At work:
- Co-production resources project: lots of liaising with the digital team, as they are getting ready to hand over all of the lovely stuff they made for us. Wrote up another case study. Also, many hours spent designing case studies and resources in Canva!
- Website co-production project: lots of compiling notes and updates, many meetings with the client on current and next steps, and pulling together two BIG reports – one on survey insights and one for the whole of this engagement phase.
- Project supporting team development: several meetings to clarify the direction and priorities, and revising the planning to meet a range of objectives in the time we have left. Took delivery of a GIGATON (technical term) of documents to make sense of, find a path through, and update ready for release.
- Health and social care event: securing participants and speakers using specially crafted invitation and speakers’ brief documents. 🙂 We have 6 people who’ve said they’re coming, so we’re well on our way. (It’s a small strategic event so this is already significant.) Next week I hope to get a commitment from one of the really key stakeholders, and after that I can breathe a bit easier, it should all flow together very nicely with some gentle occasional nudging.
- Team away day facilitation: designed the session plan, reviewed with the client’s CEO, made tweaks as discussed. It’s happening next week, I’m ready! 😀
Deliverables this week:
- Two reports for the website co-production project, along with a handful of interim engagement event notes. So much for the client team to ingest and digest and act on in a short time, this project is so INTENSE.
Development this week:
- The river catchment partnership project (which I wrote the methodology for last week) is going ahead; had a meeting to clarify some procurement process requirements, and we’ve scheduled a kick-off meeting next week. I’m looking forward to this one! It’s going to be nice. I mean most of my projects are nice anyway, but this will be in my favourite area – building relationships between stakeholders and with communities.
At home:
- Missed Welshthis week again – I just had to get notes written up and published, everything is urgent at the moment as the deadlines are so tight on my two main projects.
- Did lots of pilates. My ideal rhythm is 3 sessions per week, and on a good week I can achieve that without clashes with away days and all-day trainings and suchlike. This week was a good week.
- Put an ad for my WaterRowerat the pilates studio. (It’s a rowing machine with a water tank: the faster you row the stronger the resistance to the paddle spinning through the water.) It was a lockdown purchase, it is gorgeous, but I hardly use it. Turns out rowing isn’t “my thing”, however nice the sound of swooshing water. It’s been stored vertically against the wall for a long time and I want to put more bookshelves in the space instead. 😀
- Went to see the Gwen John exhibition at the National Museum Cardiff, which opened to the public this Saturday. It was MARVELLOUS. Her work is gorgeous of course but also the curation is especially top-notch. It’s taken 3 years of planning apparently, and it shows, it is so well designed. There are two professions I find particularly fascinating and they are theatre set designers and museum curators who design exhibitions. So much thought – and thoughtfulness – about the visitors’ experience goes into them.
- Missed the swim group outing to Keepers’ Pond (so no swim for me this weekend) – partly because workworkwork and ALSO because it has been a very people-y week with several spontaneous meetings (as in, “are you free to talk now let’s jump on a call” meetings), and I needed just ONE day where I didn’t have to get dressed and leave the house or be somewhere at a specific time and most of all I didn’t have to talk to anyone and make my face look pleasant! 😀
- Gearing up toward going to Singapore in a week’s time which is going to be people 24/7 for 9 days (travel and sharing a hotel room with my mum, and seeing all the family once there). I have strategised some activities to carve out 30-45 minutes of solitude every day to stay grounded and not too overstimulated. My favourite one out of the list is a little (daily?) sea swim, so fingers crossed that pans out in the planning of our days there.
Photo credit: WaterRower