Planned for a quiet period during the Olympics - but it is far from that!
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2012-08-02 22:44:29 - Graham EllisThis week and next week have been marked in my diary for a while as "Olympics - a chance to catch up on paperwork, and important but non-urgent tasks". As an IT training company, August is always a bit of a quiet month, and we fully expected the big sporting event to depress bookings further, in addition to reducing our hotel bookings. That's because people who aren't attending the Olympic events haven't exactly been encouraged to commute / travel as usual, and we're far too far from any of the venues to realistically have expected a boost from travelling families or fans.
And this week we have achieved a tremendous amount ... a really good staff meeting and training session on Monday, which almost everyone was able to make. We looked at the "behind the scene" systems such as fire alarm and emergemcy light tests. We reviewed pricing and other policy; everyone on our team is customer facing, and is able to handle first-line customer enquiries, and it's important to know not only WHAT our policies are, but WHY they're that way. And we took a good look through ongoing maintainance and upgrade works - something that we need to keep constantly in touch with to avoid any hint of a tired look! We continued the discussion over lunch at the Refa - sometimes drifting off onto more social topics. Such interaction is important for a cohesive team - and as we're open and staffed for over 100 hours per week, it's not something that happens every day.
On Tuesday, I prepared a major update for our "Perl Programming" course - I've written about this as a separate item. Although programming languages change remarkably little over the years (sensible, as people want to invest in coding that will last a long time), many of the peripheral topics that the course touches on change more quickly, and the candidates for the courses gradually change in their typical background too. So this change is no root and branches re-write, but rather a gentle stearing to keep the course relevant and ahead-looking ... to topics such as Perl 6.
We have a considerable number of different domains registered for various special groups and specific purposes, and some of those have been getting a little long in the tooth, or lying forgotten at dusty corners of web space. On Wednesday, I did quite a batch of spring cleaning ... and put in forwarding from a number of redundant domains and directories to our current (and still updated) pages. This is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to some extent - we would far rather be highly ranked via a single URL than to ranked twice, but lower.
On Thursday, I attended a SCOB meeting with the feasibility study folks - we're looking at the various options for siting and buildings for the Melksham Campus on the Council owned site at Melksham House, with some fallout to associated sites. Now that the group has design principles agreed, based on council mandated minima and user inputs above that, the questions are "how can this be done", "what will it cost", "how will it work" and "what do we need to compromise on". Regrettably, on that latter point there are likely to be tough decisions to make as we look to get the best "bang" for our "buck". But design principles like "don't provide things that will compete with alternative facilities" should help us. Personally, I was delighted to see a number of options on the table - there must have been around 10 combinations in various ways, and that SCOB inputs have been taken to heart in the suggestions (or perhaps we're just stating the obvious on the SCOB ...)
Ah - so what will I do with my next quiet week? It won't be quiet!. I have a course to run, and we have a full hotel at the start of the week. But that won't stop me getting on with some other issues that are important, but not urgent ... or are behind the scenes.