The Big Mo

I love the Harry Bosch books by Michael Connelly and one of the little things that the character often refers to is ‘the big mo..’. Momentum. For Detective Harry Bosch it is all about riding the wave of that ‘mo’ towards finding a killer. For Product Manager Matt it is about just getting some momentum to work his way out of a professional funk he was in.

I seem to have a bit of that at the moment.

This week was bitty and I didn’t really get to do any writing but I attended a couple of really good meetings in London Tuesday and Thursday, had a bunch of interesting calls dotted around and generally felt useful and a contributing member of the organisation.

Monday David (Sales Director) and I had a bit of a call with a couple of chaps from Salesforce. It was slightly odd and I think we were initially talking at somewhat cross purposes but there is an intriguing opportunity there albeit one that needs thinking through. They are keen to build up their platform ‘ecosystem’ and we could potentially make a play that contributes to that and potentially get access to a bunch of Salesforce public sector clients. Nothing is ever that straightforward but its one to ponder.

Tuesday I got an early train to London and found myself at Elephant and Castle by 09.30 which was a little ouch inducing. This was for a meeting about White Pigeon and really it couldn’t have gone much better. The programme manager from the funder was there as was the lead from the sponsoring Department and they were both really happy and enthusiastic. White Pigeon is a project that extends our FixMyStreet platform in new and interesting ways but is still very much aimed at empowering local communities and improving their communication with local authorities. I’ve been quite hands off to date — Mark (the Boss) has fronted much of it but it is getting to a point where I might be genuinely useful.

After a quick catch up with the aforementioned Mark I rushed home as we had a call with Facebook that evening and I didn’t want to get stuck in London until the later off-peak trains! That call was OK — we didn’t really have the right people on it to discuss the detailed technical stuff this time and it became clear I still hadn’t quite cracked the proposal I have been working on for them but nothing too onerous.

Wednesday morning I kicked off by doing draft three of the Fb proposal. I decided to stop just fiddling with what was there and basically just re-did it from a different angle. Felt better — was clearer and more focused. Might be getting somewhere.

Had a good catchup call with Blooming Rose though the project is taking longer to shepherd than I hoped. There aren’t really any technical gotchas but there are a lot of other things happening at the client council and a lot of decisions to make.

I had hoped to make it to a workshop about the new GDS ‘supplier standard’ but unfortunately I misjudged how much there would be to catch up on with the Blooming Rose call so missed it. Bad form so I sent an apology to the organisers.

Had a call with Louise (our Head of Development) just to catchup on Democratic Commons stuff and in particular the recruitment we are doing at the moment. Fingers crossed we attract some good applicants — it is an ambitious project and we are going to need some support to make it happen!

Finished the day with another Facebook call — just following up on some stuff from the previous day — again it was fine. Most notable for Mark managing to lead an international conference call with participants in three timezones from a cab in central London!

Thursday I was back in London with Dave (the developer) for a kick off meeting with Elkinsville. This went well and we got to see a few flakes of snow as well. To some extent I just spent much of the meeting nodding along — the client lead is much more technical than usual and was particular focused on the intricacies of the API integration rather than business processes or UX so Dave took the lead. It felt good though — it is another FMS Pro project which feels great. Also we arranged a kick off meeting for next week with Locust Grove. This is a big Pro instance so I’m not going to moan too much about the six hours on a train I’ll be spending next Wednesday!

I didn’t really work today (Friday) — I did some support, a few emails and dipped in to Slack a but I cashed in some leave (0.75 of a day as it bugged me that it was left on my leave allowance!).

Oh and people started to receive their stickers 🙂

Next week I am in Cardiff Tuesday and Locust Grove Wednesday but otherwise hopefully pretty Bristol based. We also have a retrospective for the first time in too long.

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#weightnotes

Tried to go carb-free for a few days — managed Sunday to Thursday evening (when I caved and had rice). Hated it and still only lost 2lbs all week. I am 3lbs away from hitting losing 3 stone but it is slow going. I have a diabetic nurse check up next Saturday and I’d really like to hit the mark by then!

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#no-life

If you have Amazon Video I highly recommend The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel it really is fantastic TV.

I finally saw Justice League. It is OKish. Not as bad as I feared but a long way from really any good.

Also:

..and getting into the Christmas spirit today listening to this: