Scorching. All week my weather app has been showing the kind of unwavering forecast that you normally only see when you are looking ahead to a holiday somewhere near the equator.

Mrs D was away for most of the week on a Year 6 residential trip, which meant I had to work from home. I was very grateful to be able to spend my days in shorts and flip-flops, away from the stupefying heat of the London Underground and melting suburban railways.

It felt good to work at home. I spent most of it on audio or video conferences with people in the office and it didn’t make much of a difference from being there in person. I even ran our programme steering committee via video with the majority of the rest of the participants in one room. For some reason, being on video emboldened me to keep the meeting on task even more than I usually do; I felt very comfortable telling the room full of important people to take things offline as I was determined that we got through all of the decisions we needed to make. I’ll try and translate that to the next one when I’ll inevitably be in the same room.

The programme is started to get pushed from a number of sides. Finance are asking for details on exactly when we will be making changes to the ongoing cost profile of the organisation. Other senior teams in IT in Johannesburg are pushing us for technical details and challenging us on the approach we are taking. Particularly on the latter, we’ve had to dig in as a team and make sure that we are on solid ground with what’s e are doing. It feels painful at first, but all of this is good for us and will help to focus the team on the work ahead.

It was lovely to spend a bit more time with the boys and be involved with them more than I usually am. They were really great and generally helped me out a bit too. We spent a couple of evenings watching World Cup matches which meant slightly late nights, but with it being so hot I don’t think they would have got much more sleep if I sent them up to bed earlier. We spent Wednesday night at Watford track where my eldest boy ran the 1,500m; he did great, and was less than a second away from breaking the five minute barrier.

On Thursday Mrs D came back and we both went to school to watch his final primary school performance with the rest of Year 6. They were fantastic and all the parents had a brilliant time. It’s hard to believe that in just a few weeks he’ll be off to secondary school.

There’s so much going on over the next few weeks, both at work on the programme as well as for the end of term at school. Having back-to-back F1 Grand Prix each weekend and World Cup matches in the evenings isn’t helping! Am going to need to be very harsh with time to get it all done.

It’s been interesting to read Measure What Matters by John Doerr as the WB40 Book Club book for the past couple of weeks. It could be titled How To Set Great Objectives and Use Them To Excellent Effect Across Your Organisation as it is basically a masterclass in this process. Most people have objectives at work but typically they fall into an annual cycle and are generally despised. Doerr’s ‘Objectives and Key Results’ (OKRs) are very specific in how they are articulated, are visible at all times across the organisation and are typically reviewed every three months. He presents a compelling case. Trying to sell this as a way of working would need to push through the ‘but we do objectives already’ barrier, but I think it would be worthwhile as I can see that the benefits would be immense. The book talks about tools that people use to log OKRs and make them transparent but is light on the specifics; it would be great to know what applications there are and how successful teams have been at introducing this specific method aside from the many case studies in the book.

Next week: Reviewing vendor reports (quickly — I hate the ball being with me), more planning and weaving together a programme structure for the rest of the year, getting ready for another technical programme workshop in mid-July, catching up with a vast amount of governor work, a half-day on Wednesday to go to school and work on the School Development Plan for next year, and rounding the week off with yet another Album Club.

So busy. Travelling home on Friday night my overwhelming feeling was that the waves are coming into the boat faster than I can bail them out. In the middle of conversations I keep suddenly remembering things that I have taken on and need to get done. The GTD ‘trusted system’ has left the building.

On Monday we have the next programme steering committee, the first for a couple of months. Despite blocking out as much free time in my diary as I could at the start of the week, I still got to Friday without the materials being done so I had to finish them off at the weekend. There are so many distractions and little chats at work, ranging from the important to the trivial. On Thursday I had a block of free time and resorted to donning my headphones but it didn’t help much. I’ll be working at home for most of the coming week and I’m looking forward to it.

I feel like the programme is still in ‘setup mode’ for the real work to come. I have hours and hours of stuff to get through with the team in order to get ourselves organised for the rest of the year. I have a feeling in the pit of my stomach that it’s going to be great but I am continually worried about loose ends not being picked up by the team, and not doing enough myself to keep us on track. Twice this week I woke up in a heart-beating panic at 5am filled wit terror that I had missed my alarm; I’m pretty sure it wasn’t jetlag from last week’s trip to Johannesburg that caused it.

In the middle of the week an appointment was slapped right in the middle of one of my ‘keep frees’ to spend time with two young people on work experience. Despite initially being annoyed at another obstacle being put in the way of me getting done what I needed to last week, it was great to meet them, try to see the world through there eyes and describe the bizarrely abstract nature of what we do at work. A few months ago we had an apprentice join the company aged only 16; she already seems many years older than the two work experience children that I met and now brims with confidence. The conversation took me back to my own work experience at their age — I spent a week in the office at Mill Ride Golf Club doing not much of anything. My overriding memories are (a) the turkey and cranberry sandwiches for lunch in the club house, (b) learning what a debenture is and (c) being let home early. It was hard to judge how much of an impact I had — they might have been thinking anything from “please, tell me more, this is gold” to “this is the most insanely boring thing I have ever heard in my life”; it was difficult to get feedback. Maybe in 25 years they’ll be writing some weeknotes about their memories of it.

The team we are working with who own the desktop build for our final two offices have been working hard and we’ve now got some tentative dates for our software rollout there. There are still some tests to be done and issues to work through but it is good to start planning around something concrete again.

I had a couple of meetings this week which reminded me how magical it feels to have a blank whiteboard, to use it as a conversational tool and then step back at the end to find we have created something very useful out of thin air. It gives me the same buzz as writing a blog post; you start with nothing, do some stuff and at the end you have created a thing. So satisfying.

We had a Surface Hub installed in the office for the past 2-3 weeks as a bit of an experiment. It was interesting to see how many people were brave enough to approach it, particularly that the default screen displayed a message to encourage people to interact with it. My experience was mixed — up-close the light from the screen was blinding and made it difficult to work with for long periods; it reminded me of the times as a child that my mum told me that I was sitting too close to the television. Being able to ‘lasso select’, move and resize a whiteboard-sized drawing was brilliant, although unfortunately at one point it crashed with a pop up box that I couldn’t get rid of so I had to resort to taking a photo of the screen. I’ve never had a whiteboard crash on me.

On Thursday I had a great night out with some very old friends at a swanky bar in London. I used to work with one of them nearly 20 years ago and we’ve been friends ever since. I was so lucky to start my career working with such a great bunch of people that I still keep (sporadically) in contact with. It’s been a couple of years as they now live in Singapore after having had a stint in New York. I didn’t know anyone else there and it was fun to meet such an eclectic cast of characters that all had a friendship in common.

I continue to be just about keeping afloat with my school governor responsibilities. We had a long meeting this week which went really well, with some key strategic decisions being made for the school. We now only have one Pay Committee and one Full Governing Board meeting left this year and I want to try and make it a strong finish. My lack of time means that I am massively underperforming in the role of Chair and it needs someone else to pick it up and kick it back into gear. I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to hand over the reins during the summer and stay on next year in a smaller role, but I need to make sure that we have someone who is happy to step up first.

It feels like it’s been a while since I’ve noted anything cultural here in the weeknotes. I have somehow picked up listening to a gorgeous album called Thought You Knew by Snowpoet. It’s a thing of delicate beauty that rewards repeated listens; it’s been a long time since I heard an album that made me press play again as soon as it finished. Here’s a live version of Pixel from the album. Just lovely.

Next (this!) week: Working at home for most of it while my wife is away on a school Year 6 residential trip — a great chance to ‘eat my own dogfood’ and experience mobile working for an extended period with our current tools. The Programme Steering Committee with a governor meeting (by teleconference — go us!) in the evening. More diary battling and orchestrating the many-headed hydra of a programme that we are developing. Plus all of the usual things Mrs D does (which I am already so grateful for) in sorting out the kids, cats and the rest of the household. Already looking forward to a strong finish to the week with an inaugural monthly ‘Lunch Club’ where we will start to test out the many wonderful places to eat in the vicinity of my client’s office.

A week away on business always goes by in a flash and this was no exception. I’m writing this from the plane home, sitting here on the tarmac at Johannesburg airport and not quite believing that the week is behind us already. And what a week; we finally kicked off a stream of work on our programme that I’ve been working on for over six months and it’s great to get this ‘cab off the rank’. We flew down with four team members from the vendor that we have chosen to work with, and for each of them it was their first time in South Africa. It was really interesting to see the country and the scale of the firm’s Johannesburg operation through their eyes. Years ago in a previous job I used to come down here once a month or so and I always love coming back — the people are so great and there is always such a warm welcome.

Our main event was a workshop on Tuesday with IT Architecture staff from across the firm. I spent Friday afternoon and evening getting prepared and making sure that everyone had their presentations and discussion material in order. My role was to run the day and to present an overview of my programme at the start, drawing links to why we had our attendees there and setting the scene for what we needed from them. The afternoon was spent in three ‘deep dive’ sessions where we captured a bunch of things for follow-up later in the week. The workshop could not have been better attended and our team felt very supported throughout the day; we all left feeling that everything had gone really well and we were all set for the rest of the week.

A colleague booked out a room in one of the big office buildings for the rest of the week so that our team had a well-advertised base for people to drop in and see them. From Wednesday to Friday there was a steady stream of visitors to come and cover a massive variety of IT architecture and infrastructure topics, giving our team direction on what was happening in the South African operation and what things they need to consider in the wider context of the firm. In a very real sense the work is just beginning but it could not have got off to a better start.

Unusually for a week away I spent a couple of evenings at the hotel with room service for dinner. Typically there are meals every night with different people but this time a few people were suffering with stomach issues so we didn’t go out so much. We had a great team night out at the Wanderers cricket ground for a braai and to watch the opening game of the World Cup. Those of us from the UK like to rib the local team about how mild their ‘winter’ is but once the sun went down we really felt the fact that central heating is non-existent in Johannesburg and shivered our way to the end of the evening. Great fun and lovely to catch up.

There’s always so much to do on a trip away. It always feels that time is best spent catching up with people and building relationships, which inevitably means that the email backlog stacks up and I end up having to do any ‘real work’ in the evenings, with a lot of it just being reshuffling my calendar for the remainder of the week. This means late nights, leaping into bed with my head still buzzing and very little wind-down time, and an increasing level of tiredness as Friday approaches. By the time I get to being at the airport I’m toast.

My iPad really came into its own this week. To get a ‘proper’ work environment I had to connecting back into the company’s remote desktop was via my laptop which felt laggy and clunky. It was great to be able to quickly deal with emails and documents from the iPad and also to use BlueJeans for videoconferences no matter where I found myself throughout the week. BlueJeans is a bit of a battery muncher but works really well.

Evenings in meant that, for the first time I can remember, I made use of the hotel gym. It was only thirty minutes on the exercise bike but I sweated buckets. Every little helps, right?

Next week: Keeping the momentum. Consolidating everything the team learned this week. Trying to work out how we can get software rolled out and data migrated in our final two countries whilst struggling with resource constraints at our supplier. Turning my attention to getting more things going, getting the next programme steering committee pack in place and putting together a roadmap for the remainder of the year.

This week continued the theme of the previous two with wall-to-wall meetings pretty much every day. However, for some reason it actually felt like a ‘glass half full’ week and I was pretty satisfied at the end of it. I’m not sure why it feels different; perhaps because the meetings went well? I felt like I had a clear purpose and direction at almost all of them and that I was moving things in the direction I wanted them to go.

I still can’t lose the feeling of just having too many things going on. This weekend has been tough with childrens’ running, the annual running club social evening, a football tournament, a summer street party, packing for a business trip as well as lots of computer-based admin like doing our monthly household budget. Serendipitously, my wife spotted a note that someone locally is offering ironing services so for the first time ever we decided to try it out. Having six shirts ironed for £5 and getting over an hour back into my weekend feels like a fantastic trade so I’ll definitely be back for more.

I still have lots of unfinished work in my various inboxes that I haven’t been able to get anywhere near to. I’m on a business trip for the next week so I’m hoping that the evenings will give me plenty of opportunity to catch up. Partially I need to try and curb my enthusiasm for new things before I end up with new commitments — over the past few weeks I’ve joined a book club as well as a monthly lunch club. All good fun but they take up time. It’s been a great month for the companies that have issued insurance renewal notices to me, as I’ve had no time to look at them and shop around!

I really enjoyed reading Now The Chips Are Down for the WB40 book club, which covered the BBC Micro’s place in history as a platform, but I was a bit disappointed that only a couple of us read it. It’s been interesting to hear the reactions to the ‘academic’ style of the text — I tend to prefer this to the more colloquial style of The Power of Moments (our previous book) or The Excellence Dividend (which we’re reading now). I’m not sure I’m entirely comfortable with having the main book that I’m reading being dictated by the list we have put together, particularly if not everyone is up for reading the books, but we’ll see how it goes.

We have a big workshop scheduled for Tuesday where we’ll be trying to build a team between a vendor that we have brought on board in London and key staff who are working in Johannesburg. There’s an always a little nervousness before an event like this that it will fall flat on its face but I’m pretty confident that it will go well. I managed to squeeze just enough preparation in over the past week or so to get the right names on the attendee list and an outlined agenda together. Although I still have a few slides to organise for the kick-off, there should be enough time to get them done.

I spent a lot of time in vendor meetings this week, some with those that we are using already for various projects and others that we met for the first time. We’ve covered an overview of IT security and GDPR with a Microsoft slant to it, we have visioned the workplace of the future and the users and technology within it, dived deep into the world of audio-visual, and looked at the best practices of how to move team-based ‘shared drive’ data to the cloud¹. Troy Hunt got a mention at one of the security sessions and it was interesting to encounter his name outside of the context of the weekly podcast and regular blog posts that he puts out. If you don’t follow his work, and have even just a passing interest in IT security, then you really should.

Taking a step back from all of the meetings has made me realise just how much change we are potentially introducing into the organisation over the next 12-18 months. The big theme that runs through everything is how much work we will need to do in order to bring everyone along on the journey with us. Training and cultural change are going to be all-important. So far we have rolled out a relatively small desktop change and moved a couple of workloads to the cloud, but we already have a big spread of people ranging from those who struggle with finding their emails to others who are leaping ahead in trying to use as much of the new technology as possible. Thinking about more advanced security technology is interesting in the context of most people not even knowing that email sent over the Internet is completely unencrypted. We can always do more training and support to ease the transition and it will be interesting to see whether we get it right. Will we even know if we have?

One of the most interesting discussions we had was on the psychology and etiquette of meetings. Over the past six months I have got very used to running a daily 30-minute project meeting from my desk via BlueJeans, with 10 or so other project team members videoconferencing in from wherever they happen to be, including offices, homes, cars and walking along the street. I love the comfort of being at my desk and having all of my materials to hand — if I want to show the team a document or a drawing I can just pull it up and share my screen. It can feel a bit strange when there are a number of you in the same office all joining the videoconference from your desks but it is a great leveller in that everyone is getting the same experience. As soon as those of you in the same office move to a conference room and still have other people conferencing in remotely you move to a two-track meeting, with one conversation happening in the room and needing to remember to bring people in. I recalled an article by a company who understands this well and prefers conferencing from the desk even if there are just a few people who are mainly in the same office. My client going ‘remote first’ would be a massive cultural shift. It will be interesting how people are working a year from now.

A small company has so few internal abstractions compared to a large one. Working in a small company is like being much closer to the machine with the engine cover off. Years ago when I ran projects for UBS we were given a budget and could broadly spend it across the globe however we needed to. We didn’t worry too much about the shape of the project changing from a geographical perspective, nor were we concerned about things such as FX rates fluctuating throughout the year. Any one project was so small relative to the whole portfolio that the Finance department dealt with any collective over/underspends and budget changes. A project or programme manager in a smaller company has to worry about all of it. We had a couple of meetings with our Finance team this week that vividly highlighted some difficulties with what we plan to do — the fact that our programme has budget in locations X and Y whereas we want to spend money in locations A and B really matters and it isn’t immediately clear how we can do it effectively. We could be over budget in a location A and under by an equivalent amount in location X, but unless someone is looking at that consolidated view of the budget, owners of both A and X are going to be upset. I’ve still got to unpack the detail of the implications but it may be that the plan changes dramatically in response to this new knowledge.

One of my team asked me in our 1:1 who inspired me as a child and who inspires me now. Right now I would have to say it’s those people who seem to be able to regularly deliver great things, still have time for a family, and that are able to ‘work out loud’. Troy Hunt. Manton Reece. If I could get to be even halfway as productive and impactful as them I would be doing okay. I don’t think I had any ‘inspirations’ as such when I was little, but I definitely had people in my life that meant a lot to me. On Saturday night at our annual running club social I got chatting to one of the other parents who is a primary school teacher. Over the years I’ve thought a lot about a teacher I had at my school in Feltham before we moved away from the area when I was nine. She was friendly, kind and really pushed me to do more with the BBC Micro we had in our classroom, setting me on a path with technology which has shaped the rest of my life. I’ve tried to trace her to say thank you but unfortunately she had a very common name — Miss Brown — and the school have no record of her working there. I took the picture below of her and my classmates on my last day at the school in 1986 (on my recent Christmas present of a Halina 110 ‘flashmatic’ camera), while my dad waited behind me ready to drive us off to a new life in a new town.

I had some interesting conversations with a colleague on the topic of people annoying you. I talked about the ‘Buddhist’² approach to thinking about this in terms of actually what’s going on is (a) someone had done something and (b) you’ve chosen to get annoyed. I think this helps — it’s certainly helped me in the past — but it isn’t always that straighforward and I know I need to practice this more, particularly at home. We also spoke about the Feedback Model from the amazing Manager Tools podcast; their write-up of the process is well worth a (re)read. Things would be so much better with more feedback, every day.

At home it was strange to have our eldest boy away for a whole week on a residential trip, by far the longest time he’s been away from us. Parenting one is so much easier than parenting two as there are far less arguments, but I’m sure I speak for both my wife and I in saying that we wouldn’t change anything. They are great kids and we are so lucky to have them. Our lounge only took a couple of days to decorate so I managed to get the TV and Xbox wired back up so that the youngest one could get some solo gaming in while his brother was away. It looks great. We also took the opportunity to purge a shedload of books, DVDs and CDs that we were never going to consume again. People of Berkhamsted, your charity shops runneth over with our old media.

School governing saw us come to the end of a long line of meetings which will hopefully result in something very special and worthwhile at the end of it. I have my fingers crossed for the next few weeks.

Next week: Johannesburg, for the first time in nearly a year, to kick off one of the critical streams of our programme. Looking forward to being back with the team.

(I’m writing this on the plane and was hoping to post from here, but it seems that the in-flight Wi-Fi doesn’t want to play with my VPN…so publishing on Monday it is.)

It felt good to have taken Monday off (along with the rest of the UK) to get some things done around the house and not worried about work. However, the long weekend translated to me firing on what felt like only three of the four cylinders the next day. It’s very difficult to be ‘off the ball’ at work when you’re in a leadership role. Many years ago in my career I might have a day where I didn’t feel like talking to too many people and could just get my head down to do some solo work; this is impossible now.

I found a fantastic feature in Outlook that I had never known about which allows the use of logical OR in search folders. I use search folders all the time; this feature is a game-changer for me in being able to keep up with all of the most important stuff in my email. In broad terms, I’ve given up for now with trying to read everything that comes in and am instead focusing on emails where I am in the ‘to’ field. Anything where I am ‘cc’ed’ is being generally ignored at my desk; I may pick these up later on my commute using Outlook on iOS which doesn’t have the search folder feature. I stayed up late on Monday night trying to get on top of the most important emails and it was amazing how quickly this setup helped me to get through them.

It was lovely to have someone randomly speak to me about being a programme manager and telling me (with tongue somewhat in cheek) “that’s what I want to do when I grow up.” They’ve asked for a coffee and a chat which of course I’m very happy to do. It stopped me dead in my tracks and reminded me of where I am in my career. It’s easy to forget what my current role would have looked like to a much younger version of me.

Unfortunately we had to call a ‘no-go’ for our rollout in Asia as the technical work is not ready. Our current provider is going through some resourcing challenges which means that we are stuck with a ‘best efforts’ approach to getting things fixed. It isn’t great that we have to delay our plans and is made more difficult by the fact that we don’t have a clear timeline to be back on track; until we know what the issues are we can’t make a sensible estimate of how long they will take to fix. We’ve now got (another) weekly meeting in the diary with the management team in Asia to report on our progress and revisions to the plan.

My programme isn’t the only one happening at the firm, and not the only thing that’s making demands of our incumbent infrastructure provider. In order to help both them and us, we’re going to have to pull together a single prioritised backlog of items for them to work through. It’ll be interesting to see how we can make the prioritisation work and how quickly we will get to the point of making a call on which of two things is more important to the firm.

We have lots of work to do on processes, and not just those for our future end-state. With the small amount of change we’ve implemented so far we have already broken a few things and highlighted problems that were already there. Previously, when users moved between countries, they had no expectations of keeping their data, their email address etc.. It’s now much less clear about whether they can keep these things and if so, who has to do what to make that happen. The volume of these types of issues is low enough right now that we don’t need to drop everything to fix it, but it does need to be prioritised sooner rather than later.

The next few weeks will see quite a bit of change in the makeup of the programme team. We had the first of a number of new team members join us this week and it will ramp up in a couple of weeks. At the start of the year my puzzle to solve was trying to get the programme delivering through multiple streams at the same time and it finally feels that we are starting to see this bear fruit. There are plenty of adventures ahead. We have more vendors to talk to over the next couple of weeks with at least two workshops in the next few days alone which will hopefully kick off more work in parallel. I still have lots to do myself to contribute to the effort aside from overseeing it all; my focus is going to be in trying to find time to plan the work between the streams on the programme as well as with the other projects with which we have dependencies.

A friend of mine had to leave work suddenly in the middle of last week as their child was feeling ill at school. Things escalated quickly and they ended up spending a few nights in hospital to recover. Thankfully they are fine, but it was a bit scary for a time and of course makes you think about how quickly events can change in your day, or even your life. Three years ago I ended up in hospital with pneumonia while we were on a family holiday; it wasn’t fun but it could’ve been a lot worse. In our house our unspoken philosophy seems to be that unless you have a fever or are puking up, you’re going to work/school and getting on with it. There’s very little sympathy and low tolerance for disrupting the things we have all committed to do. I think that it is so much harder for the partner who spends more time with the children; even if you feel rotten you are still expected to do all of the things that you usually do for those that are dependent on you.

I’ve managed to spend quite a bit of time with the kids over the past few weekends. Our little guy was at a sleepover last Sunday so the remaining three of us watched Les Miserables, which the eldest boy loved. I’d never seen/read it in any form and it was interesting in how clearly it showed itself as a stage play that had been translated to film. In the theatre you are expected to use your imagination, whereas film is a lot more literal. It felt a little strange to have the big budget film effects alongside props and sets that could have appeared on a stage, such as the ridiculously inadequate barricade in the street. Still, it was something very different and by the end we were all really enjoying it. I couldn’t help but think about the film of Macbeth with Ian McKellen and Judi Dench which I watched at school, with sets so sparse but rendered completey unecessary by how utterly engrossing the performances were.

My bike has been serviced and I managed to get out on a 60mi ride on Saturday. My eldest boy had a 1,500m British Milers Club run in Milton Keynes so I made my way there by bike in time for the run and came back again straight after while my wife took the boys in the car. It felt great to be in the saddle again. Incorporating a ride into a thing we’re doing anyway is a very good way to get the miles in and I’m going to try and take every opportunity I can to do it.

This weekend we’ve had to spend a lot of time getting everything out of our lounge ready for it to be decorated for the first time in 13 years. It’s only when you clear out a room that you realise how much stuff there is in it; one of Berkhamsted’s charity shops are soon to be in for a bumper haul of books and DVDs. Also, I’ve learned that untangling the web of wires and dust clumps behind the TV is a job I don’t want to do any more frequently than every 13 years.

Next week: A beautiful new lounge! School governor meeting time again (with plenty of reading beforehand), and trying to get on top of the meetings we have between now and the end of term. More of the same at work with trying to battle for time to get the planning done, both for the immediate future — workshops this week and next — as well as the road further ahead.

These weeknotes are primarily a tool for me to gather my thoughts and reflect on the past week. After many attempts at private journaling, the discipline of getting some structured thoughts down each week has been good for me¹. I’ve been reflecting on how getting the posts out publicly changes what I write, particularly after reading the thoughts of Colin Walker and James Shelley, two bloggers I have discovered through the wonderful micro.blog. Colin Walker notes in Writing in the Social Era:

Is it a surety in our thoughts and our words, an arrogance that leads us to share them with the world? Or is it the opposite, an uncertainty that requires confirmation?

Knowing our own mind is an internal, personal act but, being so closely linked to our perception of who we are, does it become a projection of ourselves. Is there a desire to be seen, to be known, to be acknowledged? A cry of “this is me” and the only way we know how to do that, the only way that is readily accessible, is to publish that cry to the web and hope someone hears.

For those who claim to write solely for themselves to hit publish, moving from the private to public sphere, has to be something so fundamental to who they are, something incredibly individual – otherwise why post publicly at all? What would be the point?

There are definitely notes I capture during the week which get removed when I edit, either because they are too revealing about my client or people that I work with, or that I don’t want to say in public; perhaps the weeknotes are then less useful to me than a private journal because of this. I know from my experience of being involved with the Readmill platform that the very fact that I was ‘reading out loud’ meant that I became a much more prolific reader. For me, being public isn’t trying to ‘show off’ to an audience, it’s a genuine desire to engage with other people in interesting conversation, although I am sure I am also seeking some form of validation in the feedback from others.

The reason I have been thinking about this is that I am now aware of how many of my notes seem to start off along the lines of “It’s been an incredibly busy week” and talking about how many things I’m trying to juggle. This week it has been incredibly busy once again, and I find myself being very self-conscious about starting yet another weeknote the same way because (a) it’s monotonous and (b) I’m sure there are many people who would read this who have had even more of a hectic time as me. I don’t mean to moan, it’s just how it feels.

Despite being conscious of having too many plates spinning and cautious about adding to the number in rotation I’ve continued to take on more.

Continuing a theme of recent weeks, my diary looked like this:

I’m in a Programme Management role so most of my time should be spent talking to people and working with my team to keep things aligned and pointing in the same direction. The trouble is that I’ve also got some chunky items that I need to deliver myself as well — reviews of documents for each programme stream, putting together a coordinated plan, integrating the programme with others that are also executing at the same time. Focused time to work on these doesn’t exist, and the only time I’ve managed to find is in the evening. I’m sure the answer is to block out time in the calendar if I can, but this is a whole new discipline that I will need to master. Needs must?

It’s a bank holiday Monday next week. I spent no time at my desk on Friday and have emails galore to catch up on; another day’s worth building up from the team in South Africa while I’m away fills me with dread. I’m currently contemplating working on Monday just to focus on getting through the backlog and getting organised, but it also doesn’t feel like a good answer.

Our software rollout in Brazil was the most difficult since our pilot in London back in November. We spent a few evenings working as a team this week to try and resolve the issues; this was made a lot harder by personnel changes in the company that provides our IT infrastructure and our need to beg, borrow and steal to replace them. Communicating via group text messages across multiple countries and time zones is hard to do well and it’s so easy for information to be misinterpreted — there’s no substitute for stepping through an issue as slowly as you can so that you can ascertain exactly what’s going on: Who has the problem and who doesn’t? When did it start? What changed? What did we do so far? I am grateful that the office is small so that the team on the ground could keep the users easily informed. We got there in the end through a great team effort; I’m hoping that the success continues now that our team members have flown home.

We have a ‘snagging list’ backlog issues from our rollout across the four countries that we have gone live in. Given our resource shortages it’s going to be difficult to get these dealt with on top of turning our attention to getting the builds ready for Asia. Frustratingly, we have a different desktop stack in the three regions we operate in, and different stacks again for the virtual desktop/remote access solutions. Part of my programme is to move us to a brand new stack and I will insist on the success criteria including having (as much as we can) one build everywhere; users and the support teams should be able to pick up any laptop and know that it will work exactly the same as all of the others.

At school, our Full Governing Board meeting went really well. We managed to spend the right proportion of our time on the important things and reach some good collective decisions. I even managed to use my commute the next day to follow up with some urgent actions from the meeting, which felt great to have completed so quickly. We will lose a few governors over the next six months and have some important roles to assign to those who have left; the team have stepped up and most of these are now in place with a few notable exceptions. I’m sure we’ll get the rest assigned before the summer term ends.

I’ve had Mariah Carey earworms all week (don’t ask — this deserves a blog post on its own and I’ll spare you here) so it felt a little strange to switch gears to a choice for Album Club. My selection went down quite well and I was happy that it generated a bit of discussion, which is always so much better than where everyone just agrees on a common view. I don’t think anyone loved it anywhere near as much as I do, but there’s a lot of joy that comes from repeated plays — it’s a real grower — and Album Club is mainly about immediate impact and a bit of follow-up in your own time. As host, I executed my role of quantity surveyor for beer and snacks near-perfectly, with just a few ales and a couple of bags of crisps left over. Once again I felt grateful the next day that I don’t drink anymore; a tough day would have been made even tougher if I had carried a hangover with me.

I’ve been avidly ploughing my way through Alison Gazzard’s Now The Chips Are Down, the next selection for the WB40 book club. It’s very well-written and has brought back so many memories of being introduced to computers through the BBC Micros we had in school. I’ve got tons of notes and will have to write up my thoughts once I’ve finished this one.

Next week: Keeping the plates spinning with on-boarding new staff, backfilling others, planning a technical workshop in Johannesburg, getting as far as as I can with reviewing workstream documentation and putting the first draft of an integrated programme plan in place, talking to a new vendor about migrating shared drive folders to the cloud, getting ready for our rollout in Asia, and so much more besides. And that’s just work…we also need to move everything out of our lounge ready for it be decorated the week after. So much to prioritise.

The past couple of weeks have been so busy — this week reaching a ‘having difficulty breathing’-level of busyness — with regular gasps when remembering things I need to or have committed to do. Despite having a good ubiquitous capture tool and a reasonably solid GTD-esque reminder system I still found myself juggling to get through the week without dropping anything.

In my current role I have fallen off of the Inbox Zero bandwagon and am struggling to prioritise the time to get back on again. I remember reading a post by Michael Lopp which said that he gets all of his inboxes to zero every day. How? Surely he must take a brutal approach to processing it. Someone I know recently invested in a ‘GTD coach’ and a couple of weeks later is still finding themselves doing a lot of capturing and processing and not as much actioning as they would like. The coach’s advice is that the GTD process will reflect back at you when you have too many commitments and you need to do something to pull back on them. I’m just not sure what I can pull back on right now.

My calendar seems to be perpetually full. I’ve thought about defensive scheduling, but most of the meetings are with people who are getting work done for my programme and the cost of me having some time back is a potential loss of prioritisation, direction and focus in the team. I’m going to have to do something about it soon as there are some big things to get done before the end of May: on-boarding workshops with our new chosen vendor to help us with where we’re ultimately heading, working through the details of the programme plan with each of the stream leads, integrating the work across all of the streams and creating an approach and plan for hiring. All of this while we continue our software rollout in our final two countries and work on fixes and updates for the locations where we are already up and running. I’m going to have to take a hard line with prioritisation as much as I can, and across the team we need to make sure we are as spending as little time as possible on the old/current infrastructure platform. We have a small team and need to keep everyone focused on making where we are going great.

Late on Monday afternoon I suddenly found myself picking up and coordinating the communications around a significant production issue. As the team is small, if something like this happens it is very easy for us to get sucked into managing the detail. Looking back, it was interesting and unusual in that it only impacted us and not our primary infrastructure supplier, as in the past problems typically hit both of us at the same time. As we continue to move further aware from their infrastructure stack there will be more cases like this. The key thing is making sure that everyone has the same understanding of who is responsible for ownership and communications, no matter where the problem originates.

My contract with my client has been renewed for another year, which is great. The first year of being a contractor has gone by so quickly; I can’t believe that it’s been 12 months since I was preparing to leave my old job and venture out on my own. I still have a long list of things I want to do with the company I’ve set up, not least of which is finishing off my website which has been on my to-do list for months.

My evenings have been spent keeping on top of governor work. May is the time that we close out on last year’s budget and agree on the next one, and I’ve put a lot of time into getting my head around the various views of school financial data so that I can confidently sign them off. The staff at our new Financial Services supplier have been great; it was lovely to get my long list of questions answered so quickly, while the context and reasoning was still fresh in my mind. Next week we have the penultimate Full Governing Board meeting of the academic year and as usual we have a lot to get through; I’m going to have to be on-form as Chair in order for us to finish on schedule.

SATS week came and went in a flash. We’re so lucky that our eldest boy didn’t seem fazed by it at all. The school is so supportive; the year 6 teachers sent the fantastic letter below to everyone they had a special in-school breakfast all week, making sure that they were all settled in order to do their best. I’m clearly biased, but I’m so happy that our boys ended up attending this school.

Our younger boy has made us proud by being chosen as ‘player’s player’ of the season in his football team. He’s so pleased to get the award and it’s great to see him have some sporting success when usually so much of the awards and plaudits are focused on his older brother.

The hastily-assembled WB40 podcast book club tackled our first book, The Power of Moments by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. The plan was to read the first three chapters (as that’s the assumed distance into a typical business book required for you to understand what the rest of it will say) and then discuss it. It’s been great to join in but I’ve been worried about leaving a trail of half-read books all over the place. So, after reading the first three chapters I ploughed on and finished the book, helped significantly by having the audiobook version to accompany my commute. It’s a good read and has sparked some very interesting discussion, but my conclusion is that in this case the three-chapter rule is correct. I’ve fallen out of the habit of writing book reviews recently but will try and put something together on this one.

I managed to remember to cancel my trial Economist subscription before they hit me with a big charge. They seem a little sneaky in that there is no automated unsubscribe option and you need to send an email to them in order to do it. “That’s how they get ya.”

Next week: More professional diary wrestling, running our next Full Governing Board meeting and then hosting Album Club #87. My turn to host felt like miles away and now it’s here, and I still haven’t settled on an album choice. Here are some tracks from the shortlist of three:

A four-day week that felt like a two-day. On Tuesday I felt that I had left half of my brain in the weekend as I repeatedly found myself struggling to remember names of people and things in the various meetings I was in. And I was in a lot of meetings. Most of my week looked something like this:

Despite defragging my calendar as much as possible I was still left with very little clear time to get anything else done. Lots of 30-minute meetings can leave me feeling unproductive at the best of times, but this week felt doubly worse due to people not turning up on time — or at all — to a significant number of them. On Wednesday morning I made it to the office exceptionally early for an urgent meeting that frustratingly couldn’t get going due to key people being missing. By the end of Friday, a day in which I had been stood up for meetings no less than FOUR times, I felt like I might have a Michael Douglas Falling Down moment. Well, almost.

Somehow we still managed to keep moving things forward, although I did feel out of breath at times as I grabbed any available moment to prep for meetings and to get documents written and submitted. Our vendor selection work is now making good progress and we are starting to plan for what we will do when they come on board. The global software platform rollout is due to start in our next city from Monday and we’re very much on track for it, with only two more cities to go after this. There are quite a few challenges looming on the horizon at all levels — hiring, getting our plans in place, integrating what we are doing with other programmes, executing on the work — but it’s interesting, challenging and (mostly) fun. And somehow I managed to wander outside for lunch this week for the first time in a long while.

We’ve started to roll out iPads to our end users because (a) they provide a useful backup for Microsoft Office if there is a local network or other computing outage and (b) they are fabulously brilliant devices. I’ve been using one since the iPad 2 came out and do a lot of my work on them. I’m writing this on one now. I was halfway to the office on Tuesday before I realised I had left mine behind in my house and had a teeny panic about how I was going to manage my day. We are absolutely going to have to run some training sessions so that people can begin to get the most out of them; although they are very intuitive to use there are a few tips and tricks which can be a major boost to productivity, such as running apps side-by-side, taking and syncing handwritten notes in OneNote etc. The Microsoft Office applications on iOS are now so functional that you can do quite a bit without turning to their desktop siblings.

We’ve been test-driving different phone headsets in the office, from basic over-ear devices to ones with accompanying touchscreen panels which interface with the desk phone, the computer and a mobile phone all at the same time. The one I am using has such a strong magnet to attach the headset to the charging dock that the clip has broken off, the end result being that it needs to be docked in just the right place in order to charge it. On Tuesday morning after the long weekend I found it had been knocked off its perch and I then spent the rest of the day (the same day shown above) juggling between charging the headset and making phone calls. Someone else in the office has a model where the cradle comes with a spare battery which you can swap out if the headset runs out of charge, a little delightful detail that gives it the edge over mine.

On Wednesday night our planned 2.5 hours of school governor committee meetings and training turned into nearly 4 hours. We got lots done, including a run-through of how GDPR will impact the school. It seems at this time that a lot of schools like ours are having to have governors step in to become their Data Protection Officer (DPO), which doesn’t sit well with me at all — governors have a strategic role whereas the DPO sits firmly within the operational category. We are extremely lucky to have a knowledgable and willing governor step up to do this for now but it will not be sustainable long-term.

Juggling when our school governor meetings are is a perennial problem. We have a Full Governing Board meeting every half term and then break out into three committees which meet slightly less across the year. All of them take place in the evening as the vast majority of our governors work full time. The Committee meetings are usually held back-to-back on the same day as each other which tends to mean that the first one bumps into the second one and they both slightly overrun. We could split them across different days, but that is then asking people to give up more evenings, particularly the Headteacher or those who sit on more than one committee. There’s no easy answer and I feel we’ll keep wrestling with it forever. The best I feel I can do right now is to try and keep the meetings on point and on time.

Media

I’ve been really enjoying Adrian Newey’s How To Build A Car. It’s a real cut above the other Formula 1-related books that I’ve read this year — readable, honest and geeky. For a long time I’ve always thought that Newey looks like Malcom McDowell’s Alex from A Clockwork Orange so it has been striking that he has mentioned the actor and the film a few times in the book already! Coincidence?

One passage in the Newey’s book gives a great illustration about how hard testing can be, and it made me think back to projects in my career where we have really tried to do testing properly:

On the topic of reading, I asked the WB40 podcast community how they manage their reading queues. I have PDFs, magazines, books and web articles coming out of my ears and have never felt that I’ve been able to prune the backlog enough so that I am always reading the next most relevant or valuable thing. No good strategies came back (besides “serendipity”, which seems to be the default) and the conversation ended up with the community starting a book club. So now I’ll have even more to read.

The FT AlphaChat podcast has a good, well-balanced interview with Jim Millstein which looks back on the financial crisis. Millstein had the extraordinary job title of Chief Restructuring Officer at the US Department of the Treasury and was “responsible for oversight and management of the Department’s largest investments in the financial sector and was the principal architect of AIG’s restructuring and recapitalization” so his insights are worth listening to.

Troy Hunt’s weekly update included a mention of the disclosure by Twitter that they found plain-text passwords being stored in log files. Hunt always offers a well-balanced view and I agree with him that it is understandable how this could happen. Given how many sites store passwords badly in the first place (think of all of those that specify specific character combinations or have draconian limits on the length of the passwords), Twitter are showing that they are actually further up the security maturity scale (in my head) by making a disclosure like this.

I finally got around to watching Monica Lewinsky’s TED talk from a few years back. It’s very moving and illustrates very well the problems with social media and the impact of our online behaviour. There are real people behind the stories and I can’t imagine what it must feel like to be publicly shamed. Even clicking links to gossip and trash websites isn’t victimless; for years I have avoided clicking Daily Mail and Daily Express links as the more clicks they get, the more they can use their click numbers to attract advertising and funding for their hate-filled pages.

Euan Semple’s words that “we’ve all got a volume control on mob rule” come back to me often when I see people being hounded in the media, and Lewinsky’s talk illustrates the point well.

I’m one week away from hosting the next Album Club and it’s getting to be crunch time for picking something. I played PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake in the house a couple of weeks back (one of the most brilliant albums I have ever heard) and it’s been strange to now hear my 11-year old son walking around the house singing the macabre lyrics to The Glorious Land. But what a song.

Next week

Software rollout in South America, more planning workshops, getting my head around hiring, putting vendor contracts in place and tons of prep/catch-up with school governor work.

A really solid week, but a strange one, with most of the people I work with in South Africa out of the office until Tuesday for a long ‘Worker’s Day’ weekend, and then being out of the office myself from Thursday onwards due to my wife heading off for a well-deserved long weekend in Lake Garda with some friends. I’ve been working from home and have had to plan Thursday and Friday around school pickups, kids’ dinners and bedtimes. Nothing makes me appreciate what my wife does for our family more than the rare occasions when she’s not here with us. Having said that, it’s been great to have some ‘forced’ time with the boys and I love being with them. When my wife is here it’s a lot easier for me to retreat into a to-do list, but having them on my own means there is little optionality around participating, especially if I want to avoid them being on the Xbox for hours on end.

Friday night my 11 year-old tolerated — and my 9-year old endured — watching Eight Days A Week which I had discovered was free on Amazon Prime. Well-made but a bit of a disappointment in terms of new material to the story. I made up for it by treating them to an IMAX 3D screening of Avengers: Infinity War on Saturday. I’ve seen some other IMAX movies but I was still taken aback by the size of the screen and the 3D effects, both of which are amazing. The expensive ticket prices look much more worth it when the film is good and you see it as an experience you can’t get at home. I’ve only seen Black Panther in the Marvel series but it didn’t feel as though I’d missed out on too much of the storylines.

We’ve spent most of Sunday in London. Slime London was okay; it’s a great idea for someone to capitalise on the latest school craze by bringing together so many people involved with it and selling their wares. (Was there a ‘Fidget Spinner London?’) The people involved must have been making a fortune. I was glad we got there early as apparently the afternoon before they were literally queuing around the block.

Around the corner from the event we randomly stumbled across a Warhammer store. With memories of the huge Avengers-related battles from the day before looming large in our minds, the big assemblies of battling demons, robots and machines drew us in. We found a highly-tuned sales staff ready to give the boys a hands-on introduction on how you go about assembling, painting and playing a ‘proper’ game with the models. They even have a kids club in the store at the weekend where you can go in and spend time with the other kids on a big workbench. The world of fantasy gaming has always seemed daunting and impenetrable and the people behind it appear to be fully aware of this; the staff couldn’t have been more helpful in explaining how to get started. After much deliberation and a cooling-off period which took us to the South Bank for lunch, ice cream and a wander around the Royal Festival Hall, the boys now have a starter set to keep them busy.

I was hoping there would be some South Asian music and dance at the Southbank Centre but we were far too early. We popped into the Hayward Gallery which is hosting a small exhibition on futuristic visions. Turning the corner into the darkened room we nearly jumped out of our skins as we came face-to-face with a large scary-looking fox in a mirror reciting passages of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine.

Bedwyr Williams’ Tyrrau Mawr was also interesting — a 4K digital ‘painting’ with an audio track that brings the picture (video?) to life.

https://vimeo.com/231694475

We’ve had fun, but I can’t wait to see my wife again.

Back in the world of work I find myself wishing that everyone managed their diaries properly. I know I’m not perfect but It’s an ongoing bugbear for me that people leave meetings in place when they know they are going to be on holiday. I find myself coming out of the flow with a piece of work because I know I’m talking to person X in a few minutes at the scheduled time, only to find that they don’t turn up. Looking ahead and cancelling or declining things is just good hygiene.

Diary clashes have meant that I have had to move out my next programme Steering Committee meeting. This is a blessing as I am hoping that we will be able to go to the next one talking about the things we have done as opposed to the things we are going to do. We had a great couple of key meetings this week which played out exactly as we had hoped, and we’re well-positioned to close out our vendor work as well as put together a plan for the rest of the programme over the next week or two.

I loved Matt Ballantine’s blog on policies at work. We are having lots of healthy discussion about this at my client’s office in the context of IT Security and user behaviour so it is a very timely read.

I had fun running a workshop on efficient strategies for using email (specifically Outlook and Exchange) and had good feedback on it. The session was born out of the fact that some of our users have been struggling to find things since we switched to the new system. The main points of the talk were around how to use the search syntax to efficiently find an email no matter where it is stored, and how most people should be spending time searching instead of filing emails into folders. I am sure that investing time into things like this has a much better impact than so many other things we do.

A few years ago I found out that I live less than a mile away from Mark Lewisohn. This week I found that I live about the same distance from a multiple winner of the UK National 24h cycling time trials. In 2015 he managed an average speed of 22.4mph to cover an unbelievable 537 miles in that time. The fastest ride I’ve ever done has probably been no more than 17mph or so for a fraction of the distance, and that was at peak fitness for me which gives it some context. He’s now getting ready to attempt the to beat the record time for Land’s End to John O’Groats of 44h 4m 20s. There’s a great podcast with him that covers his preparation for the attempt; his primary means of training has been to cycle to and from work in Watford and typically does not cover long-distance rides. You can follow the attempt on Twitter. Inspirational.

Next week: Another email workshop, a half-day planning the programme with each of the workstream leads, getting things moving with our vendors and school committee meetings.

What a difference a week makes. The issues that dominated my time last week seemed to abate and I was able to make good progress with the strategic stuff. A public holiday in South Africa on Friday helped; with colleagues out of the office there was time to get my head down and get things finished. Early on in the week we had a key quarterly governance meeting which went really well and gives us a great basis to plan the rest of the programme; I didn’t realise how much it was on my mind but I felt exhausted afterwards.

I am hoping that next week we will be able to deal with a problem which has been causing performance issues for all of our users and the noise level will die down substantially. We’re still pursuing a more drastic ‘plan B’ and should have a view next week as to whether we need to go down that route.

Tuesday is Labour Day in South Africa and a lot of people are taking Monday off as well so there should be a lot less time in meetings. I’ve got some big discussions lined up for the middle of the week and some home working lined up towards the end while Mrs D jets off on a long weekend. It’s already time to get prepared again for our monthly programme steering committee and I will be pushing so that we have some good updates to report on.

It was a busy week for school governance. A long and intense meeting on Tuesday night was followed by a session at my house the following evening. We had asked the Chair of Governors from another school in our town to meet with us to talk about her experiences with Ofsted inspections. Her school went into the ‘Requires Improvement’ category before going back to ‘Good’ the next time they were inspected. It was great to get her insight about how to prepare. I’ve not been through the process myself and would hate to think that an inspection could be let down by the things I say and show them. Everything in education changes so quickly and so often that maybe things will be different by the time we go through the process, but it shouldn’t fundamentally change what we focus on and how we present ourselves.

This week I was again reminded about the danger of making assumptions that people know what they are doing and will just get on with things, only to find out later they hadn’t and didn’t. Assumptions will be the death of me.

My work week ended with someone popping by by desk asking me how she could set up WhatsApp on someone else’s phone that she had borrowed. It turned out that her car had been broken into the night before; thieves had not only stolen her purse and two iPhones, but also her journal in which she had written down her passwords. We spent some time logging into iCloud, marking her phones as lost, getting her password changed and setting her up with a new phone from an iCloud backup. Unfortunately she had run out of iCloud storage space and her last good backup was from nine months ago. I imagine that all of her photos since then are now lost as well. I’m not the first person to say that given how expensive the devices are, 5Gb ‘free’ iCloud space is far too small as the default. Non-geeks just want to use their devices and don’t want to worry about backups. And why should they? It was a good reminder that there’s a real need to give people just a little bit of education as to how to keep their stuff safe for when things go wrong.

Since last week’s adventure with my first Ofo ride I have used them a couple more times. It looks as though you get your first three rides for free, which seems pretty reasonable to try the service out. I also took a Mobike for a spin and had a pretty dreadful time; the bikes don’t have any real gears and seem to be optimised for ‘not quite easy enough, not quite fast enough’. They are very heavy and rattle a lot; I ended up injuring my wrist through a small commute from Euston to the City. I still prefer the Santander bikes but the inconvenience of finding a free docking station will always put me off. Biking to work still leaves me a bit too hot in my suit so I think I’ll revert back to walking when I can.

Last weekend was filled with activities as usual. My 11-year old finally had his birthday party and seemed to enjoy himself. I still find it incredible how quickly a bunch of kids can make a dinner table look like a hurricane has swept through the room. I found myself projecting my own values and being disappointed that they didn’t seem to worry about the mess they made, but I also know they are only little and it’s not top of mind for them yet. Was I the same? I don’t remember. It’s strange to think that in a couple of years they will become self-conscious teenagers. Everyone was so generous with their birthday gifts and one of them left us all giggling with a completely age-inappropriate birthday card. What were they thinking?!

A good friend of mine ran a great time in the London Marathon. I don’t think it’s entirely fair that other better-known runners get a head start. What could’ve been!

I’ve still been munching my way through The Coming of The Third Reich. The Audible and Kindle Whispersync combo is working out really well and I’ve only got just over an hour to go. I’ve found that I read faster than listening to the 1.25x speed audio version and seem to have settled into a rhythm where I’m taking in the content both ways. It’s so great to be able to carry on with reading whilst walking to work, cutting the grass or doing the ironing.

Chas and Dave have been ringing in my ears since I saw them last week. Their album Gertcha! The EMI Years is excellent and the quality of the recordings is fantastic. Here are a couple of YouTube gems that I can’t get out of my head at the moment:

The next live gig is lined up — I managed to bag a couple of tickets to see Kelis at the Jazz Cafe in July and can’t wait.

Next week: Finishing off our software rollout in another city, detailed planning workshops and the start of the endgame for our vendor selection. And ‘ciao’ to Mrs D as she heads off on a well-deserved break for the long weekend.

My first meeting on Monday got off to a bad start when people turned up woefully unprepared, and the week got worse from there. A coalescence of issues meant that the all of my time in the past five days has been spent almost entirely focused on the urgent and tactical rather than the important and strategic. Every day I find myself staring with disbelief at the clock as it signals the end of the day. The programme is hard and we are only scratching the surface so far. I’ve postponed my travel next week to focus on the work here but the team are pressing on. What a difference a week makes.

It’s been great to have a couple of Office 365 experts in town this week to spend time on helping people to get the most out of the platform. I learnt a few new things too. There’s a lot of depth to the features and half of the challenge is getting an understanding of what’s there to be used.

Being here next week means that I can still get to the school governor meetings I was going to have to miss. Last week we had training on primary school assessment data with the ever excellent Ben Fuller. The way the data is captured and presented changes on a regular basis which means that you never feel fully on top of it, so a couple of hours digging deep with all of the governors is time very well spent. It’s difficult to apply statistics in a primary school setting where each year group only has around 30 children but it is still good to use the data as a guide to look more closely at particular areas.

Last weekend’s F1 Chinese GP forced an early start on both days. Aside from being glued to the racing I managed to spend a lot of time outdoors, getting a 52mi bike ride in on Saturday and the whole of Sunday at the Wycombe Phoenix Harriers Junior Club Championships with the kids. My eldest boy learned a great lesson about pacing himself in the 1500m; he went out very quickly and eventually came forth with a time of 5m10s, 8s slower than the last time he competed. The youngest did great by coming second in the Y3/4 QuadKids (a long jump, throw, 75m and 600m runs) and picked up a gold, silver and bronze medal for the individual events. I’m very proud of them both. All of the athletes were brilliant and I overheard so many of them congratulating their friends on how well they had done; everyone seemed so supportive of each other. There were a couple of very heavy falls in the running and I really felt for the kids who had gone head over heels after so much anticipation of their big race. Saturday’s beautiful sunshine had disappeared and for the most part the event was incredibly cold; not great for the spectators but good for the athletes.

I managed to plough my way through Blankets by Craig Thompson, a really beautiful and touching graphic novel. It isn’t particularly profound, and doesn’t have the breadth and depth of From Hell (probably the only other big graphic novel I’ve read), but it’s a lovely story and I didn’t want it to end.

I’ve put the podcasts to one side for now in order to dive into my audiobook backlog. A while back I bought Richard J Evans’ trilogy on Nazi Germany — The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich In Power and The Third Reich at War — and decided that now was a good time to make a start. I bought the Kindle version of the first book and it’s been great to see how well Whispersync for Voice works between the audio and eBook versions. After one week I’m already a quarter of the way though the first book but worry that I’m not taking enough of it in; it almost feels like a different book when I pick up the Kindle version in the evening and read a few pages at a slightly slower pace.

On Friday night I went to the Albert Hall to see Chas and Dave. I hadn’t realised that they released a new album on the same day and heard it on the way there — it’s not bad at all! The venue is visually stunning but the acoustics aren’t great, especially if you’re up in the gods; Chas was a little difficult to hear which was weird given that his mic seemed twice as loud as everything else. I had to rush there straight from work and couldn’t believe that a salmon sandwich and packet of crisps costs £7.80. Am I getting old?

I’ve never got up and down to let people in and out of their seats so much. Constant toilet and beer refill trips were the order of the day. Chas’ daughter Kate Garner came on and did Why Not Me, a number that appears on their new album, and was great. Down in the stalls people were in the aisles dancing their socks off and by the time we got to the crescendo of Ain’t No Pleasing You and an encore of The Sideboard Song everything seemed to go nuts. It was worth it just for those two alone. Great evening.

Next week: Managing a rollout remotely and trying to get that strategic stuff moved on.

What a great week. It started on Sunday with another all-day session to get the Steering Committee pack put together ahead of Tuesday’s meeting. Again, it’s not great that I couldn’t get it done the week before, but I took advantage of Mrs D and the boys heading to her parents’ house for a few days from Sunday morning. The day was helped massively by having a couple of the team over from my client’s office and breaking up the work with the brilliant Bahrain GP in the afternoon. I got to bed after midnight and still had a whole additional day’s work to do on the pack but we managed to crystallise our thinking and convey it pretty well. When I took a step back and looked at what we had created I couldn’t help but think of the Heath Robinson-style machine in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, which makes a lot of noise and produces a tiny thing at the end, but the work to get there is just as important as what we ended up with. Only 20 working days until we’re doing it again.

The week has been tough at times; my delivery of the pack in the meeting wasn’t as impactful as I would have liked. I took full advantage of being home alone through working most evenings. Tuesday saw us have an impromptu four-hour desktop videoconference to get some high-level planning in place against a sudden deadline, but the work was worthwhile and we’re really getting set up for what’s to come. Having a ‘fire drill’ was tough but useful; putting constraints in place on a programme really focuses the mind and gets things moving.

There is so much happening on the programme over the next month. As well as consolidating our software roll-out in London we’ll be going live in another country, planning to visit one more in May and another two in April, kicking off a user education stream, starting a future-state planning initiative with a vendor and getting the main programme streams up and running. There’s so much prep to do but it feels like it’s doable. The end results are going to be great. I was actually sad for 5pm on Friday to roll around as I could have quite happily gone for another few hours of getting things in place and off my list. I’m very, very lucky to be doing a job that I love right now.

I popped into a business department’s management workshop to talk about Microsoft Planner and ended up telling them all about Kanban. They are going to try it out and it will be great to see whether it works for them for their operational processes and project work that they are doing.

There has been a buzz in the team this week about Getting Things Done and it has been a good reminder to me to try and practice it more. I don’t think I’ve ever managed to hoist myself completely onto the wagon. I’ve always mixing up the capturing, processing and doing steps and have never taken the time to do a proper weekly review, even though I know this is precisely where it all comes together. I dusted off a pack on GTD that I created years ago and sent this around to the team — the screenshots may look a bit out-of-date, the links may have rotted a little but the essence is exactly the same.

After a couple of fallow weeks, there have been a few media things that have peaked my interest:

• Track Changes had a great episode on Postlight opening a new office in Beiruit, Lebanon. The story of what they thought they would open (a lower-cost location to get more stuff done at a cheaper rate) and what they actually ended up putting in place (great team members that are the equals of the team in New York that aren’t that low cost at all), and the reasons why, are fascinating.
• WB40 proved that the ranty ones are the best. Great topic of the digitisation of car parks and the flaws in what’s been done, and what hasn’t been done, so far. When you deal with an app such as Ringgo or JustPark you don’t need to fund the infrastructure of paper tickets and ticket machines etc. but invariably it costs you around 30p more than using cash, probably because the services are a bolt-on and the old infra hasn’t gone anywhere. I love the phrase ‘digital washing’. Digital parking could be so much more, e.g. having the apps tell you where the car parking spaces are or having dynamic pricing. This is a bit of a sore point given the shenanigans in our town over the proposed multi-storey car park; based on how I’ve seen town and county councils work I don’t think there is much joined-up thinking. We had proposed ideas for a bit more digitisation in the signage around the town to say where the spaces are but it got very short shrift with the town council who were largely hell bent on getting on with their vanity project.
• The first episode of Hi-Phi Nation is brilliant, asking questions about why vast sums of money are invested and spent executing the wishes of long dead people even when those desires no longer make sense for people living today. I love things that make me see things from a different angle or pose questions that I’ve never even considered.
• Tried not to be too smug about having given up drinking when I read about the latest research into what it does to your health. I’m 41 and I plan to be around for as long as I can; there’s too much to do and enjoy to head towards leaving the planet early.

The risks for a 40-year-old of drinking over the recommended daily limit were comparable to smoking, said one leading scientist. “Above two units a day, the death rates steadily climb,” said David Spiegelhalter, Winton professor for the public understanding of risk at the University of Cambridge.

“The paper estimates a 40-year-old drinking four units a day above the guidelines [the equivalent of drinking three glasses of wine in a night] has roughly two years’ lower life expectancy, which is around a 20th of their remaining life. This works out at about an hour per day. So it’s as if each unit above guidelines is taking, on average, about 15 minutes of life, about the same as a cigarette.

Finally, on a whim, I took my first Ofo bike ride to get from the office to the station on Friday night. The bike was just sitting there, all yellow and tempting, and it only took me five minutes or so to download the app and get set up. Having bikes that you can park anywhere is a great step forward — using a TfL bike always feels like a massive gamble that there will be a space to dock it when you get to the other end. The ride cost me nothing which I assume is an introductory offer. The bike itself was a little rattly and not quite as comfortable as a TfL one, but it was fine. I’ll definitely give them another go in the future.

Next week: Prep for travel, a visit from the user education team to get the most out of our new platform, a big push on our vendor selection, school governor data training, and getting as much in place as I possible for the next phases of the programme.

A week of two halves, with a boat load more positivity, energy and optimism at the end compared to the start. Once again I had a vivid demonstration of the value in business travel and the benefits of being colocated around the right people for a period of time. One of our extended team members from Johannesburg was in town and his questioning helped me to focus exactly how we are going to wrestle the programme over the line. It only took a few questions, a bit of time in a meeting room with a whiteboard with some back and forth discussion and all of the pieces started to fit together. We have much of the draft work already done in one form or another and just need to stitch it together into an approach which we can play back to the rest of the organisation. The ‘ball of string’ problem suddenly feels doable. I can’t wait to get cracking on it. All of the other work hasn’t gone away and there is still a challenge to work on the real strategic stuff versus the here and now but I am sure we can do it.

We finished the software rollout in the London office and said goodbye to the team that flew in five weeks ago. They’ve done a fantastic job, methodically working their way through everyone in the office and responding to issues and questions in a rapid, calm and unfazed way. The technical work isn’t done but the rough edges of the software issues have been significantly smoothed by the way in which they did their jobs. Work can be tough and the issues frustrating, but it can still be both fun and rewarding when you have a great team.

I’ve found that users have a very low expectation for how well IT systems will work and have a certain degree of tolerance for problems. A small set of people seemed to have had a disproportionate share of issues but even they have been incredibly patient with the IT team — some have even bought us doughnuts and chocolate to say thanks for the time we have spent with them.

Our long Easter weekend was filled with friends and family, watching Black Panther at the cinema (7/10, I’m really not an action flick person), a dinner out for my son’s birthday and a get-together with my parents and brothers and all of our wives and children. Lovely. All rounded off with an unusually timed Album Club of the best kind — an album that I had always intended to listen to but had never got around to, which sounded great. It’s my turn next, so I’ve put the podcasts down for a bit and gone back to listening to a few albums from my shortlist to work out what I want to play.

I’m finishing this weeknote off at the athletics track where my 11yo is training. He ran an incredible 5:01 in the 1,500m in the Watford Open this week; we looked it up and found that he would have beaten the Women’s world record before July 1936! Wish I could have been there.

This weekend I need to get lots done for work again so that we’re ready for our next programme governance meeting on Tuesday, as well as fitting in time with the family and watching the Bahrain F1 Grand Prix. Somehow we’ll make it work.

Next week: So much to do, it’s going to be all about ruthless prioritisation and keeping my fingers crossed that the team can deal with any ongoing issues from the past five weeks. Strategic planning, a programme steering committee, a big push hard to finish our immediate vendor selection and detailed planning to roll software out into the next two offices.

A five-day week goes by in a flash; a four-day one is supersonic. Another week where the urgent and tactical has tended to trump the important and strategic. There have been similar themes for the past few weeks; more than ever I’m conscious of repeating myself here and will try and avoid it.

• Four weeks into a five week phase of our programme and I can feel the sense of the team being tired and flagging a little. A big push to get it over the line next week and we can then focus on the issues that have come up as well as the bigger aspects of the programme.
• We coined the phrase ‘the ball of string’ for where we look to move one piece of technology and find it is attached to everything else. Getting this right is the crux of what we need to do and where I need to be pushing to spend most of my time.
• Wrote an internal blog post to explain the complexities of where stuff lives once someone has switched over to the cloud. Good to have something written down that we can point to when questions start coming in. Conscious that the need to have the blog post is interesting in itself and that the system goes against the grain of ‘don’t make me think’.
• When rolling out software to tens of thousands of people, problems become statistics. When it’s a very small number, every problem is significant and every bad experience is highly visible.
• Had some interesting new problems turn up such as ‘why can’t I send one email to 1,336 people?’ and learning the limitations of the system. Software as a service means that we all have to play by the rules set by the vendor; this may hurt in the short term but will be simpler in the long term. Great to hear about users exploring the tools and thinking about how they can utilise new features that they never had before. I like all of these problems more than the “you broke my computer and I can’t work” one.
• Still battling with having tons of strategic materials at my fingertips and so little time to be strategic. When most of your long-term thinking happens in meetings with vendors or on the weekend, you’re doing something wrong.
• Trying to put a document in landscape format in order to fit more info into a table and finding it was already in landscape is the documentation equivalent of cycling uphill and being disappointed to find you’re already in first gear.
• School governance meetings went well and were productive; I felt as though I did a good job of chairing the FGB meeting this week and the team asked lots of great questions. All wrapped up in good time.
• Life with the cats remains challenging even after four years. Greeted by ‘the meow of doom’ in the evening as one of them brought a live mouse in, took it halfway up the stairs and then lost interest. I have never seen a mouse jump in the air before and we all let out a collective “aaargh!” when it did. Friday saw Mrs D have to clean up the remains of a wood pigeon that seemed to have exploded in our kitchen while we were out. I’m more resolved than ever that these will be the last pets we own.
• My 10-year old has taken to making us cups of tea, and he’s pretty great at it. I was given a random cup of tea and a biscuit while I was on a conference call at home on Monday. This is a fantastic development.
• Kids football has felt like a bit of a slog this season. Our U9s lost again on Sunday although they had some great chances and managed a goal. It was a first for us with one of our players getting a mild electric shock mid-game, from a fence as he retrieved a ball.
• We had a lovely time with our South African visitors today. After four weeks of living in London it was great to be able to offer them lunch and a walk in the countryside. Seeing the place you are so used to through other people’s fresh eyes is brilliant.

Next week — a family birthday, an unusually-timed Album Club, another four-day week and the end of a significant phase of our programme.

This has come around super-quick for me, partly because I didn’t get much of a weekend the last time around. I got my weeknotes out late and then slipped straight into Monday with a huge to-do list. I seem to spend a lot of time thinking “I can’t believe it’s Friday already”; this is great in that I am loving what I am doing but bad in that I wish I had more than 168 hours to do it all in.

This was week two of five for our software rollout in London. Initially, things continued in the same smooth manner as last week and by the time Tuesday morning’s Steering Committee meeting came around I still had a good, confident story to tell. The meeting went well; the time I had spent at the weekend creating illustrations like the one below to explain various concepts really paid off. It can always be better, though; we need to look for more opportunities for the Committee to make decisions and really steer the programme, but I think this is a factor of where we are with the work right now.

On Tuesday afternoon, almost straight after the Committee meeting, things took a turn for the worse, with some of our users reporting all kinds of issues, particularly around speed and responsiveness of the software on a specific platform. It’s a real measure of the team in terms of how they step up when we get multiple problems arriving and we did well; we were organised, calm and gave the users as much attention as possible. It’s a bit like a bad experience in a restaurant where the management team have an opportunity to put things right as much as they can through how they respond. Our daily wash-up meeting was a little more involved than usual as we got our head around the entire landscape of where we are and agreed what to do next. I found myself stuck on a late train home, writing a note to all of our users and taking responsibility for any issues, frustrations and loss of productivity they had.

Wednesday was better but there were still a few niggles. We weren’t completely stuck and could continue with a lot of our work, but we were cautious to avoid adding load to the environment where we had seen the issues on Tuesday. Later in the week we have found a lot of circumstantial evidence that could have led to our problems but it is incredibly difficult to draw a straight line between a cause and the effects. Deciding on how to move forward feels a bit like trial by jury where we are trying to work out whether we can explain problems ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ as opposed to positively proving that two things are linked. This makes me very uncomfortable but given the way we work and the infrastructure environment we work in, we have to accept that we probably can’t get down to a lower level of detail. Overall, we’re still on track but will need to decide on details on how we move forward while we have imperfect information.

Meanwhile, I have been continuing to try to spend my time laying down the runway for the next projects in the hopper. Vendor discussions are reaching a level of maturity which hopefully means we can decide on a partner soon and we are busy planning visits to the firm’s other international offices to upgrade their systems. I am far, far from being on top of email and have been conscious about what I have committed to; this week I have found myself working late at night to reply to someone where I said I would get back to them that day, which has meant I have been trying to avoid making this type of commitment where possible.

As work has been so busy, we are half a month in and haven’t done our monthly home YNAB budget yet, possibly the longest we’ve left it in four years. We’re flying by the seat of our pants a bit but there isn’t much major spending going on this month so I’m hoping our income will cover our outgoings. One to catch up with this weekend.

My wife made an executive decision to treat ourselves to a new kettle, which seems like an extravagance as our old one was still working after only a year or so of service. The problem was that the rounded spout of the old Russell Hobbs one meant that it was utterly abysmal at pouring, which is quite an important feature for a kettle. The 1980s-style Breville which we’ve replaced it with is almost sniper-rifle-esque in comparison and it has been a joy to use.

The two evenings of governor meetings went well this week, although as the clock approached 10pm on Monday I felt as though I had to rush everyone along in order to get out of there. As hard as I feel I work, it’s always sobering to check in with Headteachers across the town who seem to be in a permanent state of evening and weekend working. Not good.

On the media side, other than continuing with podcasts on my commute and a few pages of Johnny Herbert’s biography before I turn my light out, nothing really grabbed me. I did have a puzzled look on my face when a Medium post turned up from Tim Berners-Lee about the web being under threat. Am I missing something?

Next week: More of the same; focusing on our rollout, trying to find chunks of time to keep laying the runway, and a few key governor meetings. Plus the a welcome return of Album Club!

This weeknote is late as the week didn’t stop until today. So much is going on that I’ve had to put in a full day’s work on Saturday and another half on Sunday just to keep up.

A small team of people flew in last weekend to start the next phase of our software rollout and although things have gone relatively smoothly, being involved in the work has meant that my ‘spare’, focused time has been very limited. We have a monthly steering committee meeting on Tuesday and I’ve been trying to find time all week to prepare and get the materials out in order to allow time for people to read them beforehand; they are finally done, but they took me almost two whole days to put together from Friday evening onwards. Looking back now, it’s no wonder I’ve felt stressed all week. Although I spent very little time with my family this weekend I’m so glad to have got the work done. It was great to have a whole day on Saturday with no meetings and very little interruptions, allowing me to focus my thinking around what we need to do at the programme level, before I get pulled back into the day-to-day details again tomorrow.

The team that flew in are with us for five weeks. We kicked off our rollout with an early morning meeting which then jumped straight into a presentation with our first batch of users. I soon started to get the same feelings as I did when we rolled out our pilot back in November; my job quickly becomes one of trying to slow the team down, putting some structure into our approach when issues come up so that we address them in a calm and coordinated way. From what we’ve seen this week, the whole point of running a pilot has paid off and we haven’t had any significant new issues appear, despite implementing on some additional platforms. Unfortunately the start of this process has coincided with some critical technical problems with our key software vendor which means that we can’t completely finish the job for any one user until next week at the earliest. This is possibly a blessing in disguise as we were able to see the impact of doing the first part of the rollout, making sure that have a stable base before we proceed.

We managed to get a team dinner in the diary and had a fantastic meal at Haz St Paul’s on Wednesday. One of our South African colleagues said his ‘pirzola’ was the best lamb dish he has ever had in his life, high praise indeed from someone who comes from a nation of carnivores. I’ve been a vegetarian (or more strictly, pescatarian, although that has always sounded completely ridiculous) for 20 years or so and it was interesting to see how people reacted to a big round of mixed mezze as a starter. Hummus, tabbouleh, falafel and cacik go with the territory but some of the team members had never had them before, making it even more enjoyable as they discovered how delicious they were. All bases were covered in our dinner conversation and it was great to get to know everyone a little better after spending so much time talking about work for the past few months.

A South African in our London team had put an order in with the travellers to bring a few things from home. One of those things was a big bag of gem squash (gem squashes?), a fruit that I’d never heard of before. It’s a bit bigger than a tennis ball and has the consistency of a cricket ball. We are now the proud owner of a sample and need to work out exactly what to do with it in the next couple of weeks.

I’ve had so many great conversations this week. There is so much depth and opportunity to the work that needs to be done at the company and the only limiting factor seems to be the time available to do it. My client and I have made great strides in defining how we want the programme of work to be represented to the rest of the organisation; now the work is to create both the ‘presentation’ and ‘actual tasks’ versions for the senior management and programme team audiences respectively.

I didn’t feel myself last weekend and it continued well into this week; it was a bit of a cross between having a mild cold, being worn out and (now when I look back) quite a bit of stress about all of the things on my plate. We had lots going on with being up and out early on Saturday for a family breakfast for my wife’s birthday, sledging with the kids for a good part of the day, setting up a new laptop and then making a last-minute call that the snow had thawed enough for us to chance a trip out to two different 40th birthday parties in the same evening. I’m so glad we made it to the parties; although we felt like we couldn’t get settled down at either one it felt great to have made the effort and to have been there to see people that are important to us. Actually, looking back at it now I can see how I started the week worn out before it even began. Other than Wednesday I’ve been working every evening until about midnight, and then getting up a few hours later to get back to work again. It’s been like walking about in a bit of a stupor and Friday was the first day I managed to feel myself, having had any kind of a good night’s rest. In my fug on Thursday I only remembered during breakfast at my kitchen table that I had to be in early for a meeting, promptly setting a new world record for a person in a suit with a belly full of muesli and coffee to run from my house to the train station.

With so much going on, this is the first year that I’ve had to miss our annual ‘Governors in School Morning’. I always love this event. As governors we aren’t in school very much when the children are around and never automatically have access to see teaching and learning in action, so it’s a great opportunity to get a good reminder of the real reason that we’re volunteering. From the feedback I’ve seen so far it was a big success with the staff and children leaving a fantastic impression on the governors. I’m very proud to be associated with the school, and it’s a privilege to serve them. Again, I just wish I could give it more time.

Media

After reading Michael Lopp’s latest blog post I finally picked up a copy of his book Managing Humans which I have had on my wish list for the past few years. I’m a few chapters in and feel a bit disappointed to be reading the same material that I’ve read on his website, but then again the posts themselves are brilliant so it’s buying the book is a good way to give back.

Being so busy has meant that I’ve reached for some more easy reading for last thing at night. Having finished A Kind of Loving I’m back into Formula One again with Johnny Herbert’s autobiography.

It was great to have the WB40 podcast back again after a brief hiatus. Great point from Matt on Office 365’s terrible name if you have any hope of a ‘work/life balance’; this was brought home to me at my client’s office this week when a number of people refused to have Outlook installed on their phones as part of our rollout. The discussion on Chris’ trip to India and offshoring initiatives made me think back to the time I ran a project with a large outsourced development team based in Pune. There was tension between the managers in the company I was working for and the outsourcing vendor in that the former felt as though they had to get involved in everything and the latter wanted some breathing space to run things and get on with the job. It always felt to me that we should have given them a little more latitude than we did. If you go to one of the big vendors, shouldn’t the management of the setup be one of their selling points to begin with?

I stumbled across ‘Julia from IT’s post on Iron Triangles and Vicious Circles which was worth a read. She has some great points on how to broach conversations with stakeholders who want to fix all three points of the ‘triangle’ of cost, scope and schedule.

Next week

The second week of our London rollout, two evenings of school governor meetings, a steering committee and lots more vendor discussions. And hope that there will actually be a weekend next weekend.

The world of work

It’s been a battle this week. I’m managing a whole programme of work but it’s been a struggle to get beyond dealing with the minutiae of issues on the very first project in the programme. At times it has felt as though nothing will move along unless I drag it forward by the whiskers myself, which has been incredibly frustrating. The work is still fun but I wish it would gather its own momentum. I’ll need to find some time to reflect on why that is and how I can get it firing on all cylinders.

As a team we’ve recently caused ourselves a lot of pain through a series of tiny errors, things we could have double-checked and quickly fixed when we did them but which ended up causing us to lose hours and days later on. (“How does a project get to be a year late? One day at a time.”) We have a large distributed team and aren’t doing enough to communicate with each other as we go, causing us to lose even more time through people having to chase up and find out what is happening. We can do so much better.

Monday got off to a terrible start with snow, delays on the tube, a decision to get off 30 minutes and one stop in to call for an Uber, only to have the car journey last longer than it would have taken me to walk. Missing my programme team meeting meant I had to catch up with people individually and felt like I was on the back foot all day; our daily check-in is so valuable. On the plus side, I had a great chat with my Uber driver who I think is the first person I have ever met from Western Sahara. We covered a lot of bases in 40 minutes.

On Thursday my combination of heavy snowfall, holding an umbrella, thin gloves and a biting wind left me literally nearly in tears by the time I had got to the train station and I took a rare visit to the platform waiting room to get some feeling back into my fingers.

The working week wasn’t all bad. Our big software rollout has been on hold for a couple of months due to a number of critical issues we found in December. We’ve fixed everything we can, have got things in good shape and have now got the go-ahead from our steering committee to continue. We’re flying people in this weekend to get the work done over the next few weeks and it’ll be great to get the end-user delivery underway again. It’s something tangible that we’ll all be able to see.

The internal Technology blog is now up and running. There’s been quite a buzz about it in the team, and although we don’t have much content yet I’ve seen one or two draft posts which should get published next week. I’m not worrying too much about how it gets used right now; the first problem is getting regular content on there and we can then deal with how to tune and hone it.

I spent some time today road-testing roadmapping software. I need to quickly and easily create a top-down plan with all of the key components of my programme that I can use with the programme team as well as our senior stakeholders. I tried ProductPlan (too basic for the money), Aha! (very expensive, probably very capable but also very complex), Roadmunk (the best with lovely output but not customisable enough and no dependencies), and Monday (too bizarre and not what I’m after on the visualisation front). I ended up back exploring Microsoft Project Professional’s timeline view. I haven’t spent much time with this as the earlier versions were too basic and messy-looking, but it seems like it has matured. I now have a basic structure in place and will flesh it out next week.

We had a really interesting discussion with client-facing staff on the technology that they want to have in the room when pitching for business. It got me thinking about how much of a gap there could be between what people think they want and what would actually be successful. The best analogy I have for a client meeting in my own experience is with portfolio/programme/project governance boards. For those meetings I have usually crafted a message and don’t necessarily want lots of flashy data manipulation tools to look at things in real time — it would be too easy to go off down a rabbit hole slicing and dicing information and not cover the things we need to. As soon as you move away from slide decks, PDFs or handouts that can easily exist in the physical world you may end up showing something to someone but not actually ‘giving’ it to them; you turn up, present and then leave. If I was a client I think I would like to walk out of the session with something I can ‘hold’, physically or virtually, that has been created for me. We need to give it more thought and also look at how we can experiment with this in a safe way.

The annual bonus season is coming to a close and as a newly-fledged contractor it’s interesting not to be involved with it for the first time in nearly 20 years. I haven’t missed anything about the ‘performance cycle’ — annual reviews, objective setting, joy or disappointment with the bonus letter — and am glad to have left it behind. A year ago I couldn’t have imagined leaving it all behind. It’s one less thing to spend time thinking about and it’s been good not to have spent hours and hours of my life creating appraisal feedback statements for myself and others.

Finally, we also made efficient use of sophisticated desktop videoconferencing messaging technology:

The world of home

It was a shock to hear about a young man dying in the street in Berkhamsted at the start of the weekend. It’s a cliché, but this kind of thing really doesn’t happen around here. Even more of a shock was finding out later in the week that two 14-year old boys from Watford and a 16 year-old girl from Hemel Hempstead had been arrested and charged with ‘joint enterprise murder’. As soon as we heard about it, my wife and I decided to talk to our children and explained what had happened, just in case they heard it from their friends first and were worried about anything. What a waste of a young life.

In happier news, the children were well-prepared for the snow this week; we saw the long-range forecast and took a trip to our local DIY store to buy a sledge well ahead of when the winter weather blew in. The manager had to get them out of storage for us as they thought winter had peaked in mid-December. All I’ve managed to do so far is fall over in the street on the way home from the office but the boys have promised to drag me out on Saturday morning to plummet down the hills with them.

Media

Mrs D and I have started to have occasional ‘take it in turns’ movie night. It was my turn this week; I picked Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), probably because I’m reading A Kind of Loving and fancied another kitchen-sink drama along similar lines. The film must have been quite a shocking for the times — swearing, people getting shot with air rifles and bedroom scenes with married women — and it was jarring to hear lines such as “Whatever people say I am, that’s what I’m not” which I’m so familiar with from other contexts. Having said all that, I couldn’t escape from it being more of a historical artefact than a film to get lost in. Good, but nowhere near as good as Room at the Top (1959).

We continue to somehow make our way through Black Mirror and finally came across an episode that put the crying emptiness aside and left us feeling warm and fuzzy at the end. The boys and I finally finished Star Trek TNG Series 2 (22 episodes!) which had the lamest of all finales, using masses of footage of Riker from previous shows.

Only a couple of things to read this week:

• Recognising when you share things which aren’t framed as a contribution. (Do these weeknotes fall into the categories of ‘purpose-less contributions’ and narcissism? I hope not.)
• The output of a team of AI researchers whose creation “found two clever strategies for succeeding at Qbert: one is to play a level endlessly, where jumping off a level causes an enemy to follow but you get enough points from killing the enemy that you get another life; and in the other the agent discovers an in-game bug.” (Video) — Via Four short links.

Next week

It’s going to be hectic but I’m really looking forward to it. Our big software rollout recommences, I’ve got plenty to do to move our vendor discussions along and also have a lot of prep for our next programme steering committee meeting a week later. Communication and collaboration is going to be more important than ever and I’ll be doing what I can to keep everyone on the same page.

Here we are again already! On Friday I watched the links to weeknotes pour out of Medium and the WB40 podcast WhatsApp channel, looking on in awe at everyone else being done and dusted with them by 5pm. Weeknotes have ended up dominating my Friday evenings and I’m not sure how sustainable that is.

As much as I love the kids being active and involved in their football and running clubs, it was a rare treat to find ourselves sport free last weekend, giving me the opportunity to go on a nice longish bike ride. It was an icy start so I waited until the temperature came up to burn it off and ended up riding through lunchtime into the early afternoon, interesting to me in terms of how little energy I had. The weather was beautiful and it was a great feeling to get home with a half-century under my belt.

Mat has persuaded me to buy Forza Motorsport 6 for our Xbox so that I can join him and a couple of our close friends in the odd evening of online gaming. They have played each other online for years but this is new to me. My kids and I spent a couple of hours on Sunday getting to grips with it and running a couple of head-to-head races; they whipped my butt, which doesn’t bode well. It’s great fun, but for the past 20 years or so whenever I come away from a gaming session I can never seem to shake a feeling of regret — a guilt that I could have been doing something more productive with my time. I’ve deleted games from my phone because they have been too addictive. I’m not sure whether this guilt is a character flaw in that I don’t relax enough or something that benefits me as I actually do spend my time better elsewhere.

It’s been a really interesting week at work. I love being around the people at my client’s organisation and there is so much potential to make a difference to the business; the only limits are our ideas, bandwidth and ability to focus on the right things. We added a whole bunch of items to the ideas pile this week and need to do what we can to make sure they don’t end up mainly in the graveyard of good intentions. There are lots of dots being drawn between company strategy at head office level, how division my client works in fits into this and what it means to them, what Technology can bring to the table and how my programme needs to both respond and provide input into this. The biggest challenges at the moment are being able to ‘see it all’ and have a process for prioritising the things that get worked on. I’ve been thinking a lot about the things I have read around Wardley Maps (for an awareness of where we are), How to Measure Anything (to give us a common baseline upon which to judge the things we could do) and ‘Cost of Delay divided by duration’ (to prioritise the organisational backlog). It feels like one of those things that would benefit enormously from working out loud, writing and blogging it out, as we find out how to bring these things together. I hope I can carve out more time to move this along.

Does anyone use CD3 for their own personal to-do list, or is that complete overkill? For your to-do list, is it sufficient to work out next actions and then just work through things using context and intuition? I stumbled across Scribe’s weeknotes at just the right time; it’s very comforting to know that other people are grappling with the same things (“There are only two hard things in Management: priorities and scheduling”) and hearing their perspective on it.

I’ve previously talked here about working out loud. It struck me this week that my client, the Head of Technology, does this himself in his own way. His process isn’t to write a blog post and wait for written feedback but instead he presents his ideas to a broad range of stakeholders up and down the firm, does a great deal of sketching on whiteboards/iPad screens/pieces of paper, takes the feedback of the person he is talking to and incorporates it into the next iteration of his model of the world. There’s a lot of energy in the room when he’s around and it’s great to be involved in those discussions, working things out as we go.

The multitude of vendor meetings this week has proved to be good in this respect too; talking through our problems and getting their perspective is another form of working out loud and refining our self-awareness. I’ve been through the same background information a dozen times now and feel that I have a good grip on what we need. I’m trying to steer our potential partners away from just delivering to a spec that we give them and instead want them to tell us about how we should be doing things differently and why, based on their expertise and what they have seen work in similar situations. In one of my meetings I chanced upon Richard Davies from the Leading Edge Forum and it was interesting to talk to him about Simon Wardley and Matt Ballantine, both of whom I’ve been talking to in varying degrees over the past year or so and who work with the LEF in some capacity. Small world.

The very same Matt has been smashing the ball out of the park with his recent blog posts on the (lost) art of (conscious) decision making and the goal of getting IT out of the way as much as possible. The second article got me thinking about the conversations on my programme about whether we even really need a WAN or company-provisioned devices in our target state, and sparked a great chat with the WB40-ers about how much they had been able to achieve down this road.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been talking to people in the team about how switching to Office 365 and Office 2016 on the desktop is not going to suddenly, magically, fix all of the IT issues that people have. I think in our minds we have built up the new tools to be a something of a panacea but actually in the history of my experience of technology there are always defects, pitfalls and problems. This episode of the Track Changes podcast came along to my ears at the right time; from 24 mins 3 seconds in:

Paul: There’s this website — the guy doesn’t update it anymore — it was a blog, the URL is prog21.dadgum.com
Rich: That’s a good URL.
Paul: It rolls off the tongue. But he wrote about a week of bugs, and he just documented all the bugs that he experienced using software for a week. And it was a fairly long inventory and I was like “Oh boy, that guy has bad luck”. And I started to do it myself and I’m like “Oh my god, everything I use is garbage!” and I just work around it. Like my email flies all over the place and I can’t close that window if I want to.
Rich: We get good at navigating that stuff though, that’s the thing.
Paul: You think something’s going to open, it doesn’t, and you go back and do the three things and it opens up. Yeah, we’re all really used to it.
Rich: We get good at bad habits.
Paul: It’s terrible, I mean…our software is still exceptionally buggy like it used to be in the 80’s…we just have all gotten like “eh, well”…It’ll be fine. Everything kind of got better in that like you don’t lose work anymore, everybody fixed that part. So like, things save to the server, they save to the disk.
Rich: Always.
Paul: So you tend not to lose like a half-day of work, so you don’t have this like “I hate computers, everything’s bad.” It’s more this low-grade, like, incompetence. I just want to be very aware of it because we make software.

Somehow, given the knowledge that the software will always be buggy, I still need people to feel that what we are giving them is great. Office 365 is a real step forward in so many respects — using proper Office clients on iOS is amazing — but we do need to calibrate ourselves to still expect a degree of problems, because when has it ever been flawless?

This week we had a visit from the person who is leading the company’s work on blockchain; she held an informal meeting in the corner of the room for anyone interested in learning a bit about what the firm is doing and about 30-40 people turned up. I’m skeptical about how much the technology is a solution to the world’s problems but it was cool for there to be a bit of a buzz in the office with lots of staff from different departments all gathered around and asking questions.

On Wednesday I attended a very meaty inter-school governance meeting. A three hour session in the evening is tough enough after a day of corporate work let alone for the Headteachers that have had a long day at school. I have so much respect for the work they do; it’s a proper job in every sense. It feels great to be involved in what we’re doing and I do feel like my presence at the meetings is adding value. I’ve been reflecting on how the more I feel like this about something, the less it seems like ‘work’. In our own Governing Board we need to look at how we get parents involved from further down the school and build a pipeline of future leaders; despite our best efforts we are still missing those one or two elusive people who are professional, understand what a strategic role entails and do not have a commitment to full-time job, that would be ideal candidates to line up as future Chairs.

I don’t seem to have read much this week although I have been gathering a lot of documents in Evernote on some key work topics to consume over the next week or two. The stories that struck me were:

• The massive fraud at the Punjab National Bank that was caused in part by an out-of-date version of Finacle, the core Banking system (hat tip to the FT Banking Weekly podcast)
• How badly polluting it is to burn wood on your stove or fire, and that burning wood in open fires in UK cities has actually been banned since 1956!

Finally, I randomly stumbled across this little tune a few days back and it has been burrowing itself into my brain since then. The album isn’t half bad either.

Next week: Very big week on our programme, getting ready to continue our software rollout the week after. Lots of governance to do and technical work to line up so that we hit the ground running and make the end-user experience as great as it can be.