Monday kicked off with a new leader in my all time d’oh! moments. I managed to get on the train to work missing not only my pass but my laptop as well! (Given the weight of said laptop this is an impressive thing to miss). I then made things worse by alighting at a local station thinking I’d be able to quickly get the train back and rescue my morning. This was unsuccessful. I was also charged the full £12.80 for the total of 6 minutes on the train both ways.

Still I did then have a productive day based at home – powering through a pile of emails and writing a presentation that I’d been putting off.

Tuesday I returned to Titchfield where I had a really good day (which First Great Western then proceeded to ruin on the way home.) A couple of meetings that I really had the fear could be quite difficult both ended up being really useful, constructive conversations that left me in a positive frame of mind. I am more confident than ever now about the two major projects that are ongoing – the meeting with Martin from Intranet Focus and Charlie from Flax about some consultancy they have done for us around improving our site search was really helpful and also helped me realise just how much work we are already doing in this space. I need to keep the topic of the other meeting under my hat for now but it really did hugely exceed my expectations.

The main focus of my Wednesday was a long call with a colleague from the IMF sharing experiences of open data. It was interesting to explore just how similar the challenges are despite the quite different remit of the IMF. Open data is really becoming a major part of my working life these days – who’d have thunk it! I can pretty much hold my own in most conversations but I need to brush up on some of the technical rather than policy & strategic angles.

Thursday I was giving a talk to some new members of the Government Statistical Service – the aforementioned presentation I wrote. Unfortunately due to forgetting to eat and then some technical issues that ended up me losing access to my notes and being forced to rather wing the talk from memory while generally being a bit off my game. I am not expecting positive feedback 😦

Today I am at the ‘Mind the Product’ conference (I’m writing this in the lunch break). I’ll write about that separately though. My main takeaway at the moment is that there are a lot of product managers in London!

All in all not a bad week. Be glad to get home this evening though.