I almost didn’t manage my round up this month – it’s been so hectic and I can’t even look at my calendar for March! As ever it’s not just work but when work and life suddenly both escalate to a point where you feel overwhelmed.

Party Season

80% of my family birthdays fall in February and March and on top of that it seems to be kids party season. I have a pile of unanswered party invites on the kitchen side that I’m avoiding. You spend all week looking forward to a little time at the weekend to relax only to spend it surrounded by sweaty screaming children! This month I have frequented Inflatanation, Total Ninja, a glow party and hosted my own Halloween themed kids party including a creepy animal display where I was unexpectedly made to do a bush trucker trial!

As much as I didn’t enjoy that I’m not very good at spending time idle at kids birthday parties. At one party I ended up launching a campaign to improve our high school options in my home town – long story. My husband rolled his eyes knowingly not surprised that with 30 minutes free time I’d managed to create a huge job for myself! This is what I’m like at work – I think it’s quite hard for the teams to keep up with me as I’m always 5 steps ahead thinking about what more we can do before we’ve even finished what we’re currently doing. In some ways this has really helped us progress at speed and we have increased our digital maturity rapidly. Some people love the energy and the pace we move at. But also sometimes it’s just unrealistic and we have to slow down and prioritise our time. That’s why its so important to have a diverse mix of people around who approach things differently. To help us with our huge workload this month we’ve worked hard – led by our Chief of Improvement – to take a methodologically driven approach to refining our objectives for the year so we have a smaller number of goals to focus on.

A Moment of Clarity

As well as getting plans in place for 23/24 delivery, we’ve been managing our Unified Tech Funding (a mammoth task led by our brilliant Head of Digital Services) and undertaking the national Digital Maturity Assessment. Difficult timing to say the least but it’s been good to have some forced time out to review where we’re up to, how far we’ve come and how much is still left to do. We also had some time for this when completing our annual SIRO cyber and Information Governance training.

Me, my deputy CIO, CTO and CCIO doing the national Digital Maturity Assessment

Information governance and cyber security has been my focus this month really. We had our IG sub committee and have focussed on our EPR security and the long term resilience and support for PRISM (Pan Regional Information Sharing Mechanism). I am so pleased to have our CCIO now leading this space – he is one of those people that can create clarity in complexity, he listens carefully and finds a way forward one step at a time.

Everything is Possible

We had a major success agreeing some investment to unlock some of the blockages in our Business Intelligence team in warehousing and development and we’ve recruited to our new senior specialist roles in the IT team providing opportunities for the current team to progress and increasing our resilience. The BI one in particular my deputy has been working on for a long time and it felt like an impossible ask but you just have to get the timing and the pitch right and keep going and these things are always possible!

And for my next trick…

Unexpectedly this month my friend Robbie, a photographer, got in touch to say that he’d noticed that I looked like I was trying to do a magic trick in my LinkedIn photo. He was thinking about trying out work photos as part of his photography business so he came over and we had a go.

Half of them had a child either joking around or crying in the background. I feel like this one says something about work life with children –

– it reminds me of a conversation I had to support a brilliant female leader we have in NWAS who is due to have a baby soon. It’s so daunting when you’ve been so focussed and driven by your career to know that you’re life is going to completely change but in such an unknown way, to take so much time away from work, to handover everything you’ve done and just let go. People can often presume that all parents are excited about having time off work on maternity / paternity but actually for many it’s daunting and scary to give up what you love and feel like you’re losing so much of your identity. I reflected in the conversation on how having my two children has definitely slowed me down in my career in some ways, just physically I lost a couple of years but actually in the end the kids are my strength and resilience and they have liberated me in many ways giving me other things to focus on and a clarity about what’s important in life that ultimately has made me better at my job.

Anyway – we got this one in the end – it’s definitely the best work photo I’ve ever managed – thank you Venn Family Photography – Home

Until next time…