Accommodating Swedes

The advantage of doing RFPs for 6 months is that by the end, you pretty much know what you're doing. This is proving beneficial for the latest RFP for the Swedish Telco. My initial telephone calls with the Swedes have gone well and for the minute everything is hunky dory. They seem to be listening to my advice and agreeing with a lot of what I say. It's almost eery how happy they seem to be, and as a result I smell a rat - you tread a fine line between visibility and exposure you know. Anyway, I shall not look a gift-horse in the mouth and we'll continue to try and hit all our deadlines. It will be interesting to see if my way really is the right way (or if I should be on the highway!). More anon no doubt.

8th

The French Show Jumping stuff went pretty well at the weekend. We finished 8th out of 35 which is pretty respectable all in all. I rode ok but thankfully I was in a team with 3 other (pretty) French girls who all rode particularly well. At least they didn't hurl rotten tomatoes at us when we got back home! Getting back was a bit of an adventure - the event ran late on the Sunday so it meant a rushed journey to the airport and I even travelled back home in full riding gear including boots and show jumping jacket. Most ridiculous but at least it made the air hostesses smile.

The Swedish RFP has started in earnest. One month to wrap it all up. After 6 months of this type of work I know exactly where we are going, but even then, I'm looking forward to having a break. We've had one of my very good friends from Accenture Amsterdam staying with us in France, and I have to say that seeing him has made me quite envious and I'm now really looking forward to my holidays in a few weeks time. With the travel and late nights, RFPs tend to be quite tiring so it will be good to have a break. With a bit of luck I'll come back to a new project in September too.

Long time no speak

It's been a while since my last posting. This lapse can be attributed to a number of factors....Maxime's baptism (yes he is a real person not just a fictional figure), a hardware failure and the final throes of yet another RFP.

Having to cater for and host 35 people at home is one of the most tiring experiences I have had. Admittedly we (I) could have started planning things more than 1 day in advance, but it was tiring nonetheless. I spent my whole Sunday answering people's question about where to find sugared almonds and rose wine, whilst worrying about how untidy the house was becoming (remember earlier personality disorder). Getting a flight to set off to Helsinki on the Sunday evening was exactly what I didn't need, but that's the job I suppose. The good news is by the end of the day, the wee man had been christened and everybody had eaten as much Tiramisu as they could (key performance metrics for all baptisms in my family).

As for the hardware failure. Quite simply PointSec is the spawn of the devil. Our encryption technology for all laptops is great in principle, but when it prevents you from using the standby or hibernate feature of the laptop it's more than frustrating. A full boot every time is ok if you're sitting in the office and have to do it once at the start of the day, but when you're constantly travelling, waiting 5 minutes for XP to work out where it put all its configuration files each time is enough to make you want to kill an air hostess. Stupidly I did use the "hibernate" feature once and as a result it made PointSec fall over and my whole laptop unusable. Thankfully I had done a backup 3 weeks earlier but trying to frantically courier laptops between France, London and Finland was an administrative overhead I really did not need as we moved into the final stages of the Finnish RFP.

The project in Finland has been very busy with lots of many late nights. However what has been nice is that because we've been down selected, we are able to get lots of access to the client to get the information we need to fine tune the solution. I've spent large spells of most days up in the Nokia offices with a range of clients. A far cry from your typical blind RFP stuff with a single Q&A session before final submission. It's reminded me that what I really enjoy about this job is listening to clients to try and understand what they need and what they want. My role has been more client relationship person and requirements gatherer rather than solution architect. It's made a refreshing change.

As for my personal pipeline...it looks like it could be another RFP in Sweden for the month of July with the possibility of a longer term role in FS in the UK starting up gradually over the summer which would take me to the end of the year. Sweden in July has certain attractions I have to confess....:-) In the more immediate future, it's the French National Show Jumping Championships this weekend so I'm looking forward to representing the south west of France up in Paris at the Haras de Jardy.

Magic Slippers

My wife grew up in the south of France, I grew up just north of Newcastle. I am sure you can understand that there is a slight difference in climate between the two places. Basically that meant that I grew up with carpets and she grew up with tiled floors. Given the fact we have a well balanced relationship we therefore "decided" to have tiles throughout our house. Unfortunately one of my other pet hates in life is walking bare foot on cold surfaces. Therefore I always make a point of taking the slippers from the hotel room each week to make sure I don't have to walk on cold surfaces at home during the weekend. I am sure that all my friends and guests to the house have the same pet hate (this is not the case), and as a result I typically thrust a pair of "Radisson SAS", "Sheraton" or "APEX" slippers into the hands of people who arrive at my house. I've had to travel a lot this week (too much), but it's been a bumper slippers week. I've been away 5 nights but take back a haul of 6 pairs of slippers (you must always check the cupboard because they often leave a second pair there). Extremely small and scant consolation for being away from home, but I'm just trying to look on the bright side. I'm off to the airport now and can't wait to get home.

Running scared? Running bored more like.

I hate running. When I used to play football we had to run but it always seemed like there was some purpose to it (i.e. needing to be fit enough to kick a pig's bladder into an onion bag). When I stopped football I thought that would be the end of my running. After a brief flirtation with chess and tiddlywinks I realised that I was fast becoming a couch potato. I then decided to get on a horse, but it quickly became apparent that this was a sport to be done sitting down. Hence I dusted off my old trainers and started slogging around the roads again to avoid becoming a slob. Generally it's a real pain, but for a short spell in the early morning sunshine in Helsinki today, it was decidedly enjoyable. That short spell lasted about 47 seconds. Not bad for a run that totalled 30 minutes.

Two personality disorders are better than one.

They say that married life is about resolving problems as a couple that you wouldn't have if you were single. My personality disorder is that I need things to be nice and clean and tidy. My wife's personality disorder is that she is extremely conscious about getting value for money. You see then that neither is a major problem on its own. However this weekend highlighted what a dangerous combination the two together can be. My wife refuses to let me throw out old shoes that I no longer like nor wear. I cannot bear to see these sad shoes gather dust and become dirty. The net result is that I spend half my Sunday afternoon every couple of weeks polishing shoes that are never worn. I don't know why it was only this weekend when I realised what a significant waste of time this is.

3 is ok, 4 is stupid

The number of countries any one person should visit in a day. I started the day in Paris before a flight to Helsinki. I then had a flight to London. I had done this trip last week so I knew what I was in for. I had not however anticipated a diversion to Amsterdam. 6 hours to get from Finland to the UK rather than the alloted 2.5. All of that following a delayed flight and a mere 4.5 hours sleep on Sunday night....I don't think I'll be winning any beauty contests tonight. I have other random ramblings but I will keep them for tomorrow....including my selection for the French National Show Jumping championships...I'll be representing the Aquitaine region in the first weekend of July in southern Paris. More anon...