December was half holiday and half work… hard work.
Two main projects keeping my busy and an unusual amount of proposal writing.
- Finally waved goodbye to a project that’s taken up most of my time for the past 3 months, it stretched me in some ways and not in others. A new sector, a new client and a big data source. I usually work completely independently but this time round I worked very closely with my client who was new to the company. I enjoyed being part of a team again and I realised, once again, how helpful it is to be able to share ideas and talk things through with other people who are equally engaged with a project and, in this case, will be responsible for taking the learnings forward.
- The other big project was a client in the tech sector. Last year I analysed their customer satisfaction survey and this year I’m running it (except the fieldwork). Got everything in and out of field on schedule and had enough time to share some initial findings before everyone downed tools for the holidays. Happy client as their key metric (net promotor score) was up on last year. Something to celebrate!
At this time of year I really value the street we live on – it’s a long street 120 houses (some of them flats) and it really does feel like a village. For the last 3 years we have done advent windows. 24 houses decorate one of their windows for each day of advent, this year we were number 4 and went for four calling birds. It’s a community experience and we often get together at ‘lighting up time’ for mulled wine, mince pies and a good neighbourly catch up.
I finished for the year on the 21st and we headed off to the West Country for a much needed and well deserved holiday where this amazing beach was (really) on our doorstep and two out of three of us enjoyed some body boarding.
