Another season ticket purchased so thats another month committed to 🙂

This week was exhausting – I interviewed a total of eight people over 3 days with no interview lasting less than an hour and the paperwork and deliberating pretty much matching the interview timings! I don’t know how I would have coped without the help of a couple more experienced members of the team (take a bow Sam and Al) but even with their help it has been a tough few days.

I’ve written before about how hard I find being the interviewer rather than the interviewee I think. The pressure is huge as the decision doesn’t just effect you but all the people around you as well – and also with a track record like mine potentially people after you leave! Strangely what made it doubly difficult this time was the fact me had a group of genuinely very good candidates – though all my quite different strengths. I am confident in the decisions made in the end though (despite one sleepless night dwelling on it) and assuming everyone accepts the offers we should be in a position to really kick on with some of our plans.

Search continues to be a big preoccupation – we currently have Martin White, author of Enterprise Search from O’Reilly, in doing a bit of work for us helping to identify where best to put our resource for the maximum impact to fix our site search. The team has also been working on some potential UX changes that should simplify things a great deal (it was nice to hear from Martin today that one of his recommendations was essentially what the team had already proposed independently). The other strand of search related work I have been involved in is bringing in a ‘search analyst’ as a contractor for a spell to help the team better understand things like SEO and how to get the best out of our analytics package. More interviews for that on Monday.

This week was also a ‘reporting’ – it feels never-ending to be honest though I know that isn’t true and the programme team try to limit things where they can but the feeling is currently we are spending more time on the ‘governance’ of the programme than we are actually *doing* anything and that balance needs to change.

Only two days next week – taking a couple of days to recharge my batteries.