I’ve been asked by marketing to do a ‘wrap up’  blog for the end of the year and wondered what I should write about.  I think it was assumed that I would give an educated (well, semi-educated !!) view as to how things are going at dhc and how business is.  The short answer to that one is, unlike last Christmas, it’s all very good.  All of the teams here at dhc are pretty busy with projects to deliver (both new and existing client works). From a sales perspective what is also clear is the high number of new prospects and opportunities that the sales team are working on.  For the month of December this year, to date, we have generated four times as many opportunities and meetings than we did for the same month last year and the quality of these opportunities is also higher than last year. I spend quite a lot of time with partners as well as attending various networking events and I have to say that there is considerably more positivity at the moment than you would anticipate given the constant doom and gloom that appears in the news.  My current thought process is quite simple – I am going to stop listening to the news, go back to basics and live in my own bubble – something my wife often mentions I do anyway !?  

Following weeks of intense group training and dietary planning, as one of four dhc employees who braved the wet, foreboding woodlands of Wisley and Ockham in November, I thought it would be nice to give a report on how team dhc got on.

The brave participants involved were Simon O'Beirne, Paul Joslin, Matt Garman and myself - Dean James. This was the Pine Ridge 10k run which raises funds for the Princes Trust.
10k was a distance which two of us (myself included) had never attempted before, and for all involved, it proved to be an event that was to test our dedication to the very limit!
Following a rainy few days, the course was wet and marshy, so we knew we'd have extra environmental issues to deal with. On the day, the undulating terrain was scattered with a variety of hazards, including low hanging branches, emerging tree-roots and monstrously muddy puddles. So that coupled with around 600 other participants - all struggling alongside us against the same obstacles, there was a lot to contend with! On the warm-up trek to the starting line, we were separated and so took different starting positions among the bustling masses. The first few kilometres were quite crowded, but when people found their pace, the running order was gradually established as everyone eventually all fell into single file. The four of us having been split up earlier meant there were no opportunities to run with each other, so we all had to dig in deep and call on our training to pace ourselves and hang in there.

 

With the birth of my first child looming, my brain seems to be firmly set in baby mode, which also means I am affected by the well known condition ‘baby brain’ and have become quite forgetful! I spend a lot of my time now trying to organise my house, write lists of what still needs to be bought and to then purchase it, write a birth plan, packing and re-packing baby’s/my bag for hospital etc. But what about at work?

We all accumulate and store different pieces of information pertaining to our job roles in our heads, on scraps of paper or filed away on a computer.  I often have members of staff call upon these memories on a daily basis to help them with their tasks, but have you documented this useful information? I hold my hand up as I don’t always do this and am sure that many of you are the same! I always have the good intention to do it, but it is often pushed down my task list as more pressing matters arise and also the potential for me leaving always seemed so far away. Handover’s are great, but you are reliant on the person noting down the information correctly and often the questions that highlight gaps in their knowledge only ever come when you are not there to advise, so my task over the next two weeks is to document as much as I can and upload to Sharepoint (our document management system), so that my team and other members of the business have a single location in which to search when they need some additional information.As none of us never really know what’s around the next corner, maybe we should each take an hour out of our busy week to document just a little bit of that knowledge – you never know when it will come in handy.