There’s nothing like a good holiday to escape, relax and rejuvenate. I was away for a couple of weeks recently (read this post on LinkedIn about how I kept in touch with all things Jisc and Janet), as were a lot of the rest of the access programme team. A lot of us have got children on school holidays, and with the Janet summer engineering moratorium also in full flow, August is the perfect month to escape. Work didn’t grind to a halt, but it did slow down. Now we’re all back, it’s a case of pedal to the floor and off we go.
This blog post briefly outlines what we’ll be working on between now and the end of the year.
Project work continues:
- The South region is entering its final stages of delivery of the underlying infrastructure, and we’re already planning ahead in terms of commissioning, and ultimately transition of services;
- Ditto the South West region.
- The Midlands region design (East and West combined) has been completed and orders have been placed for the fibre components of the network;
- Ditto the London region;
- The East Anglia, North West and Scotland regions have entered the formal design phase, where we’re working with Members and fibre suppliers to collate requirements and optimise topologies;
- Everything else is of course on the radar as well, and it won’t be very far into 2020 when we start working on the rest.
In other areas:
- The final Tech 2 Tech event will be taking place in Belfast, and we’ll be developing plans for that series of events to continue longer term into 2020 (and beyond).
- We’re constantly working with additional fibre suppliers (and Openreach) to ensure we have access to the best value infrastructure available;
- We’re looking at how we can better meet the intersite requirements of Members, with a view to more formally identifying them,, and building them into network designs and projects where possible;
- Plans and Gantt charts evolve on an almost daily basis, so documentation and admin forms a large part of the overall workload;
- We’re learning lessons at every turn that then feed into future projects – by the time we finish this programme of work we’ll be really good at it!
And then it’ll be Christmas and we can all have 2 weeks off work again 🙂