And continue...

I've had a busy few months. Since January I have been working exclusively for a set of Chambers in London. It has been a mad, busy time, but with the arrival of August, I am done.

I have restructured the staffing and helped to facilitate significant changes of personnel - something that the Chambers management had wanted for a while. That took about six months, but then staff issues have to be very carefully handled and since I respected the people I was working with I wanted to make sure that it was handled as well as possible. I believe that we managed to get the best result for everyone - including the member of staff who ultimately left (and who looked much happier last time I saw him).

I also project managed the complete change of all the IT systems. We moved platform for Chambers Management System (to Lex from Iris - and I'm sure I will go into more detail in a forthcoming post about the mess that Iris made of the transition); we moved hosted systems platform (from Iris to CBSIT); we moved versions of Office.

It is right and proper that most of the barristers in Chambers saw little in the way of inconvenience and have no concept of how difficult that all was. If you have been part of a transfer like that I'm sure you can sympathise. There was a huge amount of planning and then quite a few weekends and over-nights to get things working. The hard work of the two project leaders (Damien Briengan for Lex and Mike Sutton for CBSIT) was invaluable and contributed to the success. We were a bit of a victim of our own success - because the process was, for most people, painless, they assumed it was simple.

Those were just the 'big ticket' items. We sorted out a number of suppliers and replaced a copier contract (these things are notoriously easy to get in a mess with). We introduced some formal risk management. Communication is better, policies are in place, documentation is up to date, financial reporting is much improved, etc etc...

With all that done, the focus has now changed to Sales and Marketing. While I have run successful Marketing teams, I am not a Marketing specialist and am certainly not a Salesman. So the time has come to move on and see what new challenges and new organisations are out there.

Looking forward to it!