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So – as per usual – this is less ‘week notes’ and more ‘fortnight notes’ once again. It’s been my busiest period yet in the new role – a consequence of some converging timelines for some major projects and some ill-discipline on my part in respect of my own diary management.

(Note to self: don’t stack those first few days back from annual leave full of meetings! #schoolboy_error)

As you’ll have guessed from the picture, I’ve had some time away with friends and family on the slopes. If you’ve ever been in one of those (sometimes slightly awkward) sessions at work, where you’re asked to meditate or something of that ilk, you might have been asked to “think of your happy place”. Well, for me that’s an easy call – put me up in the mountains and I am immediately at peace. I genuinely feel like a different person when i’m a few thousand feet higher than usual.

We were out in Morzine, France and were blessed with that awesome combination of good snow (they’d LOADS prior to us arriving) and beautiful weather. I’ve been snowboarding since 1998, so am pretty nifty on a board for a sprightly 47yr old (just make sure to pack the ibuprofen to keep the aches and pains at bay). A wonderful few days – I just LOVE flying around the mountain with my 7yr old son, who’s now charging around on a set of skis like Speedy Gonzales. My wife, also, is getting to grips with skiing. These annual skiing/snowboarding holidays are genuinely the highlight of my year.

Whilst I was away, the team pushed out a deployment to one of our key systems used by centres (our name for schools, colleges etc.) to upload centre-assessed assessment materials. Some managers / leaders get worried if they’re not around for such things, but that’s not me. I knew the team had done an amazing job at getting us ready for the go-live and, as expected, it went off well. It’s important to trust your team to deliver. So a massive ‘da iawn, pawb’ for all the work that went in.

On my return, I had a great morning sitting in on our Operations leadership team meeting – a great chance to simply sit and listen to their priorities and work plan. I learned a huge amount and was able to take some thinking away as to how we make sure we keep the IT programme aligned. It was especially pleasing to see them using some of the PowerBI dashboards that were built my folks in my team to drive their performance monitoring conversations – an exemplar approach that we want to distill out across other directorates over the next couple of years.

The same day I jointly ran an internal workshop on the use of Power Automate as part of the WJEC Careers Festival – an annual event that runs over 3 weeks covering all sorts of workshops, lunch ‘n’ learn sessions and the like. We had 70+ attendees for our session (around 1/7th of the organisation), which we’re told is the highest ever attendance for such an event. It was a great opportunity to showcase how PA can be used alongside the wider M365 suite, to deliver efficiency into the organisation. The number of hands that went up for further, more in-depth training at the end of the session told me we might have started a monster… but in a good way.

Included within the session was a short piece on how we want to manage the use of PA within the organisation. Folks of a certain age (myself included) will remember the mess that got left behind by Microsoft Access – lots of bespoke, personally-owned yet business-critical databases scattered all over an organisation. PA presents similar risks, so whilst we’re encouraging its use, we’re putting in some guiderails to ensure automations are centrally-managed and secure. This is an important consideration for any digital platform, of course, but especially so for something like PA, which puts so much power and potential in the hands of individual staff.

This week I spent some time with my Head of IT Service Delivery and our new digital trainer to talk through our thinking for the digital training workplan for the next 12 months. We’ll be looking to get some staff feedback on what training they are looking for, to help firm up the plan over the coming weeks – need to keep the “customer” uppermost in our thinking when designing our training. We’re particularly keen to understand how folks want to consume digital training resources.

Last but not least, I spent two days on Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt training. These continuous improvement methodologies are very familiar to me, but I have to say I had two fantastic days with colleagues, reflecting on the principles of both Lean and Six Sigma and, more importantly, thinking about how they can be applied to the challenges we face at the WJEC. A special mention to Rob and and Avi, who made what can be a bit of a dry subject genuinely fun and engaging. There’s no beating stepping away from the day job to reflect with colleagues in a safe environment.

So be warned… I now have a yellow belt. Who knows – in a couple of years I might just be a black belt CI ninja! HI-YAH!!!