Weeknotes 11/11/2018 – Week 10

We have had quite a few new people join at work over the past few weeks. They are all great and bringing lots of new experience and skills. It really lifts up a small company when you hire specialists in certain areas. We still have gaps in service/product design which I am hoping to get advertised soon…I said this last week and still not much progress though. The internal cogs of a small company can sometimes be as difficult to get moving as those in a large company.

We have a pretty big queue of project work that we are working through slowly, all the while we are transitioning to squads and more scrum like work practices. So many interesting challenges in the trade off of old and new projects. Teams getting up to speed and product owners ploughing their own furrow some what….well I am anyway. Now I am trying to pull some of that older work into the squad as we gain momentum without diluting the overall goal we have of making the account better for people wanting to manage their money. Plenty of changes that can come under that banner though.

I have been asked to talk at Product People North on Friday at the ODI in Leeds. It is an event for Government Product Folk to talk and I am very nervous about it as they are very good at all this product malarkey following the input of GDS and I am just winging it. My talk will be therapeutic for me, probably anaesthetic for them.

Finished reading The Sisters Brothers which turned out to be a good tale. Quite an unhappy ending too which I also enjoyed. Not all bad men get to be winners. Started and finished Snap by Belinda Bauer, a pretty good page turner but some things felt a little too simple and convenient. A story of three kids abandoned by their Father after their Mother is murdered. Next up in the reading queue are the Murderbot diaries by Martha Wells. So much death. I should read some happier books that don’t feature piles of bodies.

Talking of avoiding death. My fitness efforts are going ok. Managed my first run to work on Thursday. Exercise and commute in one is both efficient and healthy. Just over 8k from my house to the office so a decent run.

10 weeks of notes now, 10 weeks of fairly healthy eating, 10 weeks of exercise, 10 weeks of books over social media. Made some good lifestyle changes and hoping I continue after Xmas.

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