One of the problems with being out of the office as often as I am is that you become totally dependent on your technology. Well, yesterday mine let me down rather spectacularly, and I spent most of the day utterly paralysed and unable to accomplish anything.

We don’t have access to the internet at our client site, so we’ve bought a 3G router to log into our corporate network. And that works fine with everyone else’s PC, but throws mine into fits of spasm. So I spent most of yesterday in taxis, rushing across town for my IT department to fix my PC only to find that we can’t replicate the problem – it’s all down to the pesky 3G router. So IT would tell me the problem was fixed and I’d head back to the client, only for my PC to lock up again. Very frustrating. By 3pm, I’d given up the will to live. Armed with a pen, paper, and an abacus, I decided to tackle the problem the old-fashioned way.

In other news, I managed to send all of the wedding paperwork to France yesterday. Fingers crossed that our offering to the Gods of Bureaucracy is acceptable in their eyes. Watch this space.

It turns out that absence does make the heart grow fonder. After months of pursuing a client for some business (unsuccessfully – lots of good conversations but little opening of chequebooks), I’ve recently been so busy with other commitments that I’ve largely ignored their emails. The tactic seems to have worked – they’ve now asked me to book time in my diary and propose terms. Sadly I’m busy, but I’ll find someone else to do the work with them. You know what they say: treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen!

I’m making good progress with my new client as well. Like most clients, this one has some perks of their own. A household name that makes a huge variety of product, my client produces (among other things) several lines of ice cream – and it’s all you can eat throughout the office. There are huge freezers full of every ice cream product under the sun on every floor. It’s lucky that I’m not a big fan of ice cream, or my prospects for fitting into my wedding suit would be under threat!

We have inherited a project that was going badly wrong – always a tricky time to step in – but in a marvel of resource scheduling and creative networking, we seem to have absolutely the right team on the ground. I’ve brought in a manager to run the project who could quite literally herd cats and she’s quickly brought order to the chaos. I’ve got a great techie that actually understands business requirements, can self-start, and can largely be left to his own devices. I’ve got an army of junior guys who are happy to take orders and just get on with things. In short, I’ve got the perfect team to turn around a troubled project. Even the client can see it, which is great. As long as the ice-cream keeps flowing, this project should be a great success.

The two-week gap since my last entry is a good indication of how busy things have been recently. I’ve been frantically trying to get a piece of work out the door in the face of client requirements that seem to change by the minute. At the same time, I’ve been asked to act as a subject-matter expert for another client, and to lead a piece of business development for a third client. It means that I’m trying to do eight days of work in a five-day week.

After ten beautiful, sunny days in the US, we’ve come back to several weeks of grey, rainy weather in the UK. The garden looks great – Aude spent most of the weekend before last getting all of our flower beds planted, I took care of re-seeding the grass and getting everything trimmed. But the grey weather overall is a bit of a drag.

The weekend was spiced up a little bit by a Eurovision dinner party thrown by a friend of ours, although we still maintain that the UK was robbed.

Most of this weekend was tied up with wedding preparation courses – overall not quite as dull as I’d expected, although I did learn rather more about the sex lives of our hosting couple than I really would have liked. Sometimes, ignorance really is bliss.

It’s another busy week at work this week – tying up loose ends on one client engagement on Monday & Tuesday, off to Croydon on Wednesday to assess the presentations of all the graduates at the end of their 18-month graduate training programme, then off to Paris on Thursday / Friday for a training course of my own. I’m taking Thursday morning off to race around Paris securing the various pieces of paperwork I need for the wedding.

Still, even a trip racing around Paris is a good trip. They’re taking us out for a slap-up meal on Thursday night, which makes the trip worthwhile in itself.

It has been a busy old week. One of the partners from another part of the business decided he needed an analytical heavyweight to help him do some serious number crunching. I obviously haven’t hidden my data analysis and Access skills deeply enough on my CV, because he approached me as the right man for the job. Even when I pointed out the impact of my day rate for doing a job like this, he remained convinced that I was ‘value for money’.

The job seemed reasonably straight-forward – take an Excel spreadsheet that was relying on loads of clunky lookups and a number of data tables (think ‘actuarial tables’ if you need an idea of size and scale) and create a more elegant solution in Access. I took all the input materials and created the model. So far ,so good.

The devil, of course, is in the detail. Because it’s only once it’s been built and you’ve pushed some data through that you realise that 1) the data quality is poor and 2) the client hasn’t defined their requirements clearly enough. For every business rule they have outlined, they’ve conveniently neglected to mention that there are exceptions to the business rules. No two groups in the company follow the same business rules, and there are 160 groups. And suddenly what seemed like a very straight-forward job assumes a life of its own.

Never mind. All I can think about is my upcoming holiday – my thoughts are squarely on our trip to New Orleans. All of our upgrades have cleared (thank goodness – 16 hours in economy is more than I can bear to think about). After a minor cock-up with dates (hotel booked for one week, flights for another) we have managed to secure hotel reservations for the entire period, even during the busy season of Jazzfest – although we will have to move hotels halfway through unless I can sweet-talk the GM into releasing a room for us. The concierge has a list of my favourite New Orleans restaurants and is busy making reservations. I’ve emailed all my friends and invited them to get together. Short of packing, I think we’re all ready to go!

Weather is predicted to be in the 90s all week – hot, but I can’t imagine New Orleans any other way. It’s my first visit post-Katrina. I just hope that this city for which I have such a fondness hasn’t changed too much.

Woke up today to another beautiful March morning, a slight frost on the ground but predicted highs of 17C later today. The café at the train station has started to stock Cadbury’s Crème Eggs, a sure sign that spring can’t be far away now. We’ve actually had a very mild winter, so as nice as it is to have spring on our doorstep, it doesn’t feel like the long-awaited relief that it does in some years.

My week at work seems to be flying by. We’re busy pulling together all the write-ups from my client who prints money, and even I am surprised by how much we accomplished in such a short time. Two of my junior guys have been locked in a project room for three days straight cranking out the slides – I’m giving them the final review this morning, which should be a welcome relief. I’m sure they’re keep to put this to bed. I’ll go out to the client to present the findings later this week (hurrah – a day where most of my time will be spent on trains).

Wedding plans are continuing apace. As I wrote on my other blog (the one on our wedding website), the heavens seem to have aligned. After weeks of chasing various ‘Letters of Freedom’ from various Catholic parishes around the world, my prayers were (literally and figuratively) answered all at once, when all the parishes concerned emailed me on the same day (and within hours of one another) to tell me that they would be sending the required Letters in the next 24 hours. So we’ve managed to navigate the tricky intricacies of the Catholic Church’s bureaucracy. I’m not convinced that the French bureaucracy will be quite so straightforward.

In other news, Dara is coming to visit for the weekend. It will be a good chance to catch up with an old friend, and knowing Dara, quite literally swapping war stories. (For those of you who don’t know Dara, she spends most of her life moving from one war-torn country to another – currently living in Afghanistan). We were going to meet in London, but I’ve managed to lure her down to Canterbury with the promise of cooking a traditional Sunday roast.

Aude’s off to France this weekend to visit her parents and do some shopping for the wedding, and I’ve got a weekend in London catching up with some old friends. I’ve come equipped with a sleeping bag, which is about as close as I come to ‘roughing it’. The cats have been left with extra food to fend for themselves.

It’s been a funny old week. I’ve spent much of the week interviewing candidates, some good, some bad, some downright shocking. Those who were successful are attending an all-day assessment centre today, seeing if they’ll make the final grade. The rest can be summed up by the feedback I received from one of my colleagues: “She’s a lovely person. But she’d be a hopeless consultant.” They’re 90% enthusiasm, 10% capability. Nice in a puppy, but not in a colleague.

I managed to catch some sort of stomach bug so spent most of Wednesday in bed feeling rather sorry for myself. In my Operations role, one of the highlights of my week is reviewing timesheets. Apparently whatever I caught was going around – lots of people claiming hours off sick. I read somewhere that the second and third weeks of February were statistically plagued with the highest absenteeism of the year, something to do with the short days, post-New-Year blues, and long break since a bank holiday – I wonder if that’s the case or whether everyone was genuinely sick.

My Operations role has given me some really valuable insights into how a consultancy is run. Take timekeeping – the lifeblood of any consultancy. One of the things that you learn as you work in a consultancy is that you can get by for ages doing very little work if you’re creative with your timesheet. And you can be penalised for even a moment’s idleness if you’re not careful.

It’s all a matter of interpretation. Certain codes are red flags and get examined very closely – even an hour booked to ‘Unassigned’ gets careful scrutiny. Catch up over coffee with a colleague and book the time to ‘Unassigned’ – expect to get a talking to. Have the same cup of coffee, but book it to ‘Sales / business development’ and no one says a word.

My senior guys know this. They know where to stick their time in order not to raise any eyebrows, they do their thing, and everyone more or less leaves them alone. But some of my junior guys, even with all the coaching in the world, seem not to have cottoned on to the way the game is played. And then they wonder why they’re constantly being harassed by management for how they’re spending their time.

But their naivety really surprises me sometimes. It’s mid-year review time, and one of my junior guys booked 23 hours to ‘counselling and feedback’. And expected no one to ask any questions about how he’d spent his time. Even though my managers, who have to do appraisals for 5-6 people, generally only booked about 10 hours.

A group of the management team got together last night to take a state of the nation over a few beers. And we decided between us that we’ve got quite a few puppies on our team – enthusiastic and quite sweet, but needing quite a lot of handholding and not quite paper-trained yet.

Maybe I should hire a dog trainer?