Arcus Culture

I’ve recently finished Matthew McConaughey’s autobiography, Greenlights. I confess, I’m an avid fan of the guy’s screen work. Dallas Buyers Club anybody? what a film! Yet, I’m always sceptical with autobiographies, regardless of author. Am I getting the whole story, warts n all, if you like?

Greenlights is a pretty balanced read/listen. He talks about a lot of the issues that affected him over the years, good and bad. His story’s set against the context of world growth and massive social change in recent years. It runs right up to #metoo, BLM & COVID 19, so it’s current. It resonates. Through his life journey, McConaughey describes all the positives that headed his way. He was getting a go sign, a reason to carry on, a Greenlight!

As part of Arcus Global’s commitment to supporting sustainability, we will be donating 100 tree saplings to any new and existing Local Authority customers to enrich their local communities – it’s something that we’re pledging to do every year. We will work with our customers to carefully identify the right location and species and help them source and plant in their areas.

Someone once told me that Project Management (PM) is about “being told things you don’t want to hear and telling people things they don’t want to hear”. PM certainly doesn’t come without its challenges and working with the Public Sector (notorious for its tight budgets and staff shortages) adds to it. However, having managed projects on both sides of the “fence”, I can say that it doesn’t have to always be like that.

I read this report from the Connected Place Catapult with great interest. I don’t disagree with the six principles outlined in the report. In fact, at Arcus we try to put these principles into action every day. However, in focusing wholly on the software suppliers, the report misses an opportunity to highlight some more fundamental issues.

In a company that predominantly works using the cloud, many of us are familiar with working from home. However, in the ‘time before Covid’, home working could also include a variety of in-person meetings with clients, travelling into the office to work with our colleagues, meeting up with them, and maintaining that ‘face-time’ which is so important to our working relationships.

Sweaty. That’s probably the best way to describe how I felt the morning of Tuesday 17th March 2020. The morning after the Government issued the Work From Home order and we officially invoked our Business Continuity Plan.

The alarm goes off on the Monday morning of another working week, and this new routine is slowly starting to settle in. I ask myself the first question of the day: do I have any video conferences or meetings ahead? If the answer is no, then casual wear it is. As much as I enjoy looking like something out of 1973 Eurovision every time I don my new headset, not having to decide on a work-appropriate outfit every morning is both time saving and liberating.

With people imagining what life will be like following the current pandemic, you often see them quoted as expecting working life to ‘go back to normal’. For me, that won’t work.

First thing’s first – I don’t think anyone could have done anything to prevent the level of disruption we are currently facing. No amount of preparation will give adequate protection from a once in a hundred years event. No amount of planning, stocking or preparing was going to cut it. Saying “we are not prepared” applies to almost every country and every business. The honest answer is that it costs too much to be prepared for something so rare and so extreme as this.

Hi, I’m Thomas, I’m 19 and in Sep-18, I became Arcus Global’s first Degree Apprentice.

Here in the first of our occasional series of Acronaut blogs, Nicola Edwards, shares her secrets about how she gets the information she needs from clients.

Arconauts Dominic Myers and Simon Cull have been running a weekly Code Club after school at St Andrew’s School in Soham since September 2016.