Week 15 and a little bit
First off, Happy New Year to all 6 of you who read my weekly digest and many thanks for coming back, if you did ;).
I took a couple of weeks off over the festive period and promised myself a break away from any and all work / digital realted stuff until I retured to work on the 8th Jan. I lasted until the 4th when Whatsapp lured me in with some messages about planning and why we do it, then Dyfrig Williams put a post out about planning and that was it, kind of back in the game. Anyway to quote the great man ‘the 4th is all good, it aint no thing!’
Time off over Christmas really is good, as metioned on a few podcasts I’ve listened to this past week its that one time of year when I think most people (well in my line of work) can properly switch off for a bit. Yep, holidays are good during other times of year, but at the back of your mind you knows theres somethign going on at work, or you may get the occasional work message, but at Christmas everyone is off, not a great deal is happening and hopefully you can just switch it all off for a few days, or twoish weeks in my case.
Technically not the week just gone, but thought I’d get this in. Took a little trip to London the weekend before Christmas, my kids love London and we went on the Emarites Cable Car over the Thames, once described to me as a journey from nowhere to nowhere, but worth it for the views. We went early evening, it was a bit misty, but still great to view London lit up at night from the Olympic Park right across to Westminster. If you get the chance I’d recommend it, I’ll be sure to do it during the day at some point.
*post-publish add-in
Also completed 16 personalities this week https://www.16personalities.com/ which threw out the ‘Virtuoso’ persona for me. I’ll let others be the judge, but there’s definitelysome traits that ring true.
Good Things
First week back in and managed to get a draft tender docuement finished up for my current project. It’s really interesting and will be a new method of procurement for the organisation. Hopefully we’ll get this out to market shortly and step the project up another gear.
Things that could have gone better
It was the first week back for most people so work pretty much went to plan Again a bit of better planning by me wuld have meant we’d be finalising our tender doc earleir in the week.
Also, this week could have done without my 4 yr old being up all night on Tuesday being sick, but two changes of bed clothes, 4 pairs of PJs (him not me) and 2 hrs sleep (me not him) and all was well with the world. While he looked a bit peaky on Wed he wasn’t ill enough to not be asking for chocolate every 5 mins.
Weeknotes
Louise Morgan https://weeknot.es/2018-week-2-b9d07ea3c7cf
Neil Tamplin https://medium.com/weekly-braindump/braindump-season-2-episode-1-3d03f87e761e
Chris Taylor https://weeknot.es/cheese-and-prototyping-weeknotes-25-5ded3ea3010e
Jonathan Kerr https://weeknot.es/s02e06-32da88fa7d61
Matt Ballantine https://mmitii.mattballantine.com/2018/01/12/weeknote-369-clap-clap/
Reading List
All reads have been a bit longform this week and I’ve skipped some of the blogs and eased myself back into work:
First up Dyfrig Williams with the post that pulled me out of my sabbatical https://medium.com/doing-better-things/planning-is-guessing-aims-for-2018-2f569d6b5a53
A service approach is fundamental to a good service. My fav response on Twitter was from Ann Kempster ‘….you get to that decsion pointby knowing what needs you need to meet. Almost certainly involes mulitple products. Building your own in this space is the road to madness.’ which was where I was trying to get at in my ramblings.
Input a bit into this whilst it was running and the results are unsuprsing to those of use who regularly trawl DOS2. Completly agree with Harrys summary and I think the MarketPlace team and CCS have a job to do in upskilling commercial teams across Gov to get better at using this service. It’s good as it does make it easier for SME’s to submit, but its not possible to do any pre-market work as a supplier. Woudl also be interested to see plans to expand use of the DOS framework more widely across the Public Sector as we’re constantly registering on different frameworks to be able to bid for work.
Final one for the week. Great report from The Work Foundation on technology, ways of working and culture and how theres still soem way to go before we get to a place where organisations are making best use of their technology to improve employee engagement and productvity.
Podcasts
Nice podcast from Matt and Chris on planning and the purpose of it(see Whatsapp messaging above!) https://wb40podcast.com/2018/01/08/episode-51-plan-to-fail/
Listened to a few of these over the course of the week, but this weeks recap on ‘The New Work Manifesto’ was good, goign to try and bring some of these things into my working life, like reclaiming lunch and setting aside time in the day to get meaningful work done https://eatsleepworkrepeat.fm/episodes/
Glad to hear that the Scienceish podcast will eb back later this year, its gives a nice take on the science behind soem of my favourite films. However this one is about the book The Circle, must admit to having not read it, but did recently watch the film (bit meh!!), but the broader concepts are quite scary as the big 4 of Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook (some people include Microsoft in this also?) eat up our data and profiel us behidn closed doors https://radiowolfgang.com/s/scienceish/the-circle
New podcast for the new year. Planet Money, again listened to a few of these and really enjoyed https://www.npr.org/sections/money/127413729/planet-money/
