Goals for 2025

As 2025 is about to begin you will see lots of plans that people have and I do too, but a little bit different.

I have a new role at Inoapps as thought leader and advocate, not hugely different than what I do today except all of my work will be planned and executed in sprints, because my goal for 2025 is to (scuba) dive my bucket list.

 

When I reached 60 many of my peers we're retiring early, COVID caused us all to reassess what was important and for many that was slowing down. For me the thought of giving up work, which I love was horrifying, but I'd also had 18 months when it was difficult to engage in my passion, my leveler, my time out, my scuba diving.

 

I did manage to dive occasionally during lockdown or between lockdowns. I don't live that far from the sea but it's the North Sea and the amount of kit that I need for always less than 10°C water was quite a struggle. Once we were able to travel it was about choosing somewhere that was open, dealing with the restrictions and just getting out there and into the water. There are so many places I still wanted to dive and signs of getting older in my joints made me think I ought to do them sooner rather than later. I didn’t learn to scuba dive until I was 50 (as a dare) so I did have a lot of catching up to do.

 

Inoapps allows you to buy extra vacation, which I took full advantage of, and I would manage 3 or 4 proper diving trips a year. Normally on a liveaboard where you eat, sleep and dive, repeatedly for a week at a time. Then a great friend gave me a series of presents, a book, “fifty top dive sites to dive before you die” and a diving map of the world and I felt that this should form my bucket list. At this rate my body would give out before my list was completed so perhaps, I did need to retire and get it done whilst I still could. 

 

So, in 2022 I started on a plan, 2025 would be my bucket list year. I visited a few dive shows and collected brochures of the different places I fancied going to. Then in 2023 I started to book those trips, in fact the last trip in 2025 is to the Great Barrier Reef and I had just put down an obscene deposit on three weeks for the November. Before I'd even paid that credit card bill, I had a fall at home and broke my shoulder. My first question to the doctor, when I finally saw one, was how long I would be out of the water, and he was the first of many medical people to say “at your age you can't expect a full recovery”. I was devastated, did this mean that I wouldn't be able to do dive again, let alone do my bucket list? After much physiotherapy I got back in the water eight months after breaking my shoulder and I was more determined than ever than 2025 would be my year.

 

At the start of 2024 I told my boss that I was retiring at the end of the year and that if after a year I still wanted to come back I would consider contracting. After much laughter and hilarity later, and having originally being told no, we discussed it seriously. I was reminded about the many arguments at work as to when I could and couldn't travel during my long recovery. It had also taught me how much I loved my job. So quite quickly retiring morphed to being a gap year.

Initially it was suggested I just take a sabbatical but one thing that is important to me is my ACE Director and the access that gives me to things I really enjoy, sharing my knowledge and so taking a full year out would make that difficult. My plan is that I will travel for six weeks, come home for a month repeatedly through the year, so we looked at how we could make this work. With a lot of help from HR and the Inoapps leadership team we worked out that I could continue to do the things I loved, talk to customers, provide content, tell stories, speak at events and still do my year away. 

So, I've changed my contract, I'm now only working a total of 18 weeks through the year some of that is just keeping up with what's going on, after all that Oracle continuous innovation needs keeping up with. I've already got webinars set up with Inoapps and with Oracle during my first work Sprint at the end of February which will include CloudWorld London, the summer is a little more fluid as I have a few more things to work around and obviously I'll be around at CloudWorld in Vegas. 

 

I cannot believe how amazingly supportive Inoapps have been, but one of the things that I tell my mentees is if you're adding value then you can have say in how your job looks.

 

And where do I start? I'm flying to Singapore on New Year's Eve and hoping that British Airways will celebrate each midnight as we pass through them. On to Thailand for my first liveaboard and then three locations within Indonesia. Some of the trips are on my own but once you've spent a week with nineteen other divers on a boat you've made friends for life and some of the trips are organised with people that I've met on previous trips.

2024 UKOUG Thoughts

Last week was UKOUG annual conference and it was back to its traditional date, the first Monday in December, Super Sunday was back and it was back in Birmingham.

I know how hard it is to put on a usergroup event and this was a really good event. It felt busy, there were lots of conversations going on and looking at the LinkedIn posts people really enjoyed it.

There did seem to be a lot of streams so attendance in each session was not enormous but I had good attendance for my sessions, so I was happy.

Super Sunday is a very technical day and I went along to learn. I didn't attend too many sessions but did have a chance to catch up with a lot of the speakers I haven't seen for a while. 

Monday the main event kicked off and I had the first time slot for my All You Need To Know About Oracle presentation, which I gave for the first time publicly at UKOUG last year and it got me shortlisted for best session. Again I had a good turnout and whilst I recognised a few faces, there were newcomers to our ecosystem and I hope they learned something.

In the afternoon I was on a panel for long term mentoring, sharing ideas and stories to encourage others to become or ask for a mentor. I was joined by Sarah Dow who is my mentee from the ODTUG WIT mentoring scheme but also a SHINE mentor, Neil Chandler from the MASH Program and his mentee Rishin Mitra, who is actually an almost neighbour of mine in N Ireland! We were excellently facilitated by Grace Honeysett.

Tuesday I spoke on the value of Redwood, and was a little nervous there were several sessions on Redwood, second only in volume to AI! It demonstrated how important Redwood is to organisations using Fusion. I wrote a little more about this on LinkedIn.

I then supported Sue Duncan who did demos on Visual Builder, the technology behind Redwood. My last contribution was to support the HCM Executive Round Table where there was more discussion.

There wasn't a lavish party. but there was the opportunity to network on the Monday evening and the event finished on Tuesday with a motivational speaker Bonita Norris, the girl who climbed Everest. 

Actually it didn't finish there, UKOUG have put a lot of effort into their SHINE mentoring program and there were a couple of sessions and a celebration of their two cohorts. Bonita stayed to be on panel and it was lovely to see so many men stay on.

UKOUG wasn't back at the traditional ICC in Birmingham, numbers and sponsors have to return to much higher levels to make that affordable. This decline had started before Covid, and affects a lot of usergroups.

In keeping with my trip down memory lane I stayed near the ICC and walked through it everyday. Part of me wishes I hadn't, that perfect date has been taken over by the SAP usergroup. They are growing, and why? Well I talked about this in an article a while back, but it is still true, A usergroup needs an engaged community, all year round and not just an annual event. 

UKOUG had a number of executive round tables, turn them into Special Interest Groups and get the people together every few months. 

Thankyou to the Oracle ACE Program and my employer for supporting me to attend.