Mr V’s blog

October 17th, Weeknote

HR Projects Update – A Week in the Life

This week has been all about making progress, finding momentum, and getting teams ready for some deadlines. And yes, managing those little amber flags that pop up along the way.

GCC Campaign Recruitment – All Systems Go


We’re in a good place here – happily “green” on the status tracker. My new colleague officially takes the reins of Offer-to-Day-One progress tracking from 20th October 2025, which is great news for continuity. She’s already joined daily standups and is getting stuck into the tracking activities.

The team is collaborating brilliantly across Poland to get everything polished for our 1st November starters.

We’ve refined our proposal to remind hiring managers to keep things moving briskly at the last stages of interviews – because those final steps really matter.

Next week will be about getting that proposal into action and making sure reports for IT Senior Leadership are ready to go.

Talent Intelligence and Capability Development – Clarifying the Road Ahead

This one’s sitting at “amber” as we iron out ownership, business strategy, and scope for the value team. I’ve been wearing my Agile Facilitator hat, keeping Sprint 11 on track and prepping for Sprint 12. There are some chunky topics to resolve – like job architecture and scaling the skills library pilot – but we’re moving forward. Next week is all about planning, standups, and hopefully some decisions that will give us the clarity we need.

The China project is also at “amber” thanks to dependencies on external partners. Lots of back-and-forth this week – answering questions, keeping things rolling.

Risks remain around whether external partners can deliver in time for our 1st January 2026 go-live, and we’re mindful of Christmas shutdown availability.

Next week, it’s about reviewing change orders, chasing outstanding responses, and starting to stitch together a full integrated project plan with Overall Project Manager.

Similar challenges to China – another “amber” status due to partner dependencies. We’ve had a series of productive calls this week, built a simplified high-level project plan for tracking HR work, and kicked off a document review tracker.

One of the change orders is expected on 22nd October, which should finally give us costs, timelines, and a proposed plan.

Risks are much the same as China: external delivery timelines and Christmas shutdown capacity.

Next week will be more chasing of change orders and getting our integrated project plan firmed up.

Final Thought

It’s been a week of onboarding, clarifying, chasing, and keeping multiple plates spinning. All four projects have a mix of energy and hurdles, but the teams are engaged and solutions are emerging. And with me away from 27–31 October, it’s full steam ahead now to park as many actions as possible before I swap project trackers for postcards.