Splendid isolation versus teamwork

Have had two days in (more or less) of splendid isolation in the team office. Time to concentrate, peace and quiet for phone calls, pretty much no distractions whatsover. Why then do I have a sneaking suspicion that I haven't achieved as much as I should have? After all, I completed the student facing EVS information sheet with our disability officer's help and had a chat with a very helpful person who is going to put it in the right place for the students to see it on our managed learning environment. I also spoke to a man who knew a man who agreed that our own man could host the EVS software to make downloading for staff easier.

Unfortunately, I then spent a lot of time trying to find the 'crop' facility on Office 10, after spending a lot of time waiting for Office 10 to install, after spending a lot of time trying to work out why my cut and paste facility had stopped working which was before our HelpdDesk suggested installing Office 10 to solve the problem. After which I re-installed the EVS software which was sulking about the Office 10 installation.

..and there was nobody to share my frustration with. If my team colleagues had been around they would have at least commiserated with me even if they could nothing to help. If they had been around we would have talked about the poster design for the upcoming International Blended conference, someone would have cast their eyes over the student information for me, we would have talked about revising the EVS workshop for the human resources team and cross-checked our diaries for all the new upcoming events and much more. Most importantly, there might have been somebody to pass the time with while I waited for the 26 updates to install on my laptop just when I wanted to go home!!

So team mates, I missed you all today. Peace and quiet is all very well but the cross-fertilisation that happens when working in a team brings unbeatable benefits (not least tea & sympathy). Good teamwork is what will make this project happen because what we achieve as a group is much more than we can achieve in 'splendid isolation'.

Henry Ford said "Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success." Our success as a team then is probably critical to the success of the project.

I hope the team like the suggestion I am going to make tomorrow about drawing pictures but I am not ready to share this one yet, just be patient

Julie :)

p.s. the QMP trail (root cause analysis) went a bit cold on us. Over then to our information services to talk about servers falling over, capacity modelling and other such things. The user group is a must, so that we don't lose those all important users who may be scared off by a one-off poor experience. Am keenly awaiting for my invite.