Thursday, 27 March 2008

Insomnia

Mostly, I consider myself a good sleeper; accomplished even as I sleep very deeply and very little disturbs me. I don't sleep for long and find I thrive best on about six hours a night. And I cope well with disruption and never suffer from jet-lag or similar. But once in a while I have a bout of insomnia and this past night was one such night.

After several futile attempts to sleep, I thought I might as well be at the office doing something useful rather than disturbing Jackie's sleep too so I arrived at work about 4:30 am. It’s not as if there wasn’t plenty of work to do.

First, I spent time shifting furniture and computers about. This wasn’t on some capricious whim as Maria (our office co-ordinator) had ordered a skip for the day and furniture needed shifting about and papers sorted for archive / shredding / recycling.

I spent a large part of the past night reading CRM for Dummies and this had helped clarify so much. I am now 98% sure how we are going to configure CRM for the second test installation. I wrote a long-ish e-mail to Angelo setting out an agenda for us to talk through during his visit later in the day.

It is never a good idea to send anything out for wider consultation until it’s been thoroughly scrutinised by critical friends. So this morning I sent out the draft Community Development Strategy to WCVS staff and trustees. Hopefully I will get some good feedback and next week be able to circulate a revised draft to members and stakeholders and for discussion at some of our forums.

Ann Jansz had reported back on the LAA discussions with the news that Herts Forward may decide to create a “bespoke” target for itself around engagement with the voluntary sector. The possibilities are very exciting, but things will have to move fast. The charge on this was led by Watford’s Dorothy Thornhill and I have to applaud her thinking: Audentior indeed.

Angelo arrived and we tackled a few problems together before adjourning for a brief lunch. We went down the High Street to Toast - there is nothing quite like visiting a good independent local business. Over dinner, we had an intense discussion about Watford CVS's IT project which is looking so full of promise: Angelo has developed some great looking web-tools, CRM looks better than we’d hoped, and integrates with MS Exchange / SharePoint / v-base / MS Office, and everything looks fully scaleable.

This is the stage of the project where hopes and expectations ride high; sadly, I know that soon enough there will come a time when cold hard technical reality will kick in, red in tooth and claw.

Back at the office, the skip still hadn’t arrived, but Maria (Office Co-ordinator) and Anne (Funding Advisor) and Sha-Lee (Information Worker) and (Sean (Volunteer) were all working brilliantly in preparation.

I had to leave them to it and drove to Hemel Hempstead for a 3:30 meeting with Mohamed Fawzi of Connexions. We spoke about our contract with Connexions for Aim Higher work, and about our new contract to provide a BME Advocacy Service across Hertfordshire. Mohamed had some excellent ideas (and names) for the service’s Advisory Panel and I greatly appreciate his input. Hema starts in a few weeks and things look good.

I arrived home about 6:00 pm and Jackie pampered me: I went to bed about 10:00 pm and was asleep the instant my head hit the pillow.