Week beginning 6 September 

The more I think about this week the less clear I am on what to say about it. That may not bode well for you, dear reader. I began by thinking that I’d achieved most of the things that I intended. But on closer inspection I’m not sure I used the goals for the fortnight as actively which meant that whilst I did some stuff, I’m not sure how much I achieved.

Tuesday gave the best feeling. It had been a hot day and by the time I dropped my daughter at swimming I felt like I had no energy. Then I ran for an hour (there’s literally nothing else to do thanks to some non-existent spatial planning) and came back full of energy, which helped me smash through a number of tasks that I’d been delaying.

I also got some valuable feedback on how I was planning to set out our recovery status. In essence it was ‘don’t start from there’. I’d done enough to do justice to what I was intending and the feedback was clear enough to be able to change course without that leading to duplicate effort. 

From time to time I struggle to manage the back-and-forth involved in some tasks. There’s just enough time to do the first thing but then not the follow-up. I feel particularly bad about that when I’ve asked someone to do something and they do it efficiently, and then it sits back with me for some time. There were a couple of particularly good examples in facilities management this week. In the back of my mind there must be a better way of managing these things which aren’t quite tasks and definitely aren’t projects. But I haven’t found it yet. 

I was out of the office, as it were, for two days this week at the LGC pensions conference. It’s interesting to be immersed in someone else’s world, and I had also been asked to speak about cyber security. Being an expert in neither wasn’t going to deter me. And helpfully the Pensions Regulator makes cyber resilience a specific obligation on fund administrators and trustees.

Next week I’m expecting two genuinely collaborative days – working with a colleague on the business case for the next phase of develop of our data platform and building out the customer services playbook with Kelly. We’ve also got an important workshop about how we plan the always-too-contended allocation of software engineering skills across our products.