Day 20 – 30 January 2014
A whole day in County Hall and so I decided to get the train in. I can only do this if I don’t have to be somewhere else and don’t have to be too early or late. It was a welcome break from the car park on the A1 around the Metro Centre.
The first two meetings (only 6 today) were customer focussed. The first was to look at what we need to do for our business development conference planned for October. It seems a long way away but tempus fugit as they say around here.
Before I started though I had to do a bit of Feng Shui in room 5/109. Now that the desk has gone the furniture was all over the place and the lads who’d put the videoconferencing suite in had left wires all over the place. That was 20 minutes of my life I won’t get back but now it looks all ship shape and I could settle down.
Back to the conference and we identified we need to think about a location, speakers, stalls, themes and food –not much then but it is all very exciting. We’ve run a similar conference for several years but mostly focussed on the learning sector and this time we would like to widen it to cover all of our customers.
Next up was a meeting of the ICT Customer Group, a diagonal team set up to address communications, both internal and external, as well as our relationship with customers. There were lots of good ideas but it takes time to change the way that people work and so implementing them will be interesting. Perseverance pays off.
Over lunch we had the Extended Management Team meeting where all the Directors and Heads of Service get together to have a bite to eat, catch up with the gossip and hear what is going on in everyone else’s world. Sometimes the presentations and updates can be a bit heavy going but today’s started with a couple of stories which lifted the mood completely. These are interesting times whether we like it or not and so we might as well enjoy it. There was lots of beard related banter, most of which was not suitable to be published.
4th presentation of the week and 6th tier 4 manager of the year.
Learning points for today: Anatomy isn’t Aimie’s strong point; Changing culture takes time; Stories make all meetings memorable; Sometimes my jokes aren’t funny (did I get that the wrong way round?).
Today’s enjoyment rating 9/10 – was going to put an 8 as there is still a lot to do.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 