Week Note: 06 Dec 2021

Team Musings

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The week started with a full day working with The Datalab in relation to their leadership training sessions. It was through these I first really got to know a number of folk there, when I got involved as an expert advisor on their panels a number of years ago.

Sheepy Stories

It was always a fun experience, you never quite knew what topic might come up, I still think the most unusual conversation was the one about sheep farming and the digital divide between generations. My knowledge of that was almost solely from one of my (many) hobbies, but it turned out to be really useful information from a consumer side of things on how the agricultural world has so much opportunity to make more of digital and data.

Nowadays the organisations I work with are just as diverse – right now we’re working on projects with those in the care industry, further education, digital innovators and skills development.

Our expanding team

It definitely makes for an interesting, but challenging opportunity for anyone in our team! We’re really excited to say our newest member of the team Kamal Kaskasoli has just celebrated his first month with us. As a member of the software and data engineering team, he’s already been hard at work on a number of the projects.

I also discovered he’s got a bit of a collection of promo pens going on, so I got a few new ones at the previous weeks Data Summit to add to it!

As anyone who works in a small business know, recruiting the right folk is critical, as we all wear a variety of hats, and swap them a lot! Enthusiasm and desire to learn, experiment and grow is really important to us. We’ve been so impressed by the graduates that have joined us along the way, as it’s not always easy to keep up! We have exciting plans for next year, so watch this space for more news in this area.

Inclusive events

Off the back of last weeks post, where I mentioned our Christmas party plans, I had a couple of folk asked me for more details about the comments I made around creating inclusive opportunities to celebrate. They were interesting conversations, and brought up some things they’d never thought of before. It feels like it might be worth sharing more about that, so I’m working on a post specifically on that area. If you do want to chat about this, drop me a note, I’m always happy to chat.

Creative data

And I ended my working week with an interesting Friday. My morning was spent on the judging panel for the Resident Entrepreneurs panel for Creative Informatics. We’ve worked with the team for about 18 months on a number of areas, and I’ve loved getting involved with some truly innovative ideas around data. There were so many ambitious proposals, I’m looking forward to seeing the outcome of the successful applications.

Was it actually gatecrashing?

After an afternoon in the Bayes, we got a lovely invitation ( I swear I was invited, we didn’t gatecreash!) to join The Datalab’s Christmas get together. I may have accidentally signed up our team to attend a Dungeons and Dragons session after bidding in the charity auction

You can look forward to the report on that sometime next year. I am feeling some pressure to create an equivalent activity for our Christmas meal! So, on with another week, my focus for this week is Data Strategy, an area I love and one we’re very busy in right now. Future posts are going to include a deep dive into some of the common challenges we see in this area. Have a good week all!