Category: work

I quite often see buyers asking how they can make it easier and more attractive for suppliers to come and work with them. I was also reading PUBLIC’s recent report about government procurement that “Procurement continues to favour insiders and incumbents”. I’ve also recently had conversations with suppliers that some organisations appear to be closed shops to particular suppliers or groups of suppliers. This is all true. We all have biases. This gets talked about a lot in relation to recruitment, but not often in relation to procurement. We quickly form judgements about suppliers and what they’re capable of. Whether…

I’ve been working in central government, in various guises, for ten and a half years. It’s been quite a decade. I don’t tend to talk or write much about what I do. But today, I’ve sat down and made myself go through that career. It’s entailed: 8 roles 8 departments 3 general elections 5 administrations Tens of millions of pounds of budget managed Delivery of over 40 digital projects/services I’ve edited an multi-award winning staff magazine. Developed and operated the first cross government online community using an open source platform. I delivered same day payday loans iterations of G-cloud and…

I was reading Paul Sutton’s reflections on being freelance for a month and nodding vigorously. I started to write a comment and realised it was morphing into a post on it’s own. So, here are my reflections on having been freelance for almost 6 months. Freedom The sense of freedom is still strong at this point. It’s really hard to describe this feeling. Even when working a contract role which required me being in an office on a daily basis, I still had that sense of freedom. I have no boss putting expectations on me (though my own expectations as my…

I took part in on a great session at #ukgc13 run by Julia Chandler on the future of digital comms teams. Julia has also written up some notes from her session and there is a link to her full notes there too.

This subject seems to be coming up a lot lately in conversations and others have been blogging on the subject – see Dan Slee’s excellent post on this topic.

Many people are suggesting that digital comms specialists and teams will disappear in (soonest) two years or five years or ten years.

I’ll set my stall out now. I think this is a load of crap. The same question can be asked of comms teams in general. And I don’t see those going anywhere. Ever.

So over the weekend I had a tweet from the Women’s Room, a really cool project that is trying to do something about the very important problem of the lack of female faces and voices in the public realm.

Why have I hesitated to sign up?