.
• Took part in the launch of ‘Team Effectiveness’ training and coaching being run for our team. We’ll each be completing a CliftonStrengths profile and using this as an entry point for broader conversations about how we work as a team. The group delivering the training and coaching seem to be very good and I am sure that we will get something out of it, even if I am a skeptic about the validity of this kind of assessment and profiling.
• Got back on top of my work emails, getting them down to less than 100 for the first time in a few years.
• Joined a number of webinar ‘town hall’-style meetings, including one with the leadership team of our Wholesale Division, one with the CEO of our Angola office and another with our Group CTO.
• Had a random coffee with a colleague from our Wealth Management division in London.
• Reviewed and discussed the IT service agreement for our school, prior to its planned renewal in a few weeks’ time.
• Attended Governors and Inspection training hosted by Helen Jones at The Training Centre by Aspire. An incredibly useful two hours, but left me feeling the weight of all of the things we need to get done in the next few weeks.
• Along with my eldest son, joined Berkhamsted Cycling Club after going out for a trial ride on Saturday morning. I’d been thinking about joining the club since it was set up a few years ago, but it always seemed pointless as my family commitments meant I wouldn’t be able to join the club rides. I’m really pleased that my eldest boy and I have found something that we can do regularly together. The club members couldn’t have been more welcoming, and it will be worth forgoing a lie-in on a Saturday to get out riding with them.
• Ran the line for my youngest son’s first football match of the new season. Great to start with a victory, particularly as he is now playing 11-a-side on a seemingly giant pitch.

• Watched an incredible weekend of sport, with Emma Raducanu’s stunning US Open victory and a thrilling Italian Grand Prix.
• Realised I have a major book problem. I have around 1,400 purchased unread books, plus over 2,000 in my wish list. A book was recently released that highlights that if we are lucky we only have around 4,000 weeks on the planet. I think I’m going to need to drastically prioritise.

Next week: Another day in the London office, meeting old friends and hosting Album Club in-person for the first time since 2019.

Monday saw our last public holiday before Christmas here in the UK, extending my time off and making it a four-day week. I had planned to go into the office on Wednesday to start getting used to being there again, but I had forgotten about a dentist appointment booked long ago. I’m planning to try and go in this coming week instead.

Autumn seemed to set in before August was done and I found myself reaching for my jumpers and slippers again. However, it looks as though summer will be making a small fight back over the next few days so the jumpers are back on their hangers.

This was a week in which I:

• Got through all of my new emails and Teams messages that had accumulated during my week away.
• Resolved to try and deal with messages and emails on the ‘first touch’ much more, which did lead to me feeling much more productive than usual. I’m going to try and keep this up.
• Provided details to a vendor on the existing phone system in one of our offices so that they can quote for a Teams Direct Routing service to replace it.
• Closed out on a final quote for a door access system upgrade in one of our offices, after many weeks of back and forth as we refined our requirements. We now need to finish off the architectural details before we can commission the work.
• Agreed with colleagues in Finance on an approach to our piece of the business case of the large group-wide programme that we are taking part in.
• Presented a proposal to the entire IT team on how we should go about organising our internal data. Received good feedback and agreement that this is something we need to do, and soon.
• Sat in on a demonstration of a prototype put together by our internal AI group to help with greater understanding of current and prospective clients for our part of the business. Enjoyed the discussion and debate on the next steps.
• Attended a presentation by colleagues working in behavioural science on improving product adoption. This got me wondering how much a well-crafted email, or a document written with the reader in mind, falls under behavioural science.
• Met with a new team member who joined while I was away.
• Had a lovely random coffee with our Head of Operational Risk.
• Signed up to LeadIn 4-D specifically to watch Matt Ballantine talk about his PlayCards project. I’ve heard Matt talk about it quite a bit, particularly in the WB-40 podcast Signal group, but had never really ‘got it’. Matt’s presentation was excellent and had my brain whirring; I called him later to download all of the notes I had made. It was a nice side-effect to have joined the LeanIn 4-D community too, and I’m looking forward to exploring it.
• Reviewed the latest iteration of the school’s COVID-19 risk assessment as well as the new Outbreak Management Plan.
• Looked at a contract renewal for the school’s IT service provider.
• Cleaned up the majority of my ‘blog post ideas’ folder and found many posts that I had more than half written but then never finished off. I am going to try to breathe life into them, and to generally write more.
• Went through the car insurance renewal dance and saved over £100 by finding a new provider instead of renewing. Spent 50 minutes on hold with my current insurer before getting through to someone who could stop my auto-renew.
• After a week of running, had a good week back on the turbo trainer. Strava is telling me that I have gone ‘well above normal range’ in terms of physical stress and I can feel it.
• Had another migraine. I am starting to conclude that they are almost solely down to tiredness. Fortunately I never get debilitating headaches, but the aura is a total pain in the butt as I am unable to see properly for half an hour or so before the headache kicks in.
• Had an unmentionable number of fillings at the dentist. Some of my old ones had failed and fallen out over the past couple of years and needed to be replaced. I am so grateful to have the superb dentist that I have, especially as the work was done under the NHS. It was amazing to ‘watch’ her work on multiple teeth at once.
• Took part in Cycle Silverstone with my eldest boy. After a long queue for registration, hitting the track felt wonderful. The tarmac is super-smooth and it felt amazing to be pedalling around there. But tackling 50–60km was something else — the lack of downhill meant that it felt like a tough turbo trainer ride, and I was very grateful to find the food table at the finish.

• Enjoyed the Netherlands F1 race. Very happy that Max Verstappen won, given the turnout of the crowd and the fact that the race didn’t happen in Zandvoort last year. Based on what we saw on TV, the Dutch really seem to know how to have a good time!

Next week: Back to the office for the first time in 18 months, and trying to keep cool as we get the last of the summer sunshine.

A wonderful week’s holiday. On Monday evening we were joined by some good friends who had rented a neighbouring lodge for four nights; it was lovely to spend some time with them, and fun for our children to have some friends around as well. We’ve holidayed together before and they are great company, but we agreed that it was much better to have separate apartments where we didn’t feel under any obligation to start socialising the minute we heard other people were awake.

We were fortunate to stay at the stunning Bowland Retreat Lodges on their second week of taking paying guests. They will eventually have ten bespoke rentals, thoughtfully located on their site to maximise the enjoyment of the views. They are all finished to an incredibly high standard and we felt very privileged to have stayed there.

I never seem to have any problems in putting work to one side and switching off, which I think is a good thing. As the new week approaches I need to remember what all of the important things were before I left.

This was a week in which I:

• Thought about visiting Blackpool, but at the last minute switched to take a look at Lytham St Annes and the confusingly similarly-named neighbouring town of Lytham instead. Lytham St Annes seemed like a quite generic seaside town. My children wanted to spend some time at the pier arcade, so I waited outside and people-watched for a while. We then jumped back into the car for the short trek south to Lytham, which turned out to be much more peaceful and beautiful.

• Got back into running. I didn’t take my bike on holiday but I did pack a pair of trainers. After a run with my wife and eldest son on the first morning of our holiday I went out solo the next day, and suffered for a couple of days afterwards. Running seems to use completely different muscles to cycling and I always spend a few days wandering around like a geek version of John Wayne whenever I pick it up again. There’s a simplicity to just going out without all of the cycling faff which I love.
• Took a trip to Whitewell for a lovely short walk that involved crossing an amazing set of stepping stones across the River Hodder. Our lodge had a set of leaflets called Walks With Taste In Ribble Valley, each with a round walk and a suggested location for lunch or dinner. We followed the route on the Whitewell leaflet which was a good setup for some longer walks later in the week.

• Visited Lowland Farm to take their beautiful alpacas for a walk. I had no idea that alpaca fur is so soft! Our youngest boy reported that this was the best part of the holiday. We all loved it.

• Had a couple of meals out, neither of which were particularly great. We enjoyed getting together in one of the lodges and cooking our own food a lot more.
• Wandered back to Malham with our friends so that they could see Janet’s Foss and Gordale Scar for themselves. We brought swimming gear and towels for the children as they wanted to brave the cold waters of the plunge pool. It is such a magical walk that we were happy to do it again.

• Revisited Billy Bob’s Parlour in Skipton with our friends so that they could grab an ice cream, milkshake, burger or coffee (and in one case, three out of the four in one hit!) It was interesting to see that the ice cream parlour was constructed with the help of the EU.

• Ventured on a magnificent walk up and down Pendle Hill. We’d been looking at the hill all week as we mooched around Clitheroe, wondering whether we could climb it, and a quick web search found a very useful step-by-step guide on the best way to do it. We started at Barley, winner of the Evening Star’s ‘Best Kept Village Competition’ in 1975, according to a plaque above the car park toilet. The whole walk was stunning — past two reservoirs before turning up a steep ascent to the top of the hill and then down a set of very long, very steep stone steps to get to the other side, with a mile’s walk to get back to Barley. It was the kind of walk that made you feel glad to be alive, and wanting to be nowhere else.

• Enjoyed a wonderful afternoon in Romsey, seeing lots of family members all together for the first time in years. After our six hour holiday drives to and from Lancashire I wasn’t looking forward to another four hours in the car but it was worth it. The time went too fast, but I am hoping that we’ll be able to get together with everyone again soon.

Next week: A public holiday to get my house in order before starting back at work again.

The second four-day week this month as I took Friday off. It felt like a productive four days, and I don’t have too many loose ends to come back to when I return.

This was a week in which I:

• Had my mid-year review with my line manager. A really useful discussion which helped me to understand and articulate where I am work-wise right now.
• Got a piece of work completed that had been in progress for much longer than I had hoped, providing a learning syllabus for our IT staff.
• Agreed a strategy for our compliance recorded lines solution, and met with the Group technology owner to clarify our requirements.
• Met one of our telephony providers to discuss their proposal for Teams Direct Routing as a Service. The less technology that we need to own and run ourselves, the better.
• Agreed the communication strategy for rolling out Azure Information Protection to our organisation, and reviewed the email introducing staff to the topic. Hopefully it will be focused on what they will experience in terms of ‘speed bumps’ more than the theory behind the ‘why’.
• Reviewed a draft training course on Information Risk that is due to be sent to all of our staff.
• Had a number of meetings for our big group programme, including a couple focused around the financial business case for the work. The part of the company that I work for has a very different approach to costs than the rest of the Group, so we agreed to follow up with the business case template owners to go into this in detail. Separately we agreed to proceed with a proof-of-concept for one of the system modules.
• Met with the technical members of the IT management team to assess our requirements for an architectural capability and what form it should take.
• Aligned with a colleague on a data and analytics project that we are running and shared all fo the information I had on the business case for the work.
• Joined and left a webinar in the space of five minutes as it didn’t seem a good use of time. I’m quite comfortable with dropping off if the platform is mostly one-way and there is little chance of the presenter seeing me go and thinking that I’m being rude.
• Had to rush to pick up my son after he called to say he had come off his bike, hitting a tree and smashing his hand. We’re so lucky to have a wonderful friend a few doors away from our house who works as a paediatric matron at a local hospital, and my son took himself off to see her for a quick triage. We ended up going to hospital to have his hand assessed; fortunately nothing is broken, but three of his fingers are very bruised.
• Took delivery of a new tumble dryer, after our last one seemed to continuously default to a ‘third degree burns’ setting. It lasted over a decade and it’s amazing to see how the technology has changed; our new one is a ‘heat pump’ design which reuses the heat inside of the machine instead of pushing it out into the room.
• Had my wife’s parents to stay with us for a couple of nights for the first time in two years or so. It was lovely to have them there, and felt like another step in getting back to normal. (My fingers are crossed and my breath is held, but UK infection rate seems to be ticking up again.)
• Spent most of Friday driving to Clitheroe, a four-hour drive which turned into a seven-hour mission including a stop for lunch. We’re here for a short break, handing our own house over to my brother-in-law for their own break from their usual surroundings.
• Had a day in Clitheroe itself, exploring the town and the (extremely tiny) castle.

• Headed up to Malham for one of the most beautiful countryside walks I have ever been on. I know that the UK has a lot to offer, but I forget how stunning it is until I see it again.

Next week: More exploring in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and some friends come to join us on holiday.

Normality came a couple of paces closer this week as I attended more in-person meet-ups. COVID-19 cases, hospitalisations and deaths all seem to be flatlining here in the UK and it feels like we are at the ‘let’s just live with it’ stage. From next week onwards, the government no longer require us to self-isolate if we have been a close contact with a confirmed case. It really does feel like the bulk of the pandemic may be behind us here, and I hope that’s true. The next big discussion will be about whether our population gets ‘booster shots’ while the majority of the rest of the world remain unvaccinated. Given that we have already cut back overseas aid this year I am doubtful that we will be good global citizens, but I do hope we do the right thing.

This was a week in which I:

• Met up with lots of my London-based colleagues for an afternoon social in Hyde Park. I hadn’t been on a train in 18 months and expected it to be quite profound, but the journey there and back actually felt quite mundane; I haven’t missed commuting in any way. It was so lovely to see everyone again and the hours flew by. I finished the day by going for a wonderful Greek dinner at Mazi with a friend and colleague who has been out of the office with a serious illness for most of the past year. Seeing him was just what I needed, and I left for home with a renewed sense of purpose and a warm glow from all the laughter we shared.
• Attended a meeting to get an overview of our proposed post-pandemic working arrangements in London. It struck me that as our IT team is geographically dispersed, ‘being with everyone in the office again’ isn’t quite the same thing as it is for other teams. Before the pandemic, I spent most of the working day at my desk on Teams calls, so it will be interesting to see what kind of working pattern makes sense for me.
• Saw the next part of our IT infrastructure implementation get moved out by a couple of weeks staff in one of our locations suddenly found themselves working from home again due to COVID-19. The team are trying to move things around so that we get the work done in a different order and stay on track overall for the quarter.
• Reviewed a revised statement of work for the IT infrastructure implementation in our final office on our rollout schedule.
• Discussed the current state of protection for confidential data in one of our key global systems.
• Participated in our our monthly IT risk review meeting.
• Started some more Kanban coaching with another member of the team.
• Completed my mid-year performance review on our new performance management system.
• Caught up with my messages, emails, and Kanban board notifications after being out of the office for a week.
• Attended a presentation on our company’s new multi-factor authentication application.
• Enjoyed a random coffee with a colleague who moved from Lagos to London just before the pandemic started. People are so interesting, and it’s great to get to know them in this way.
• Enjoyed an in-person Album Club once again. If everything stays as-is COVID-19-wise, we’re probably back to being in-person for the foreseeable future.
• Attended the first few sessions of Micro Camp, which started straight after I finished work for the day. It’s such a wonderful community to be a part of, and the event was a lovely opportunity to interact with so many like-minded people in real time. Kimberly Hirsh’s talk on Learning in Public on Your Blog was super inspirational; I’ve already watched it twice and it has got my brain whirring on things I could write about.
• Celebrated my 17th wedding anniversary with a family day out in London. We took the train into Euston and wandered around Camden before strolling across to King’s Cross for an early dinner at Dishoom. The food was good but not as exceptional as I had been led to believe; I enjoyed my lunchtime falafel from Camden Market a lot more. The sun was shining, and as we strolled around, eating our post-dinner ice creams, it felt like we were on holiday.

• Spent Sunday afternoon at our friends’ house for a lovely barbecue. It was lovely to relax in their beautiful new house, enjoying the food and being outside in great company.

Next week: A four-day week as I am taking Friday off as part of another short break. The diary is full up so I know this will mean cramming all of the work into those four days. Plus a visit from my wife’s parents, who haven’t been to stay with us for a very long time.

After a busy few months at work and a giant bike ride that circumnavigated London without actually going into London, I was ready for a week off. As always, time has zipped by and I’m back to work again tomorrow, but only for a couple of weeks before we have another holiday.

This was a week in which I:

• Spent Monday recovering from the big ride. It was a beautiful day so we headed up to Dunstable Downs for a coffee and a wander, and found that they had turned a field into a makeshift sports and games playground. We tried out the volleyball and football before deciding it was too hot for running around so much.

• Got back on my bike on Tuesday to ride to the other side of Oxford with my eldest son. Cycling through the town brought back memories of being there in the late 1990s, wandering across a bridge, heading back to a friend’s house after having danced for hours in a club.
• Met my wife and younger son in Eynsham for lunch and ice cream before driving the rest of the way to Ross-on-Wye to see my wife’s parents. It was so lovely to see them again. After 18 months of being in lockdown it strangely didn’t feel like a big change to be back in their house. We had a nice alfresco pub dinner at The Royal, enjoying the beautiful summer evening.

• Took a short trip to Biblins Rope Bridge, which spans the River Wye between England and Wales. It had been damaged by floods in February 2020 but reopened a few months later. Unfortunately we didn’t have time to explore beyond the bridge itself but we’ll be back.

• Was sorry to see that the lovely old bookshop in Ross-on-Wye had closed down. It was always one of my favourite shops to visit when we went back there.

• Relocated to the Up On A Hill glampsite for a couple of evenings to spend with my wife’s family. The cabins were brand new and the site had everything we could wish for. On Wednesday night we cooked pizzas and on Thursday we sheltered from the rain in the open barn-style seating area as we tucked into fish and chips. The weather wasn’t great but the family did make it up Hay Bluff and we spent an afternoon wandering around the bookshops of Hay-on-Wye. We played outside when the sun was shining, and played Scrabble under cover when it rained. A really lovely couple of days.

• Struggled on the turbo trainer despite all of the riding I’ve been doing. Maybe I’ve been overdoing it.

Next week: Back to work, an Album Club, and venturing into London to see my colleagues for the first time in 18 months.

A really enjoyable week. Work seemed to scoot by at a pace, which was fine to begin with but got a little troubling as the end approached. I have next week off as holiday so wanted to tie up as many loose ends as I could.

It occurred to me that having Monday off meant conditions were perfect to attempt a circumnavigation of London on my bike on Sunday. My friend Ian had lamented that he couldn’t make the Audax ride a few weeks ago and agreed to attempt this one with me. We had a wonderful Sunday, starting at 5:45am and getting back home just before 9pm. I’d been thinking of doing this for years and it was great to finally complete it.

This was a week in which I:

• Completed an overdue root cause analysis report for an issue that occurred with one of our systems a few weeks ago.
• Had my team meeting that was carried over from a diary car-crash at the end of last week, and reviewed what needed doing before two of us would be out on holiday next week.
• Said goodbye to a colleague that has worked in the department for the past couple of years. He and his wife have left South Africa to join their daughter’s family in Australia. It’s very sad to see him go as he’s played such an important role on the team, and has been a lovely person to work with.
• Met with the stream lead for the group programme that we are participating in, as well as participated in the work being done to roll out financial templates for associated business cases.
• Agreed with another peer to help coach them with their team’s Kanban board.
• Took the newest member of our management team through the theory of why our current ‘ways of work’ looks like it does, and got some useful feedback as to how it can be tweaked further.
• Discussed the IT support and operation model for two of our offices.
• Enjoyed an informal talk from one of our staff on the new Instant Coffee feature in LeanKit.
• Used the Instant Coffee feature in a small session run by the two LeanKit product managers as they solicited feedback on the ‘mirrored cards’ feature. LeanKit is my favourite tool that we use at work and I was very happy to give some insight into how we have been using it.
• Had two ‘random coffees’ with colleagues as one had been postponed from last week. Both were great and it was lovely to catch up with them.
• Raised an issue in GitHub for the first time, for the micro.blog iOS client. Perhaps one day I’ll be able to make a positive contribution by helping write some of the code too?
• Joined two more of Tortoise Media’s ThinkIn sessions, one with Jess Phillips MP and another with John Amaechi. I think a big part of the enjoyment of the sessions is the in-meeting text chat — active participation is much better than just sitting through a webinar that you could easily consume as a podcast. The chat is expertly curated and guided by someone at Tortoise Media, which helps a lot.
• Had a wonderful night with my old friend, swapping music and getting lots of new leads for artists to check out. The following evening we went out for a delicious meal at Tabure with our wives. They are such great company and we had a lovely time.

Next week: A week off work, spending some time with family and a couple of nights in a ‘glamping’ tent shed.

In the UK we build our houses for a northern climate. Double-glazed windows and plenty of insulation keep us cosy and warm. But those wonderful inventions are cursed when the odd boiling hot day turns up. We’ve just had a week of heat which has made it difficult to keep cool in my home office, and even more difficult to sleep. My colleagues in Johannesburg have the opposite problem where their houses are not built for the cold, so they have also been struggling with overnight temperatures of -5°C. (Interestingly, I heard John Gruber on a podcast this week talking about how bad Celsius is as a measure of temperature — with Fahrenheit, zero is dangerously cold and 100 is dangerously hot. It seems more logical than being concerned about the freezing and boiling points of water.) Of course, the hot weather disappeared as soon as the weekend arrived.

We’ve also had another week of the landscape gardeners at our house, building some decking and adding their finishing touches to our back garden. I’ve had to be up early in order to get on my bike trainer and get ready for their potential early arrival, leaving me more worn out than usual. The results are great — we’re so happy to now have a back garden that we want to spend time in. Unfortunately, a heatwave wasn’t the best time to be laying turf and I’m a little unconvinced that the brown areas will come back despite all of our watering efforts. They’ve agreed to fix them if they don’t ‘take’, but hopefully it won’t come to that.

The bike has been a real challenge this week. On Tuesday I found that I couldn’t finish the hard workout that was scheduled, and I found myself riding out the time on a much gentler setting. It’s bizarre, given how much I’ve been out doing long rides at weekends. Hopefully next weekend’s cooler temperatures and a little more rest will mean I am back to normal.

This was a week in which I:

• Presented details of my long-running IT programme to Internal Audit, giving them an introduction to our part of the organisation, what we’ve done over the past few years and how we’ve been doing it. I’m proud of what we’ve achieved and love talking about it.
• Created a series of slides showing the IT infrastructure journey for our office in Brazil. Presented these slides at the monthly review meeting with the in-country CEO and Office Manager. We now have a suite of slides for each country whose IT we are responsible for.
• Fleshed out a ‘lean business case’ for a project to start compliance recording for Teams, hopefully leveraging an initiative already happening elsewhere in the company.
• Reviewed the next iteration of the design for our IT infrastructure back-end in Asia, which will hopefully be closed out next week.
• Continued to edge forward with a physical access project, getting the thoughts of our CTO and requesting some more information from our vendor.
• Attended our Information Risk Steering Group meeting. Encountered the FAIR Institute for the first time, which looks worth investigating further.
• Had a walk-through of a handover document prepared by a colleague who has moved to Australia and leaves us at the end of the month.
• Was given an overview of one of our business departments and some in-house tools that they have developed to run some of their key business processes. The developer is leaving so we are putting in an interim setup to manage the tools.
• Attended a monthly internal catch-up on governance, control and cybersecurity, as well as a separate session on firewalls and networking.
• Joined some meetings for the large global programme, and was given an overview of a financial calculator for project business cases that fall under the programme.
• Reviewed a lean business case for a proposed Marketing project.
• Spent more time coaching teams and individuals in our department on their Kanban processes. I really enjoy this part of my work.
• Had a wonderful catch-up call with an old colleague in Johannesburg. It always takes a little to-ing and fro-ing for our diaries to align but I’m grateful when they do.
• Spent a lot of time thinking and talking about the ideas in How To Be An Antiracist, which I am about a third of the way through. It’s excellent; every time I finish another chapter I see things in a slightly different way.
• Got to the dentist for a checkup for the first time in two years due to the pandemic. As I suspected, it isn’t great, and I’m booked in for some work in a couple of months’ time.
• Took delivery of one sofa where we should have had two; the larger one got into our house but we couldn’t fit it through the doorway to our lounge. Fortunately we could get a complete refund from the shop. Unfortunately a new order for another smaller sofa won’t be fulfilled for 20 weeks. Happy Christmas!
• Met my brothers for a night out to celebrate their birthday. It was lovely to see them as well as my sisters-in-law. Dining out feels so fragile and I am still nervous about being indoors with lots of random people. I am hoping I don’t end up with a ‘ping’ from the COVID-19 app that I came in contact with anyone who subsequently tested positive.

• Watched my youngest boy take part in his football club’s annual tournament. His team won the group and then lost to another team 1-0 in the final which was a superb result.

Next week: A final week before some time off, which I feel very ready for.

An unusual week in which I found myself surrounded by people again. We have landscape gardeners working at our house, trying to transform our back garden from a botanical fever dream into something we’d be happy to have people come and visit. We’re hoping it will be lovely to look at as well as easy to maintain, as none of us in the house have very green fingers. I’ve been on tea duty in between meetings, keeping the workpeople well-watered and nourished. So far so good, and they finish up next week.

I was pleased to have quickly recovered from last week’s mammoth bike ride, and hopped back on the turbo trainer from Tuesday onwards. The coming week is going to be a challenge for indoor biking with soaring temperatures here in the south of England, but I’m going to give it a go. Now I’ve got some fitness I’d really like to keep it, as I know that if we do make it away for a short summer break that cycling opportunities may be limited.

Looking back over the week, I seem to have subconsciously stepped back from the UK news, probably for my own sanity. Instead, my worries have been about my colleagues in South Africa as they have seen their country go through the worst riots and looting for many years. People who always have a smile looked genuinely terrified at times, and it felt so helpless to be so far away with very little options for making a difference.

This was a week in which I:

• Had my second dose of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine. I am so grateful for the NHS and the seamless process to get the appointments booked and the jabs in my arm. I felt very few side-effects this time, which sounds similar to others that have had the same shot.
• Saw my lovely youngest boy turn 12 on the day he was released from his COVID-19 self-isolation.
• Completed a first draft of an internal ‘IT curriculum’ document for the team, listing topic areas and resident experts in each topic within the team. I’ve had lots of very valuable feedback which I will include in the next iteration.
• Reviewed and agreed the final version of the closure report for our New York office infrastructure project.
• Reviewed the low-level design and implementation plan for our IT infrastructure in Asia which we hope to deploy in the next few weeks.
• Agreed with one of our teams to try an experiment with their Kanban board, adding two new card types to distinguish everyday work from project work. A quick informal write-up of what you plan to do and how you will judge its success goes a long way.
• Took part in our monthly risk management meeting.
• Met with our head of Operational Risk to get aligned ahead of the next cycle of senior management meetings.
• Had a lovely random coffee with a colleague in HR I hadn’t spoken to in a very long time.
• Was pleased to see my colleague in meetings again following his long illness. It’s so great to have him back.
• Had an excellent end-of-week catch-up with my boss, covering a lot of bases about where we are, where we are heading and more besides.
• Attended an all-hands meeting about legal developments in one of the countries in which we operate.
• Joined the Headteacher, Chair of Governors and members of the school senior leadership team for a feedback meeting from our Improvement Partner. It’s always so good to get some external feedback on how things are going.
• Attended our final school Full Governing Board meeting of the year. I can’t believe that another academic year is behind us already. I felt as though I had to cram the reading in, but by the time the meeting came I was well-prepared.
• Took my eldest son and three of his friends to Aqua Parcs in Milton Keynes early on Saturday morning. It was a beautiful, fresh day and the complex that they had there made it feel like we were all on holiday. I spent an hour in the shade with my book while they all had fun on the inflatables.
• Took part in the Hemel Hillbuster on Sunday with my eldest son and my friend Ian, riding a lumpy 100km to raise money for the Dacorum Emergency Night Shelter.

• Got rid of our old sofas in anticipation of new ones arriving. Manoeuvring heavy furniture around doorways and down the drive was not the optimal activity for a hot Sunday night. One of the couches had done nearly 20 years’ service and had started to come apart in a big way, so we were overdue a refresh.
• Joined my first Tortoise ThinkIn, on how pop defines the 1980s. It ended up being an hour-long Zoom love fest for all things 80s, and a lot of fun. I didn’t anticipate being on a call with Martyn Ware, Dylan Jones and Sarah Champion but that’s exactly where I found myself. At some point I was brought into the discussion to extol the virtues of Hue and Cry’s Labour Of Love, a song I never get tired of hearing.

• Enjoyed hearing the Young Knives for the first time, a new Album Club discovery.
• Loved watching the new three-day event format for the Formula 1 race. It kept the drama going and seemed to be a great success.

Next week: A meeting with Internal Audit, work finishing in the garden, trying to get some sleep during a boiling hot few days and looking forward to a cooler weekend.

A four-day week. My upcoming monster bike ride dominated my thoughts as I watched the changeable weather forecast getting more locked in as the days ticked by. I took the Friday off in order to get a lie-in and an early night as I knew I would have to be up at 4am on Saturday for the ride.

The week was busy, but had a pleasant feel to it thanks to the meeting-free Wednesdays that we are experimenting with at work. Wednesday came at just the right time after a busy couple of days, and initial feedback across the team is that most people appreciated the initiative.

The pandemic is never far from our thoughts. Schools and pupils are having to cope with so much right now. On Wednesday my eldest boy was sent home with a message that he had to self-isolate due to close contact with a positive case. On Thursday morning he got a message to say that he could go back to school as a follow-up test was negative. Then on Friday I had a text in the afternoon to say that our younger boy now has to self-isolate due to his contact with a positive case. Keeping people safe and stopping the virus from spreading makes a whole lot of sense, so much less so when the TV is showing masses of people at sporting events and in the pubs, bars and streets.

I continued to feel for colleagues in Johannesburg as I heard that two more people known to the team had passed away from COVID-19. It makes hearing about ‘freedom day’ in the UK even more jarring.

This was a week in which I:

• Presented to our IT Architecture Governance Authority on the second major iteration of our network topology, and got the green light to continue down the simplified path that we are on.
• Attended a kick-off meeting for our Beijing IT infrastructure project and agreed next steps.
• Contributed to the IT submission for our company Board report.
• Attended our IT governance meeting for Dubai and took the attendees through my slides on our IT infrastructure journey.
• Reviewed and edited a lean business case for a potential new marketing initiative.
• Reviewed CVs for a technical consultant position in the team and agreed who we would take through to interview stage.
• Spent time refining a business case for moving two more of our offices to Teams PSTN calling, along with mandatory compliance recording. Spoke to a colleague in the wider group who is already some way down the line in doing the same thing, which may make the work significantly more straightforward. Got an introduction to very knowledgeable Unified Communications specialist via LinkedIn who has been super generous with his knowledge.
• Agreed to defer some detailed technical design decisions until a key team member returns from a long absence next week. It’s going to be so good to have him back.
• Asked a team member to help out with taking ownership of an application developed outside of IT using modern Microsoft 365 tooling. It’s interesting how the problem of critical Access databases springing up in business has shifted technologies but is still fundamentally the same challenge.
• Attended a school strategy planning meeting with our Chair of Governors and another colleague, making good progress on an updated mission and vision. I spent some time writing it up on my day off work and am glad to have had the time to move it forward.
• Conducted annual reviews for two of our school governors. I wish I had started the practice when I was Chair as it was very worthwhile to take the time to reflect and thank the governors for the work they do.
• Enjoyed a relaxed day off which included a lovely lunch with a friend in town. We agreed that we should do it more often.
• Had our oven professionally cleaned for the first time, and it looks just like new.
• Enjoyed the final week of matches in the Euro 2020 championships. Yes, even the final 😊
• Took my bike out for a 327km ride, leaving my house at 5am, starting the 307km Audax ride from Aylesbury at 6am and getting back there around 10pm. A really beautiful route through some amazing towns, villages and countryside. I was gutted that Strava didn’t record the last 30km or so — I am guessing that the ride data is held in my iPhone’s RAM while it is being recorded, and it was struggling with swapping data every time it tried to do something different like receive a phone call. Next time I think I may rely on the Garmin as it seems more reliable. A man from West London Cycling had his GoPro with him and made a short video of the ride which captures the essence of it. On Saturday night I was ready to pack my bike away for good but by the end of the weekend I started thinking about my next adventure.

Next week: Vaccine shot #2. The last school Full Governing Board meeting of the year. Album Club. And work starting on our back garden, hopefully turning it from a weedy mess to somewhere that we would actually want to invite friends round to visit.

I spent the first half of this week in a bit of a daze, with the tiredness from last week lingering on into this one. The weekend had made no difference. At one point I felt so run down that I did my first ever COVID-19 lateral flow test to see if that was an underlying cause of feeling so ‘out of it’; fortunately it was negative.

A big contributing factor could be the very weird period we seem to be going through right now. I’ve been struggling with the cognitive dissonance of it all. It’s bizarre to have calls with worried colleagues in Johannesburg who are having an awful, frightening and tragic time with their current COVID infection wave, to watching Euro 2020 matches on TV with full stadiums, to talking to our Headteacher about closing year-group bubbles because of infections, to hearing the UK government saying that we have to end our restrictions in the next few weeks. It feels bizarre to be stuck between seemingly having been through the worst of the pandemic with the infection figures clearly showing another wave. Ros Taylor did an excellent job on The Bunker podcast of articulating the unfairness of the school situation — we aren’t yet prepared to vaccinate our children in the UK, but we keep closing school bubbles and sending them home whenever someone tests positive. Surely we have to do something to keep them in school? The secondary school my sons attend have unilaterally decided that the children need to go back to wearing masks and my youngest one has told me that he’s in favour of it.

I was very grateful to have the members of the WB-40 Signal group to lend an ear (or eye?) this week as I got all of this off my chest and tried to make sense of how I was feeling. I’m so pleased to have found such a supportive (and regularly amusing) network.

This was a week in which I:

• Caught up with a close colleague and friend who has been out of the office for the past nine months with a serious illness. Trying to summarise everything that had happened at work in the past nine months without overwhelming him wasn’t easy. It was so lovely to chat with him and I can’t wait for him to be back with us.
• Spent time updating our architecture documentation with our current thinking for our technology stack. It was broadly correct, but the document hadn’t been touched in 18 months and needed a bit of a refresh. I also created a couple of overview slides to explain the major change between what we’re doing now and the approach that we had started out with in 2019. I’m not a technical architect so I was a little outside my comfort zone, but part of the joy of working in such a small team is that I get to do such a broad range of things.
• Refactored our change roadmap by areas of focus as opposed to the sub-teams responsible for each change. It gives us a more collaborative view in that the whole team is responsible for achieving the deliveries, and is interesting in terms of the areas that have the most focus right now.
• Completed a set of slides for one of our smaller offices, showing the IT infrastructure technology journey over the past four years. I’ll be presenting these at the local governance meeting for that country on Monday.
• Met with my boss and a colleague on the large group programme to try and refine our thinking and approach to the work in our space. We have lots of good thinking and ideas but are letting it cook for a little while longer.
• Attended a kick-off session for upgrading our meeting room equipment in another of our smaller offices. We are still gathering information and costs before we present the proposal to the local CEO.
• Discussed the plan to roll out new information protection technology to our part of the organisation in the coming months. It’s a small change but has a significant impact on everyone’s day-to-day workflow, so we have been trying to balance the friction it will deliberately cause with the risks that we are minimising.
• Met for a ‘pre-interview’ with a potential candidate for a technical role in our team.
• Along with the rest of the company, started to experiment with ‘step-back Wednesdays’ where we have no planned internal meetings. I was concerned that it would mean the other four days would be a collection of diary car crashes, but people seem to be taking the opportunity to prune back the overall number of meetings or schedule them to occur less frequently. We’re trying it out for three months. I’m betting it will stick.
• Attended a Gartner meeting on the same topic and heard about what similar changes had worked at other companies, and why.
• Had a ‘random coffee’ catch-up with one of our business heads in London. It was really interesting to get his perspectives on returning to the office, particularly on the impact physical presence can have in landing deals.
• Resigned myself to the fact that I am not going to change the wider company culture of having cameras off in meetings. I spent one meeting as the only person out of sixty attendees that had their camera on throughout. I know everyone has video meeting fatigue but there’s something about not being visible that irks me — I get much more value out of seeing everyone’s expressions and physically putting their hands up when they have something to say.
• Tried out my new cycling shoes and adjusted the cleats to where I think they are most comfortable. Once they’re in a good place, replacing the cleats is easy as you just draw a template around the old ones, but starting afresh is a bit more involved. They are much more comfortable than the old pair I had been using for years.
• Started to turn my attention to weather watching for next Saturday when I will make my first attempt at a long Audax ride. I’m excited to give it a go. I’ve taken Friday off so that I can get some rest ahead of the event.
• Had a short road ride with my eldest son this week as he wasn’t feeling too great. He legitimately beat me up Bison Hill though. I am very proud of him!
• Bought a Unifi G3 Instant camera with the intention of installing it outside of my office. It is an incredible piece of kit for the €25 price, with excellent picture quality in both light and dark conditions. You need to have a Unifi Protect system running to begin with, but it is a ‘no brainer’ simple add-on for that price.
• Enjoyed watching as many of the Euro 2020 football matches as I can. It’s strange watching England now — I really want them to succeed, but nowhere near as much as I did when I was a young boy lying on the floor in front of Italia ‘90 on the TV. In some ways, it’s nice to not have any expectations.
• Had a lovely family morning out at Topgolf. Learned that I really didn’t miss my vocation by not becoming a golfer.

Next week: A four-day week, with a ‘step-back Wednesday’ in the middle of it. Continued plugging away at the backlog of documents I need to review or produce. Turning my attention back to my school governor role with some evening meetings and preparation for our last Full Governing Board meeting of the year the week after.

Summer has been trying, and failing, to make a comeback. My shorts and flip-flops have once again been packed away and replaced by jeans and jumpers. At one point this week our house’s heating system awoke from its summer hibernation to reinforce the point about how bad the weather has been.

The UK seems to be in a weird space COVID-wise, with rapidly rising infections but people being quite relaxed about the risks. Schools seem to be having a very bad time of it, with classes and in some cases whole schools being shut down due to infections. At some point there will have to be a difficult decision made in terms of whether to (offer to) vaccinate children and/or to keep them in school despite infections. It is ethically dubious to vaccinate them for a disease that doesn’t seem to pose much threat to them, but it also seems very unfair for them to keep going through the stop/start process when infections are diagnosed and reported.

I’ve been so tired all week, and by Friday evening I had completely run out of steam. I’m not one for going to bed early and often stay up late reading, but I’ve also been waking up early having had bizarre dreams. Someone randomly mentioned to me that they hadn’t slept well this week either, and I wonder how much the atmosphere has a collective effect on our sleep patterns.

This was a week in which I:

• Attended an online funeral for a colleague. We received notice of his passing a little while ago, which came as a shock as I wasn’t even aware that he had been ill. I didn’t know him well, but he seemed like a lovely man and it was moving to hear the speeches prepared by his wife and daughters. I’m glad I ‘attended’ as I got to learn a little more about him and his extraordinary journey through life.
• Completed preparation for our Internal Audit meeting, and frowned when it was moved out by a couple of weeks at the last minute.
• Updated my high-level infrastructure slides for our London office, showing the transition from old to new over the past four years. Submitted these as material for the governance committee meeting next week.
• Pieced together further information on how compliance monitoring works for one of our communication channels, and updated the slides relating to this for the same governance committee.
• Created a short slide deck for options for integrating LeanKit with JIRA, should the need arise, and submitted a summary to the governance committee.
• Agreed on a way forward for putting together a Microsoft Teams telephony business case for two of our offices.
• Agreed on next steps for upgrading a physical door access system in one of our offices.
• Attended the first sprint playback session for a new AI prototype tool being developed in-house for client-facing staff in our region. I was very impressed by how much had been achieved in such a short space of time.
• Met with more vendors to discuss the technical consultant vacancy in our team and received some interesting, wide-ranging proposals.
• Reviewed the latest drafts of the monitoring, maintenance and support renewal agreements for three of our offices.
• Attended more meetings for the large group-wide programme covering architecture, funding and implementation details for specific modules. I was asked with one day’s notice to present at one of the steering committees; a colleague and I quickly put something together and delivered a well-received presentation.
• Reviewed the Dubai Financial Service Authority  Guidelines for Financial Institutions Adopting Enabling Technologies and compared them to our existing practices and standards.
• Had a random coffee with a Wealth Management colleague in Jersey. It’s always so lovely to meet someone new where there conversation is free-flowing and you feel like you could have spoken for two or three times as long.
• Attended an excellent Herts for Learning webinar on the topic of systemic racism in schools. There was a lot to think about, and it was heartening to see the in-meeting chat being so thoughtful and considered despite there being over 200 attendees.
• Finished Learned League 89 in a shocking position, only two slots from the bottom of the division. I had a fantastic season last time out and got promoted, so it was very sobering to find myself being relegated back down again straight away.
• Had the car serviced and MOT-ed. I can’t believe a year has gone by since we bought it. It had done very little mileage and I was glad that nothing needed doing to it. Someone from the garage came to pick it up, and it was cool to see the AirTag tracker working as it made its journey there.
• Bought some new cycling shoes. My old pair had done me well, but they are very long in the tooth and have 23,000km of sweaty riding to their name. I’m not sure if there is any science to fitting cleats into the right place — I’m used to drawing a template line on my old pair when the cleats needed changing. I guess I’ll find out when I start using them.
• Went out for another 100km ride with my eldest son. He’s getting to be a really good rider and I really love going out on adventures with him. I hope he keeps his enthusiasm for our long rides.

• Ran the line again for my longest son’s football match, his last of the season. I’m hoping I still get to do the job again next year when they move to 11-a-side.
• Booked in a professional oven clean for the first time ever.
• Followed along with the Euro 2020 championship as well as the F1. My wife and I have swapped our evening TV for the football, and occasionally the boys have joined us to watch some of it too.

Next week: A backlog of documentation to create and submit to various forums by the end of the week, and trying to get my sleeping back on track.

Yet another week of many, many meetings. South Africa’s Youth Day public holiday on Wednesday offered a little respite in the form of a few hours that I could block out to get some things done. Next week seems to be much clearer; I’m not sure why, but I plan to take full advantage of it.

The week started under a cloud as I learned that two people known to the wider team had both passed away from COVID-19 over the weekend. The problems brought by the pandemic are far from over yet, particularly for colleagues in other countries.

This was a week in which I:

• Put together the first draft of a presentation for an internal audit meeting at the end of the month, on the topic of the IT infrastructure programme that I have been running for the past four years.
• Saw the team get signoff on the next stage of our IT infrastructure rollout in Beijing. We are a little bit behind schedule but I am hoping we can complete the work at speed.
• Received a presentation giving an overview on our IT network security and agreed next steps, focused around defining the problems we are trying to solve.
• Concluded the initial reviews of the team’s Kanban boards where they had requested them.
• Reviewed the department-wide roadmap with the IT management team for the first time, and agreed to make the reviews part of our regular process. I have some follow-up work to slice and dice the content differently, but it was a very useful start.
• Reviewed the contract proposals for monitoring and maintenance of our infrastructure stack in three of our locations with our key vendor.
• Had a couple of meetings on the topic of our big group programme, including a ‘masterclass’ on how our part of the organisation will be enabled and enhanced by a new platform.
• Met with a colleague for a ‘random coffee’ and learned a lot about what someone in Equity Sales does in their role.
• Had an exploratory meeting with a vendor on a vacancy in our team, to be followed up next week.
• Discussed how to approach the challenge of tracking where staff will be located in the future in order to make planning meetings easier for everyone. Not as trivial a problem as it sounds, and not one that I’ve seen solved effectively by a product in the marketplace. I suspect that someone could write an Outlook plugin and make a lot of money in the coming months.
• Met with a friend of a friend who wanted to talk through her idea for a web platform. I learned about differences between Switzerland, where she lives, and the UK which could have a dramatic effect on how viable the idea is. I’m not sure how much help I was.
• Attended a short LeanKit webinar where they outlined the new OKR functionality available in their tool.
• Signed up to the NGA’s online seminars that were scheduled in place of their annual conference. I had meeting clashes so could only attend a couple of them, but the quality was as good as ever. The NGA produce some excellent material.
• Joined Herts for Learning’s Chairs Strategic Information Briefing. These sessions are invaluable, with lots of information imparted in an extremely short time. They use the Livestorm platform which is pretty impressive and slick functionality-wise.
• Attended a seminar on What Does Zero Trust Actually Mean?, organised by Presidio. The session seemed a little bit unstructured and didn’t feel like a good use of time, so I didn’t stay for the whole thing. The BrightTALK platform also seems very dated and low quality when compared with others I’ve used.
• Met with a consultancy in relation to continuing professional development for a member of staff at school.
• Had a visit from a plumbing engineer to look at a strange patch that has appeared on the ceiling in one of our bedrooms. He was thoroughly convinced that it isn’t an internal leak as the surface is completely dry, which leaves me back at square one and scratching my head.
• Finished off installing the trunking for the wired doorbell cables. I’m pretty pleased with the results.
• Watched a lot of football, and have thoroughly enjoyed the Euro 2020 championship so far. I’m not a regular follower of football, but I do love a tournament. The F1 race at Paul Ricard was thrilling as well, and I’m looking forward to the next two weekends with back-to-back races.
• Had my first night out with friends, at a pub, for as long as I can remember. It was great to feel a little bit ‘normal’ again.

• Went for another bike ride with my eldest boy, this time only 45km but including a few local hills. I’m really enjoying our excursions at the moment. Only four weeks until we’re both attempting a sportive together for the first time.

• Ran the line again at my youngest son’s football match. Last week it was crazy hot and this week I was longing for my gloves.

• Said thank you to my boys for their lovely, thoughtful Fathers’ Day cards and present that they got me. (With some help from their wonderful mum, no doubt!)
• Started reading A Russian Journal, the next book in my multi-year journey through John Steinbeck’s complete works.

Next week: Less meetings, just in time for me to complete a stack of work that has accumulated in the past few weeks.

Back to five days at work after luxuriating with Monday and Friday off the week before. It took its toll. I had so little time that I could call my own between all of the various scheduled meetings that it was difficult to make significant progress with anything. Frustratingly, my to-do list looked broadly unchanged at both ends of the week. In the evenings I found myself struggling to stay awake in front of the TV before the clock struck 9pm. My bike training programme on TrainerRoad has ramped up in both intensity and duration so I was up a little earlier than usual on most of the weekday mornings, and this will continue for the next few months.

This was a week in which I:

• Worked through a monitoring system issue with our Compliance Officer in New York and agreed to follow up with the vendor.
• Reviewed a draft ‘lean business case’ for a proposed piece of work in our team. Templates only prove themselves when you come to use them in anger. It has been interesting to try and get our heads around the hypothesis for the entire initiative, which could be months or years of effort, versus getting to the ‘minimum viable product’ which is unlikely to have much of a short-term payoff. I haven’t seen many examples of lean business cases, let alone good ones.
• Met with our Head of Operational Risk to ensure we were aligned ahead of the next regional governance meeting.
• Promoted the concept of Kanban work-in-progress limits to our sub-teams. There seems to be a good understanding of why this is a good idea and it will be interesting to see it implemented in the coming weeks.
• Made contact with a couple of our vendors to discuss a Microsoft consultant vacancy in our team.
• Created the first ‘random coffees’ pairings for one of our global business teams. They have decided to try it out for their own group, beyond the region-wide setup I’ve been running for the past year.
• Had my own random coffees — one with a member of my team and another with our Head of Risk. My pairing spreadsheet told me that it had been 50 weeks since the Head of Risk and I last got together for a chat. It’s gone so fast.
• Joined an online live event to get an update from our division’s Chief Executive.
• Attended an architecture overview session on our firm’s plans for data management. I ran a project to build a data warehouse from scratch back in 2004–5 and it was interesting to hear some of the terms from that era again, alongside many new ones.
• Had lots of interesting discussions peppered throughout the week about the thought process of returning to the office and what form it takes.
• Caught up with an old colleague on a new project we are both involved in. It was fascinating to hear what he had done since we parted ways six or seven years ago, and contrast it to how I’ve approach things. I’ve never had a long-term career goal whereas he planned a number of different moves and executed them. It was inspiring to hear how he went about it.
• Installed some D-Line Micro Trunking to hide the wires for our two new doorbells. They are excellent and the process couldn’t have been simpler; even I with my extremely limited DIY skills have managed to make them look quite good. I’m short by a couple of lengths so I’ll have to finish the job off next week.
• Put my new pictures up in my home office. They are fabulous, but I wish the glass was non-reflective as they are a bit difficult to see.
• Went for a solo bike ride on Saturday morning, following a route I found on Ride With GPS. I’m not sure I’ve ever sweated so much on an outdoor ride; at one point I could barely see with all of the salt going into my eyes. I’ve ordered a couple of headbands to try and combat it for next time. The route was a bit hairy in places with some very dodgy pot-holed and grit-covered single track roads, but it was great to try something new. There are so many blackflies and greenflies around this year; my legs came back looking like a car number plate from the 1980s.
• Bought some new cycling shoes from my local bike shop. I’m hoping to break them in over the next four weeks before my big ride.
• Tuned into as many of the UEFA Euro 2020 football matches as I could. I was as stunned as everyone to see the footage of Christian Eriksen’s collapse and resuscitation on the field during the Denmark v Finland game, and even more stunned when the teams resumed playing later in the afternoon. I hope he makes a full and speedy recovery.
• Ran the line for my youngest boy’s friendly football match. I really enjoy doing it. I was very grateful for an early kick-off as it was a sweltering day.
• Booked a holiday for next year with some close friends. It’s over a year away but it’s something to look forward to.
• Attended an Album Club in person for the first time since February last year. We had a cautious approach, with a well-ventilated room and a couple of people sitting out in the garden. I’m grateful for the videoconferencing services for seeing us through the past 18 months, but getting together in person to socialise is so much better than online.

Next week: Looks much the same as this week, perhaps with even more meetings, and the same puzzle of how and when I will be able to get anything else done. I have some deadlines to meet so something’s got to give.

A three-day week at work, top and tailed by a public holiday and a Friday spent with my family. I’ve swapped the jeans and socks for shorts and flip-flops, but nobody I work with is any wiser. I was grateful for more time away from the keyboard and another long weekend.

This was a week in which I:

• Overslept on Tuesday due to the Sleep Cycle iOS app deciding to terminate at some point in the night. I know that this is always a risk with a third-party app that isn’t part of the operating system, but it’s been pretty solid over the eight years and many iPhones that I’ve been using it. It threw out my cycle training sessions for the week which left me feeling mildly annoyed. It’s interesting how much I’ve been able to make exercise a part of my life since the pandemic hit, and losing it is the biggest fear I have with going back to the office.

• Completed a deck of slides on the IT infrastructure story of our New York office ahead of a Management Committee meeting this coming week. In the three days at work I had thirty minutes here and there between meetings to get the work done, and I felt as though I was always just picking at it instead of sitting down and getting absorbed in the task. It was interesting to do the work and see visually how different it is from the Beijing deck I put together recently. Three more sites to go.
• Put together some additional slides for the same meeting on a recent process failure and the work we have done to put it right.
• Presented options for in-room meeting equipment in one of our offices and agreed on a solution with the CEO.
• Reviewed and discussed the need for redundancy in public cloud installations that we use, and agreed on next steps.
• Agreed our approach for initial monitoring and maintenance contracts for our sites where we still need to complete our back-end infrastructure rollout.
• Spent time reviewing the epics/projects on one of our sub-team’s Kanban board with the head of the team. To be concluded next week.
• Had my first regular one-on-one meetings with a couple of members of the team that I don’t speak to regularly. It was great to have a space to catch up and get aligned.
• Attended a talk held by our Marketing and Communications team on the preparation for our big investors conference that takes place at the end of the month.
• Watched a very entertaining talk by our Head of IT Governance, Risk and Compliance on the importance of risk management.
• Attended Visualise Your Agile Strategy and See Your Roadmaps in Context with Craig Cockburn, organised by the Agility Leadership Network.

• Caught up with some school governor emails. I have such a massive backlog of work to look at for school and I am not quite sure how I will get on top of it all.
• Spent Thursday evening and a chunk of Friday afternoon setting up Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi. Our new doorbells are fantastic, but I wanted to solve the problem of their being no audible chime in the house when a button is pressed. In a few hours and with the help of a ton of Googling I managed to create a script that pauses the Sonos speakers in my house, plays a doorbell chime mp3 and then resumes whatever was playing on the speakers. There is so much to Home Assistant and I want to write up my experience so far in a longer blog post, if I can prioritise it.
• Took my youngest boy and three of his friends to Topgolf in Watford. I had no idea that such a place existed — it effectively turns a driving range into a digital bowling-alley experience. It wasn’t cheap but they had a lot of fun and it was great to see them out enjoying themselves.
• Had a family dinner at Pizza Express. Due to the iffy weather we had to eat inside which I didn’t feel very comfortable with. We’ve got used to takeaway food over the past year, so the price of the meal felt enormous for a visit only lasting an hour or so.
• Went out on the bike with my eldest boy on Saturday for his first 100km ride. I’d created a route that looped around Luton and I had no idea that the surroundings were so beautiful. We stopped for a perfect lunch at the Surfin Cafe in Ampthill and fuelled up with sandwiches and drinks. About ten miles from the end of the ride his front wheel started making some strange noises, and with just one mile to go he hit a pothole which gave him a flat rear tyre, so we walked the few hundred metres to the local bike shop and dropped the whole thing off for a service. I’ve been using a new Garmin Edge 830 for the past couple of weeks and it is so impressive — incredible battery life, rolling ascent/descent profiles and information on climbs as you go. It’s a massive upgrade from my seven-year-old Garmin Edge Touring in every conceivable way.

• Regretted not putting sun cream on my legs before the bike ride. I only ever seem to go red on my nose, neck and arms and made sure that they were coated in factor 50, but my legs now look ridiculous.
• Enjoyed an alfresco dinner with a couple of close friends at Rosanna’s in Berkhamsted. We hadn’t eaten together in so long and it was great to see them.
• Watched my youngest boy’s side win a friendly 10v10 football match as I ran the line.
• Loved watching the Azerbaijan Grand Prix. It was sad to see Verstappen lose out on a win through no fault of his own, but great that Hamilton’s error meant that the championship race is neutralised.

Next week: Another week jam-packed with meetings, and an Album Club at the end of it.