Working out loud - taking some leave!

Vacation = relaxation?   I hope so!

Flying out on holidays in a few hours - three weeks of decompressing, and spending time with friends and family.  

Will I experience the vacation stress syndrome captured in the image below?   Will I be able to disconnect from my inbox? 

Let's face it, I don't have it in me to not check emails for 3 weeks.  Yes, I know the cemeteries are full of people who were "irreplaceable", and yet the sun still rises each day.  No, that doesn't help me. 

So I've decided to launch a social experiment:  I'll shut off my email (really!) for the entire time I'm on leave.  However, I leave a back door for people to reach me by emailing a dummy gmail account  - making it clear that it should only be used consciously, and in case of time-sensitive issues.  Full text of my auto "out of office" email below.

Will try to report back with some stats on how this worked (and if I kept my promise to not open my outlook). 

Congratulations! You’ve qualified to participate in a social experiment on emails during annual leave.

I am on leave from 30 June to 18 July 2014.  I will have excellent connectivity during my leave, but am not planning to use much bandwidth on work-related emails.

In an attempt to balance quality time with my family with being available for urgent work matters that may arise, I’ve decided that I WILL NOT BE CHECKING THIS EMAIL ACCOUNT.

That’s right.  If you sent your email in the date range mentioned above to my @cgiar.org email address I will only look at it after 18 July.

However, if you urgently need me, fear not:  just send an email to iddoisonleave@gmail.com and I’ll be sure to get back to you as soon as I can.

Best wishes,

Iddo

#FridayUpdate of 20 June 2014 (Week 4 of #WOL)

Another week has gone by, and here we are with my 4th #FridayUpdate.     Here comes the stuff:

Photo Credit: sqlknowledgebank.blogspot.com


Started work on the IBLI Case Study (woot!).  Initial set of interviews taking place this week with IBLi members, next week we'll expand to other ILRI staff and external partners. Will have a conf call later today with Andrew Mude and Shreya (consultant working with us on the case) to review and discuss the initial outline. 

Had several meetings (mostly virtual) around the CGIAR Development Dialogues (see lat week's update for more info).  Quite useful, and we have a revised proposal out now for peer-review.  Hope to get a revised version finalized before I go on leave at the end of next week!

Finalized ToR for the FEAST consultancy and working to get a contract process so the work can begin.  After weeks of planning  - I can't wait to actually get my hands dirty with this gem of a project.  

Caught up on CapDev work taking place in Uganda under the CRP Livestock & Fish - big assignment with 8 training modules on different aspects of the pig value chain.  The project, with 8 national consultants, an international consultant, and 4-5 ILRI colleagues is suffering from some delays and difficulties in getting an consistent quality of work across all modules.  At this point, we (i.e. the CapDev folks) need to wait till the content is produced/reviewed so we can start our instructional design work - seems like we have a ways to go before we can have the desired deliverables from this project.  Hope it will end well. 

Followed up with minutes and next steps for the revision of ILRI's Fellowship Guidelines.  It is proving difficult to coordinate time slots for such a large taskforce (15+ members), as many are traveling or on leave.  Hope we can keep momentum and advance quickly. 

Participated in a  steering committee meeting for the next CGIAR CapDev CoP meeting, which is scheduled for thew week of 8 Sept.  Great team, productive call.  Some interesting thoughts for drawing in partners and senior CG leaders' into the meeting. 

Consolidated and sent some comments for the Global Task Force (GTF) of the TAP (G-20) initiative on capacity development in agricultural innovation systems, which I currently Chair (representing the CGIAR).  The TAP holds much potential for collective actions in CapDev  - but really there are pesky governance and transparency / process issues that need to be addressed.

This afternoon will have a look at a longlist of candidates for mNutrition Quality Assurance Officer.  We had over 200 applications, but apparently very few suitable candidates.  If so, this would be disappointing and might hamper our plans to move quickly with the recruitment. 
 

My "working out loud" experiment - here we go!

Virtually all website with tips for bloggers will tell you that consistency is the name of the game.  My last post was over 5 months ago, which kind off defeats the purpose right?   I've been meaning to write more often, and will try to blog about why blogging professionally is more difficult when it is not part of your established work priorities  - all the more so when you're on the road or in meetings upwards of 70% of the time. 

But enough of that.  Today, I'm starting another experiment, namely "working out loud".  I'm really not sure I'm cut out for it (I'm the kind of person that thought laptop privacy screens were an overdue invention!)  - but the cool kids in my CGIAR network are doing it, and I thought I'd give it a try.   Last week was my first official #fridayupdate and one of the comments I received is that it was too long for a Yammer post - and that I should blog about it and link back from Yammer.  So here we are.  I wasn't sure that a public post would be the way to go about work stuff, but then I remembered that we're publicly funded, so I really should put my work out there in case it would be useful for someone.    With that, here we go - WOL update for the week ending 6 June 2014:

On Monday we hosted a team from INSEAD / Toto Agriculture, led by Phil Parker and Ioana Popescu.   They are in advanced stages of preparing a 2.0 version of their system, which aims to have all the relevant information possible about agriculture available to various groups (extension officers, radio stations, etc.) in a customizable.  The Facebook of global Ag if you will.   Some seriously cool stuff.  They'd like to get ILRI content on livestock into the system, and it would be nice if we manage to find a way to make it work.  I am a bit skeptical, because we are anything but agile, and they plan to move very quick.   Ioana's work dovetails Toto, but is focusing on establishing individual credit scoring systems for smallholder farmers.  Could be a real game-changer in financial services at the BOP if it takes off. 

On Tuesday morning, we sent out the draft CGIAR Capacity Development Guidelines for the 2nd round of CRPs. The document offers recommendations on how CGIAR and boundary partners can successfully implement strategies for CapDev and highlights the key advantages offered by CapDev to CRPs, centers and partners. It was initially drafted by members of the CGIAR CapDev CoP, at a Writeshop held 7-9 April 2014 in Montpellier, France. The current version is a result of peer-reviewed by the CapDev CoP members during April-May 2014. I am really delighted to be part of the core team that is taking this forward.   We plan to actively seek feedback from Center DGs, CRP Directors and other internal and external stakeholders for feedback ahead of the next CapDev CoP Annual Meeting in early September.

I had a number of meeting with my colleague Ben Lukuyu around the work we're undertaking to revamp the Feed Assessment Tool (FEAST) and make it more accessible and less dependent on 1-2 high level experts within ILRI.  I'm having so much fun in this process - pure instructional design bliss - and so happy to be able to introduce such CapDev / learning aspects into our work.  This week we shortlisted proposal from consultants based on a mock assignment, and we were very impressed with the quality of proposals.  We then had phone interviews later in the week and are hoping to finalize with a consultant next week  - so I can start working with them to deliver a re-designed blended learning course before a FEAST summit in Vietnam in September.  

I also had a meeting with the IBLI team this week, and we've decided to go ahead with the preparation of a Harvard-Style case study on the program.  We have a consultant lined up, and I'm gearing up to write my notes of the proposed approach and management dilemmas later today.   The aim is to have the case study ready before September, so I can test it in my course on "financial services at the BOP at the IOMBA / University of Geneva.  Very ambitious schedule, but hey - nothing ventured nothing gained, right?!

The new mNutrition project is finally signed - and we got a job ad posted for a  Quality Assurance Officer to who will work under me (and closely with my colleague Delia Grace) to manage a range of quality assurance procedures, and provide advice and guidance concerning mNutrition quality assurance systems and their implementation.  Some press releases on mNutrition are being planned, so more on this in a future update. 

Apart from that, lots of work around performance approvals, preparation for a revision of ILRI's Fellowship Guidelines, follow up on Livestock and Fish work in Uganda, and more - but will stop here for today.