Leaving CGI after nine years

Just over nine years after rejoining I have left CGI (they bought Logica in August 2012). That is the longest time that I have spent at one company and while I could have been thinking about retiring I have chosen to go for a new challenge instead.

I have enjoyed much of my time at Logica/CGI and I look back fondly at my time at Nokia Siemens Network where I was able to combine interesting work with travel to some interesting places like Moscow, Kiev, Dubai and Rabat, being a project manager at EDF Energy in two challenging spells and spending a couple of years in Cardiff in a decent hotel close to a great curry house.

There were less good times and in the end that is why I left. When I rejoined Logica it was as a member of the UK Consulting team and it was the consulting role that had brought me back. I went through several reorganisations after that, spending time in teams with names like Professional and Technical Services (PTS), before drifting into internal roles first as an expert on the financial side of preparing bids and finally as an internal consultant on Continuous Improvement where I had no power or influence and nobody was really interested in making improvements.

When asked in job interviews why I was looking to leave CGI I came up with the boiled frog analogy, I had joined as a business consultant and through gradual changes had ended up in a job that I would not have applied for when looking for a job nine years ago. There were some specific pushes too, I was in almost continual conflict with my manager (insufferable micro-manager and patronising with it) and I had another concern that I cannot mention here.

Having come to the conclusion that I was in a job that I did not want, and did not need, I decided to leave. My final day was 30 April 16.

As it happens, I got another job soon after I resigned but there is a two week gap between me leaving CGI and starting there and I will wait until I have actually started before telling you about the new job.

Accepting the Walking Challenge

I have always enjoyed walking both as a means for getting somewhere and also as a pursuit in its own right. I am not a boots and sticks sort of walker and I rarely venture into the countryside but I manage to clock up a few kilometres in urban areas while wearing a work suit.

I had no idea how much walking I was doing until I got my iPhone6 in November 14 and it started counting my steps for me.

With my phone constantly there to nag me I started to walk even more.

Some of this extra walking was just doing more of the simple things and doing more with them.

For example, when I am working at Kings Place I could take the tube to the nearest station, Kings Cross, or the one before that, Euston, but I get off two stops early, at Warren Street, to give myself more of a walk. When working at Leatherhead I walk the mile from the station to the office (and back) rather than take the shuttle-bus.

Similarly, I have changed the ten minute bus ride to the Willoughby Arms into a twenty minute walk. Allowing for waiting for the bus, walking is not that much slower and its much better.

I usually walk to the theatre in the evening too and several times I have walked from Kings Cross to one of the theatres south of the river. I have walked as far as Battersea and Kennington from Kings Place, that is around 7km. The theatre does not start until 7:30pm, sometimes a little later, and that gives plenty of time for a long walk as well as something to eat and drink before the show.

Initially I set myself the generally known target of 10k steps a day but that quickly proved to be unambitious and I upped this to 12k. More recently it has gone up again, to £14k steps a day which is about 100k steps a week.

I manage 14k most days and it is frustrating when I have a day where there is not much opportunity for a serious walk. I had one of those days at Glyndebourne last week and so desperate was I to maintain my averages that I went for a medium length walk, around 4k steps, when I got home at 10pm.

When the well-being team at work introduced a Walking Challenge I had to join in.

This was aimed more at encouraging casual walkers to walk a little more and so while it mentioned the 10k step guideline the target that it actually set was 35k steps a week, or just 5k a day. I do that many getting to work.

There is an online system where you can record your steps taken each day and it shows how your numbers compare to the average.

Two weeks into the four week challenge the average number of steps taken is 106, 548 and my total is 249,637, though I will caveat that by saying that not everybody will have recorded all of their steps yet. Even so, I have managed 145k and 105k steps in the first two weeks of the challenge (despite Glyndebourne!) and I am happy with that.

Walking at work has some challenges at some of our office locations. Kings Place is brilliant as it is on the canal and there are lots of interesting places within walking distance in every direction. Green Park in Reading has nice landscaping with a lake but there is only one route and that is not very long. Leatherhead and Birmingham are dreadful, both offices are at the ends of business parks and the only place to walk is out back past all the offices and once out there is still nowhere interesting to go.

Walking like this has had some obvious benefits to me. On the health front I have lost one stone just through the additional walking, i.e. I still eat and drink as much as I did before.

The time spent walking is never wasted either and I listen to a lot of podcasts and downloaded radio programmes. I get a few hours worth of podcasts every day and I need my walking time to keep up with them all.

Walking has also taken me to places and shown me things that I would otherwise have missed. These range from the Gagosian Gallery to the Cally Clock Tower to a garden stuffed with gnomes. Walking is its own reward.

Walking, except in the rambling sense, is a much undervalued activity and one that I am still learning to appreciate more as I do even more of it. Setting myself a walking challenge was one of the best things that I have ever done.

I can see your office from here*

Logica moved out of Stephenson House by the Euston Tower and in to Kings Place by Kings Cross in 2008. The Kings Cross area has seen a great deal of change in that time with much more to come.

One of the new arrivals to the Kings Cross Campus is CSC who my eldest son, Howard, works for and we've swapped photos of each other's office.

This is Howard's photo of Kings Place, that's the big grey building. Logica, now CGI, occupies the top (7th) floor so we have the best views. I am normally on the long west side (I'm there now) somewhere just to the left of the red vertical band that marks the main entrance.

We have a nice veranda on our floor so I was able to walk outside to take this photo. It is taken from the top of the red tower in the previous picture.

The safety barrier is rather tall (I am very pleased to say!) so it restricts the view down, which is why I moved to the gap above the entrance to take the picture. Howard's building is the grey one on the left that is partial obscured by the metalwork.


*My thanks to Camel for inspiring this post's title and for making so many fine albums.

Green Park under water

From time to time I need to work in our UK head office which is based in Green Park to the south of Reading next to the more famous Madejski Stadium.

This is something of a pain for me as the journey there is terrible, if things work well the door-to-door journey takes two and a half hours.each way, and the only redeeming factor is that I get to walk around the landscaped grounds of Green Park at lunchtime.

I am fairly certain that I've posted pictures of Green Park somewhere before and this was meant to be a then-and-now piece but I cannot find the then so I'll just describe the now.

Green Park is built around a large irregularly shaped lake with a path around the outside and a few bridges to let people get around more easily.

This works well usually and the path around the lake is pretty but when there has been as much rain as we have had recently then the lake rises to change the mood of the place.

The lakeside path is easily consumed by the rising water with only the railings on the bridges to show where the path used to go.

That meant that my walk instead of being around the lake was instead a series of walks up to it, so that I could take pictures like this, and then turning around to go back to the road to look for another path to take me up to a different part of the lake.

This disjointed walk was still very much worth it though because it gave me views like this.

More water also meant more reflections, and I like reflections.

The final picture shows another sunken bridge, this one was meant to cross the middle of the lake, and also a very lonely looking lifebuoy. Its one contribution is to add a splash of colour to a scene that is otherwise dominated by dull greys and browns.

Green Park is still far from my favourite work location but I have tried to be fair to it and show off some of its good points. It can be pretty.

My CV as a word cloud

I had generated a word cloud from my CV using Wordle before and I thought that it would be interesting to do so again to see if the changes that I had made to it, particularly the addition of my recent projects, would make much difference. It did.

The work that I do does not vary that much between assignments but the job titles that I am given do, and so I am pleased to see that the new Wordle shouts out "Business Consultant". It is also clear that I usually work in projects.

What is missing is my interest in Knowledge Management. That is because I do most of that that out of hours with the likes of LIKE, TFPL and Gurteen and so it is not in my CV which just covers what I am paid to do in the office. I must work on that.

CGI Walk Around the World 2013

Today was the annual CGI Walk Around the World where we were all encouraged to go out for a walk lunchtime in groups at each of our locations. The aim was health, team building and fun. I am not working at a CGI location but we had a team meeting arranged for lunchtime and I managed to persuade the boss to move this from an office to the path running through St Mellons Business Park.

It worked well as a bit of team building and some fun but was much less walking than I would normally do on a warm and sunny lunchtime so the health aspect lacked a little.

We stopped for a team photo by one of the little bridges for no other reason than they are painted red which is the colour of the CGI logo.

Just for the record, I am the only person wearing both a jacket and a tie.

I'll miss Cottam Power Station

My current assignment ends later this month, and I'll miss it.

For the last six months I have been travelling up to Cottam Power Station near Retford in Nottingham for a few days every week, staying in Ye Olde Bell in Barnby Moor where I've got very familiar with the menu.

The travel has been a pain, it takes me almost four hours door-to-door, and so has being away from home during the week, but there have been some compensations.

After years of working in nondescript offices it has been good to work somewhere that has a clear purpose. Power stations are designed solely with function in mind and things like office space are definitely a secondary consideration. The office I normally work in is a clutch of portakabin, and that's fine.

The scale of the place is impressive. The pink (!) building is the turbine hall where four parallel systems produce a shade over 2Gw when running at full capacity; market conditions and engineering considerations dictate just how much is actually produced.

The large complex on the left is what National Grid uses to manage the high voltage network, and I have no idea what it does.

The power station I understand better as I have been taken around all the main component, that took over three hours and was one of the best days at work that I have ever had.

It has also been good working with and alongside engineers and fitters who understand the power station and what it needs to keep going. This is so very different from the common office life that is divorced from any reality and pushes paper just because that is what the job is.

I won't miss the travelling or the hotel living but I will miss the people and the fantastic machine that they work in.

Team photo at Cottam

I normally avoid having my photograph taken as assiduously as I avoid taking pictures of other people but sometimes there is no escape and sometimes the results are fine.

This is me (far right in a suit!) with the rest of the project team that I was working with at Cottam Power Station. In the background you can see the bases of some of the cooling towers and the conveyor belt that takes the coal into the station.

They were a good team to work with and an interesting one too. Most of them were based at the station permanently, and some had been there for a while, and so they had a completely different, and vital, perspective of the way that things should and could work.

Getting lost in and around Barnby Moor

Spending months away from home is part of the life of the Consultant for Hire and since March I have been spending a lot of time at two coal-fired power stations on the Trent in Nottinghamshire.

That means spending two to four nights a week in a hotel and with not many to choose from I find myself encamped in Ye Olde Bell in Barnby Moor, jut outside of Retford.

The hotel is charming and to a high standard, it caters for the events market, e.g. weddings, as much as it does us corporate regulars.

The big down-side is the location. Barnby Moor is just a hamlet and there is nothing there apart from Ye Olde Bell. There is another pub but that looks a mess from outside so I have not been tempted in.

I have managed to get out for a few early evening walks, rain permitting, and these have all have a familiar theme. West Barnby is bounded by the A1 on one side and the main East Coast railway line on the other. This severely restricts the walking options, but I have managed to find some.

On my usual route the railway line has to be crossed twice and there are not many places to do this. I was hoping for a footbridge, or even a foot level-crossing, but I have to settle for the two traffic crossings that are a couple of miles apart.

Once off the roads and away from the railway I am plunged in to rural walks like this.

And this is exactly what I am looking for in a rural walk. The path is well defined so there is little risk of being stuck in the corner of a field looking for a way out (it happens), there is no physical construction in sight and no people either.

One route takes me in to the Daneshill Lakes built from old gravel pits.

Here I have got lost but only because you cannot head in your preferred direction when there is a lake in the way.

The views can be quite spectacular and I do not mind walking around in circles to see them.

The lakes are good but the fields are better. Which is just as well as I spend most of my time in fields following the yellow arrows and wondering if some of the other unmarked paths might be other ways back.

Not that long ago these fields were bare and ugly, now a touch of Spring and a hint of Summer have teased the crops in to healthy colourful growth.

The reward is obvious. The solitude and the absence of buildings are still there only now they are complimented by the beauty of flowing grasses and bright red poppies.

I always walk late in the day, the target return time is usually 7;30 and I usually miss it, so the shadows are another important part of the experience. I like contrasts and the natural world is full of them.

Perhaps I should be a little bit more honest and explain that these walks start with a 2km yomp up the Great North Road which is busy, straight, boring and has a "pavement" that is so overgrown in places that I prefer to walk on the road towards the speeding traffic.

Barnby Moor may not be the best place to be stationed for a few months but it is not without its merits and I intend to do more walking there to see if I can find some more.

A new career in a new town

OK, so that is a slightly misleading title but I am not going to miss the opportunity to use a Bowie track when I am given the chance (it's from Low).

After eighteen months or so working on a project based in Cardiff I am now working back in Central London (Victoria) and at a coal-fired power station in the Midlands.

The cooling towers are familiar to me from the train journeys north and, more recently, from Didcott which I passed through on the way to and from Cardiff but I had never been this close to one before.

Actually I had to get pretty close to one to even know that it was there as the Midlands were cloaked in fog on my first visit there. The sun did its best all day and still it failed to shift it.

A power station means pylons and the area id thick with them. I trust that all the scare stories about high voltage cables are untrue as they pass directly over the office I work in. While the fog served only to hide the cooling towers (there are several) it had a more impressive impact on the pylons giving them a well-deserved sense of grandeur.

On the second day the fog did lift a little before darkness fell and I could see enough of the towers to see the smoke coming out of them, grey smoke disappearing in to a grey sky.

I like industrial architecture and I find working in a power station interesting. I'm hoping that the weather is better next time I go and I can see more of the industry, more of things like the pools of water that the towers sit in.

Despite being in the middle of nowhere (for a good reason) getting to the station is not that difficult, in fact it is much the same as going to Cardiff, even the rail fare is more or less the same.

It is too early to say how the project itself is going to go but I like being back in London for part of the time and am quite happy to go to the station for a couple of days every week or so. It looks like I made the right move.

Working in Cardiff

One of the aspects of working as a consultant is that you usually have to work where the client is.

Being based in London that is not usually an issue as working in one London office is much like working any other regarding commuting and lunching. But sometimes you have no choice but to work from home.

Two years ago I did a couple of months in Sheffield and now it looks as though I will be doing a few months in Cardiff.

The logistics are not too bad.

If all goes well I can leave home at 7am on Monday morning and be in the office in St Mellons (approximately half-way between Cardiff and Newport) at 10:30.

The big proviso here is that I manage to catch the 08:41 train from Reading to Cardiff. The Richmond to Reading train gets in at 08:40.

In Cardiff I stay at the Radisson Blu hotel, that's the tall white building on the left, and eat in Wagamama, which you can see in the bottom-right.

I'm still experimenting with the buses but there's an odd one that leaves opposite the hotel at 08:06 that goes close to the office arriving around 08:45. Other buses get within a mile or so which leaves me with a bit of walking to do.

And that's just as well as I'm not doing much walking otherwise.

I've been there three weeks so far and managed to go for some sort of walk just once. Things like bad weather, having other things to do and being dead tired keep getting in the way.

I did get out once and managed to find the castle. The front of the castle faces on to the nondescript shopping district but it also sits in the corner of a large park that follows the river Taff through the city.

So far I've only managed to explore the section of the park nearest the castle but have seen enough to tempt me back as soon as the time and the weather allow.

Following the river South past the main road, the appropriately named Castle Street, brings you immediately to the Millennium Stadium.

Access to the stadium from here is via a wooden walkway that weaves gently in and out providing enticing vistas of the river, the bank opposite and of itself.

The only flaw is that the walkway stops at the stadium and is not possible to follow the river all the way down to the bay, the spiritual heart of the new Cardiff, and of Torchwood, with its opera house, modern flats and trendy restaurants and bars.

I've made one fleeting visit to the Bay but that was late in the day and too dusky to take many interesting photos. I hope to rectify that soon.

Visualising my professional network

One of the web2.0 tools that I still use actively is LinkedIn and that is where my professional network now lives. I have used other similar tools in the past, like Plaxo, but just as Facebook has taken over on the social side so has LinkedIn for my professional stuff.

I use it mainly to keep track of people that I meet. A business card is useless once the person has changed jobs, and with it their email address and phone number, but LinkedIn maintains these connections for you. It's worth using just for that.

Now the LinkedIn InMaps tool lets you see all the connections that you have built up in a Social Network Map. This is mine which I find very interesting.

The first thing that strikes me is how little connected the various sub-networks are. As these are all essentially different groups of IT people I would have expected to see more cross-fertilisation.

The big blue group is people at Logica, dark green is London Borough of Lambeth, purple is Charteris, light blue is Royal Bank of Scotland and the large red group is the consultants who go to LIKE, TFPL and Gurteen meetings.

If you look at this network online then you can drill down to see the people in the network. For example, it is probably no surprise that the biggest and most central red dot is for David Gurteen.

LinkedIn is a great tool for professionals and InMaps gives useful insights in to your own network. Give it a go.

When Logica was cool

A chance meeting in an underground station a few weeks ago led to a conversation on comics that, in turn, reminded me of when Logica embraced the media to promote its annual report.

That was back in 1988 and it took a lot of effort to find a copy! Logica itself only has two and I mangled one of those under a photocopier to rescue some of the better pages for electronic posterity.

The cover sets the scene well with the familiar Beano logo topping a collage of comics greats including Ian Gibson's rendition of Judge Dredd and Asterix the Gaul's companion Obelix, both fairly well know in the UK.

And I really like the way that international comic characters are used too, such as Astro Boy, who is even older in me!

The rest of the report is decorated with scenes from more comics from around the world and one day I'll find a way to get decent copies of all of them.

Perhaps there's still a copy of the report in my study somewhere ...

be brilliant together

Our new branding was launched today.

It's more than images, it's the way we behave and the way we work with our clients; it's awesome, fun, challenging, risky and positive.

What sort of consultant am I?

Our CEO’s all-staff call this week covered the usual wide range of topics, one of which was the switch of terminology from "management consulting" to "business consulting", an issue that Logica and I have both been entwined in for some years.

I started my career in IT as a lowly programmer (I probably would have been asked to make the tea in those days if it was not for the fact that a tea trolley came around twice a day) and the first big step up was to analyst/programmer, which recognised that the understanding of customers’ needs is a rather useful skill. Along with this elevation came some formal training in Business Analysis where I learned lots of diagrammatic tools, such as Entity Relationship Diagrams and Functional Decomposition Diagrams. Tools I still use today.

For the next several years the roles that I had were either labelled Business Analyst or Team/Project Leader but the work always contained a mixture of both and I was happy with either title. Both terms are generally well understood within the industry. This is not true among the regulars down my local pub where I used to say (and still do) that I work in IT, which people interpret as either I write software or I fix PCs. It is too hard, and too boring, to try to correct them so I let these misconceptions lie.

Business Analysts work within projects where you know what it is that you need to analyse but before you can start a project you need to understand the business needs (e.g. the drivers of competition or regulatory changes) and the potential of IT to address them. This is where the Business Consultant comes in and I first called myself this around twelve years ago, when at IBM, and I have used this title on-and-off ever since then.

I think that “Business Consultant” describes what I do well but then I would think that having been in the industry for over thirty years and using the title for a large chunk of that time, but I find that it means next to nothing to anybody else that I speak to; particularly the business people in client organisations who are the main people that Business Consultants need to speak to!

The temptation, therefore, is to use the more generally recognised term “Management Consultant”. Logica did this in 2007 when Logica Management Consulting was introduced as a sub-brand. Ironically, those of us using the brand (it is on my business card) were on the Business Consulting career path.

Using the term Management Consulting gets you around the “what does that mean?” problem that Business Consulting gives but, sadly, the term is recognised mostly for things that I do not do, such as advising on mergers and acquisitions and developing corporate strategy, i.e. the stuff that the “Big Four” consultancies do.

So now we are back to being Business Consultants again, which I think is much the lesser of the two evils and it is now up to us to make that work for us with our clients.

I will also continue to sidestep the issue personally by not including my job title on my business card or in my email signature, both just say who I am and who I work for. What I actually do is something for the client and I to explore.

Playing with tag clouds (again)

I like tag clouds a lot as a way of summarizing text because they are simple to understand and simple to produce. There are various tools for producing them but the one that I tend to use (just because I came across it first) is Wordle.

Wordle creates tag clouds from text and URLs. Once created, the display of the tag cloud can be manipulated by changing the font, colours and text directions.

This simple example was produced from my CV.

Kings Place

Kings Place is a new multi-purpose building just to the North of Kings Cross Station, on York Way and next to the Regent's Canal.

For most people, Kings Place is, or will be, best known as a music venue. There are two halls, imaginatively named Hall One and Hall Two, that hold a variety of musical events including classical, folk and jazz.

But the bulk of the building is office space and it is now the office of The Guardian newspaper.

It is also Logica's new Central London office and we occupy the top (seventh) floor.

Very few staff are based there as its main purpose is to host client events. Its location and public spaces make it ideal for this. To meet this requirement, most of the space is given to meeting rooms and hot desks. It is an effective if somewhat soulless space.

Kings Place makes the most of its canal-side location.

There are terraces all around the building and these are populated with works of modern art. I like the shapes and colours of these and the way that they break up the familiar straight lines of modern buildings.

The small dock, Battlebridge Basin, is home to several houseboats and these provide more interesting shapes and colours.

These boats have seen much change over the years. They are surrounded by some Victorian warehouses (converted to other uses now) from when the canal was first built, some social housing from when canals were all but forgotten and some brash new offices now that water-side properties are attractive again.

Sandwiched between the music halls and the offices are some exciting public spaces with restaurants, bars and galleries.

The current exhibition in the main gallery is by Albert Irvin.

Most of the canvasses are large (2m x 3m) and some are huge (3m by 6m), but all are as brightly and boldly coloured as in this example.

The smaller gallery has a collection by Dale Atkinson that was inspired by the building of Kings Place over two years.

These skilfully combine elements of abstract art with fine pencil drawings of the workers. It may be because of the industrial nature of these drawings that I find them more interesting than their more colourful neighbours.

Kings Place follows in the tradition of the Barbican, though on a much smaller scale, and perhaps one day it will become as well known and as well loved.

Leaving Stephenson House

Stephenson House is situated on the corner of Hampstead Road and Drummon Street, just north of the Euston Tower, has been Logica's head office for many years, and for the last two years it has been my office too.

Now Logica is leaving Stephenson House preferring to locate staff outside of London (e.g. at St Albans, Reading and Leatherhead) and to maintain a minimal London presence for customer events etc.

When I first joined Logica, almost twenty years ago, when we had a number of offices in places like Newman Street (the original head office), Great Portland Street and Great Marlborough Street. But times change.

I work at home almost all the time now anyway so I do not expect the closure to have a big impact on me, apart from needing new business cards!

Yesterday was almost certainty my last visit there as I combined the administration task of submitting my expenses with collecting the few items I had in a cupboard in the office. I left with a bright yellow Logica bag containing a chunky mouse, a laptop power adaptor, yet another Nokia phone charger and a very purple thermal mug. At least the mug will be useful.

I work for Logica again!

The company that I left almost twenty years ago was called Logica and when I rejoined it in January 2007 it had changed its name to LogicaCMG. Now it is called simply Logica again and has an updated logo to celebrate the event.

Leaving Lambeth, (re)joining LogicaCMG

Well... working for local government again did not quite work out as I hoped and so, just like last time, I'm off to Logica, only now they are called LogicaCMG and have a management consultancy division.

In the last couple of years I have turned down a few job offers, and not been made a few that I was expecting, but LogicaCMG went very smoothly. I had my first interview in late September and we hit it off so well that we skipped the second interview and went straight for the third and final interview, but I felt then that I had the job and that I wanted it.

The third interview was in early October and was more of a chat than anything else, though some of the questions were rather probing and challenging! I was even more convinced that I wanted to join LogicaCMG when my interviewer sketched out a 2x2 matrix, which is just the sort of thing that I do during discussions.

The offer came soon after but it made little sense to move just before the Christmas break and so we agreed on a start date of 8 January. This meant that I knew that I was leaving almost two months before I handed my notice in. I resigned on Thursday and, subject to final confirmation, my last day at Lambeth will be Friday 22 December and I will then have my 7 remaining days holiday over Christmas and New Year.

And things get even better; I got an email from LogicaCMG today inviting me to the New Year conference on 5 January (i.e. before I officially join them) which I am looking forward to.