Weeknote 2024.17
An odd week, at times it felt I’d been in the role forever, at other times it felt like my first week.
Saturday
I walked from Liverpool Street through Spitalfields, Shoreditch and Brick Lane with my eldest, home from university for a few days, with a quick pint in the Good Samaritan and a cheeky Nando’s before heading home.
Sunday
Offspring Back to Uni, dropped elder off at Kings Cross and younger at Paddington, then spent a couple of hours exploring the Paddington Basin. I’ve been around there a few times now, so finding new photographs is getting harder.
Monday
A few important meetings, which went well, testing new formats for updating management teams on what we are up to and how things are going, with just the right amount of information to enable useful discussions.
B&W print competition night at the Woodford and Wanstead Photographic Society https://www.woodfordandwansteadphotosoc.co.uk/. The competition is very tough as the club is full of fantastic photographers, my three entries scored 16, 17 and 18 out of 20, but most importantly the judge shared clear ideas for improvements.
Tuesday
Day off. Trip to Cambridge. It rained. Not hard, but persistent.
Wednesday
An insightful and useful discussion about a long-running project that we will turn into an options paper for the sponsor. Some reflection on our journey so far, some knowledge generously shared by a neighbouring borough, some thoughts about stakeholders.
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And then a positive project board for a piece of work I paused shortly after I started as the conditions weren’t right for successful delivery. Lots of talking brought everyone into alignment, we restarted work earlier this month, and we will have the first new products live this month, and more in June.
And at the end of the day, an update on how we are driving savings from our commodity contracts, all proceeding well, and the more we learn the more opportunities we find.
Thursday
I joined a user group for one of our major partners, a few other local government colleagues, and rather more private sector customers. We often think we’ve got unique challenges (and opportunities) however everyone I spoke to had comparable experiences regardless of their industry.
Looking to catch-up on my emails and join a few Teams calls, I popped into another local authority building, however found they’d turned off gov.wifi since I was last there, and their local guest Wi-Fi wouldn’t work with my Teams. A couple of stops on the tube to another council, hopped on gov.wifi, all fine.
Thursday night is photography course night, feeling more confident setting up the studio lighting now, and then adjusting it to achieve the desired effect. Lots of emphasis on recording our setups, so we can recreate and adjust them.
Friday
A morning of meetings. Reflecting that starting a new job means you inherit every decision going back years, possibly decades, and you just have to muster as much grace as you can about it and plot a course forwards.
And an afternoon of budget planning, went better than expected thanks to the excellent work of finance team supporting me. Like most things, it’s a team activity.
Track of the week
She’s A Rainbow, by the Rolling Stones. Original mono recording. https://open.spotify.com/track/5dF7oCXvh7dFNt345OOClw?si=e19b8fd0bbac4501
I’m never sure how much to believe what I read on Wikipedia, however it reports Gilbert Baker was inspired by this song when creating the original LGBT rainbow flag. I suspect this is a fanciful story, but a good one.
