Innopints 3: Exeter

“Capital isn’t so important in business. Experience isn’t so important. You can get both these things. What is important is ideas. If you have ideas, you have the main asset you need, and there isn’t any limit to what you can do with your business and your life.”

— Harvey Firestone

There’s been an occasional event since last summer where a bunch of us get together, have a pint and usually some food, and talk about how we might do things differently. This hasn’t been in a fixed location: the first was at Dartington, the second in Newton Abbott.

The awesome George Julian organised the first two as they were in her neck of the woods, and now it’s my turn. So I am pleased to announce that Innopints 3 will be in Exeter on the 12th March 2012 at 7:30pm.

If you’ve never been to one of these before, it is totally low-key and is basically just a bunch of like-minded people having a chat. Drop me a line (as I’ll need to book numbers) or tweet me if you have any questions. You’ll be most welcome!!

As for the venue, we have a veritable cornucopia of possibilities in the South-West’s premier city and I’m happy to be swayed by a majority view. There are excellent Indian, Thai, Moroccan, Chinese, Italian(1) (2), Spanish, Mediterranean and even English options.

Please make a suggestion in the comments below and I’ll put a shortlist together.

#LocalGov as a platform business

I’ve been doing quite a bit of thinking recently about what the “real” purpose of my employer is. In common with many other public sector bodies, we’ve outsourced bits of our support and front line services (and others were already in private hands by default). When we do this, however, we both lose and gain something: it’s not always a good idea (it seems, or maybe we just don’t do it very well each time) as we seem to be sort of “hollowed out” and we lose influence. If people have a problem with the way the roads are surfaced, do they talk to the council responsible or do they talk directly to the company that resurfaces the roads?

In this sort of climate it is tempting (and I have succumbed) to envisaging this kind of process taken to its logical conclusion. If a council commissions all of its services, what is it for? This thought experiment has led me to start considering local (and maybe central) government as a platform business that exists to

• understand the needs of people and places under its care
• search for funding opportunities that might help with those needs
• curate a set of service providers and help to ensure the markets for each are broadly functional
• provide a set of levers for those with a political mandate to push in order to deliver on political priorities
• provide intelligence to all so that commissioning decisions can be undertaken intelligently.

So what we might refer to as “the council” becomes quite small really and is a hub – centred around a platform containing

• expertise in the funding landscape, performance management, public engagement, (big P) Politics and data
• a business intelligence toolset and competencies to crunch all the available data
• a web channel that ties services together (in a service-oriented architecture style of thing)
• document/records management that provides an archive of policy, actions and decisions
• Master data management (ensures we don’t double-count people or places in our calculations, and ensures joined up case management)
• Data warehousing (performance management, demographic, needs data on the full range of services)
• middleware to join processes up.

There’s perhaps some political (big P again, sorry) dynamite here in that it might be seen to imply privatisation or outsourcing on a massive scale (on the scale recently attempted – and abandoned – by some other councils such as Suffolk) but I need to stress that it doesn’t necessarily mean that. It does, however, necessitate a *logical* split between those bodies/teams/people/partners that commission services and those that provide those services. The split occurs because the service provider has a different business model to the commissioner.

In fact, it is becoming increasingly clear to me that the vast majority of commissioning is done by actors outside of the council: we have personal budgets for healthcare, politicians have local budgets, other authorities or public/third sector bodies may fund developments, even the private sector might utilise this platform to commission work.

[Although my focus is on local government I wonder if this approach also extends to central government. Both exist to do broadly the same thing, just on a different scale, both currently depend on partners and service providers to do the majority of the work, and both are relatively poor at commissioning as opposed to service delivery. Maybe, maybe not.]

If we are a platform business, then that model dictates that we build for scale and reuse, in a service-oriented style. And why should each council build its own platform if we are all doing the same thing?

 

Strawman: 5 Tactics for proposed new ICT initiatives

In my job I often receive project proposals. These will usually say “we want to buy/develop in-house <x software> and get the IT dept to develop/install and support it for us.” Sometimes this is ok. Sometimes my IT colleagues will even accept that this is a good idea, but they are hard pressed so I have adopted the following heuristic approach and would be interested to see what others make of it. It’s a strawman.

So with the disclaimer under my belt: I always try to consider things in the following order of (decreasing) preference:

Option 1: Re-use something we already have

This works for a few potential projects. If the required functionality is already in an existing pience of software we have, why reinvent the wheel. Cheap, quick, and painless (assuming the fit is good for business requirements).

Option 2: Use a shared service from another related organisation

Again, this can work for a few more projects as there are (in my industry anyway) lots of very similar organisations working under similar constraints and trying to solve the same problem. Slightly more expensive (fees + network bandwidth), slightly slower to implement (politics, data sharing agreements, integration), but quality can be good and best practice can be shared. Also, it looks good.

Option 3: Software as a Service (“Public Cloud”) or Off the shelf remotely hosted software

Before you start flaming me, I know these are technically two very different things. But from my point of view they are equivalent. We need to do due diligence on whoever we are buying it from, there are security and governance concerns, there are performance and integration issues. But this can be good quality, quick, and relatively cheap. The G-cloud initiative should make this kind of thing easier, quicker and cheaper in the public sector.

Option 4: Off the Shelf, locally hosted

For many requirements this is still the default option. Always worth having a go to convert it to 2) or 3). Support arrangements can be a bind but we can normally deal with it. This option will always require some kind of interface with the people managing the desktop environment. This can slow things down but they are a happy bunch. I miss them (see options 1-3). We still need to do integration but because its inside the firewall its less stressful (SOA gurus might want to look away now and instead consider this rather cute video of a dog).

Option 5: Internally developed

ok, so we got to bite the bullet and develop something in-house. That means long timescales, resource conflicts, delays, long-term maintenance overhead, even using modern techniques. Most organisations the size of mine or smaller aren’t going to want to maintain an expensive pool of internal resource. There’s a slight edge to getting the solution hosted externally as it’s (slightly) less infrastructure to worry about and there are tools to help, although I’m not an expert on them – my colleague Stian Sigvartsen is better placed to advise on that.

And that’s all. I’m interested in refining, or even throwing out, this model out in favour of something better, if such a thing exists. For now this is just a common sense way of evaluating projects.

The longer-term question of what our target architecture should look like will have to wait for another day.

#ukgc12: 20 reflections

Personal Note: My first blog post for 6 months, due to a number of different factors and events which have made me not feel like it. Time will tell if this marks the return of my blogging habit or is just a flash in the pan. Either way, that’s ok.

There’s a trend this year following a suggestion by Dan Slee for attendees to this year’s UK GovCamp to try and capture 20 insights they gained during the unconference. I was one of those attendees so here is my stab at it. I can’t do 20 but maybe will update the post later to reflect new stuff I remember.

1. The Government Digital Service used to be “us”. Now it’s “them”. This is as negative as I can be about it as otherwise they do great stuff.
2. Some of the attendees are world-class drinkers. No names, no pack drill, but they know who they are.
3. At current growth rates representatives from my particular organisation will constitute the entire attendance of UKGC18. Be very afraid. On the other hand I was really pleased with the reaction of my new colleagues as they threw themselves into contributing, networking and generally having fun.
4. We all have a default way of engaging in conversations, which can – if desired – be deliberately subverted, with sometimes profound results. I hope to blog some more about this but suffice to say that I am grateful to Lloyd Davis for showing me the route to that insight.
5. After going to this event for 3 years I now have “proper” friends there.  This pleases me enormously as I make acquaintances easily but not friends.
6. Councils don’t need CRM systems. We only have them because the rest of our systems aren’t properly functional.
7. Data Quality is the new rock ‘n’ roll. It’s the foundation on which we will build our future organisations. But currently hardly anyone does it.
8. Whenever we dismantle a hierarchy there is an opportunity for a community to take power. We should do this deliberately if possible.
9. Communities have business models (in the Business Model Canvas sense) just as a “standard” business function does. Whoever models it first gets the chance to shape its development.
10. Customer Development is the primary activity of a community, specifically the testing of a hypothesis. If the hypothesis is shown to be disappointing, the community might fade away unless new hypotheses can be found. Again, more on this and #9 soon.
11. You can deploy an IT infrastructure from “box” diagram to functioning cloud implementation in under 15 minutes. But we already knew that.
12. There’s a guy who carries a dragon around. This is either a sign of a relatively harmless mental health issue or a very clever exercise in personal branding. If in doubt, suspect the latter.
13. I really don’t blog enough. This is my first entry for over 6 months
14. I am quite an effective useful idiot for testing the usability of software because I have basic skills in most things, neither clueless or brilliant. Hire me while I’m still in the sweet spot
15. In the 3 years I’ve going I’ve seen it become more diverse. This can only be a good thing. We had a councillor and a social work practitioner this time and both had good input to give.
16. I’m conflicted about the 1st day happening on a Friday. The Saturday crowd is, in theory, far more committed and self-selecting but we got a really good buzz off the Friday so maybe I worry needlessly.

That’s it so far. I want to develop some of these things a bit more but not sure if I’ll get the space or time to do it. We’ll see.

Enterprise architecture and therapy

Anna Mar posted a useful blog on cognitive bias in decision making and its impact on Enterprise Architecture. Richard Veryard responded on Twitter asking if we wanted to fix cognitive biases in ourselves or in others.

I really like Anna’s list and it’s a useful cut-out-and-keep. Anna doesn’t have comments on her blog so this is a short response to her post.

I want to add that both the blog and Richard’s comment are a bit *technical*. The main thing, in my view, that EAs need from the psychological professions is therapy for themselves. I don’t mean by this that all EAs are sick, but simply that everyone can benefit from some kind of therapy.

There is a stigma attached to mental health, certainly in the UK. I don’t know many people who have had any kind of intervention, and I don’t really understand that. If you break a leg, you go to the hospital and they put it back together: if your mind doesn’t work optimally, surely you’d want to get it sorted out? Perhaps people are afraid of admitting weakness and think that it might cast doubt on their decision-making ability. I’m here to say this is utter rubbish. We don’t understand how the mind works as well as we would like, so how can we possibly know if it’s working as well as it can?

As enterprise architects our effectiveness depends more than anything on building good relationships. Like it or not, that begins with building a good relationship with yourself so you can effectively process your emotions and deal compassionately with those of the people you are dealing with. I used to be poor at it, but after some years of counselling I’ve improved. I would resume it again like a shot because it’s not the sort of thing you ever really master, I suppose.

As to what sort of therapy is best – I think people have to just try a few out and see what works for them. There’s a wide range of stuff available and what might work depends on a whole load of factors and may also change over time.

This is in no way specific to enterprise architects. Pretty well everyone I’ve ever met from any walk of life can potentially benefit from improving their internal processing and relationships. Some quite high-level people are surprisingly psychopathic.

I’m not touting therapy as a religion, a panacea, or a quick fix for anything. It’s just the sort of thing that, from time to time, delivers a return on the time (and financial) investment in terms of increased effectiveness and fulfilment for me and the people I live and work with.

Political Architecture part 2: Black ops

If you’d read my previous post (from a long time ago – sorry this follow-up is so late) on Enterprise Architecture in Political organisations you might be forgiven for thinking I disliked office politics. And I suppose I do. I guess this is because I’ve generally had an analytical mindset that wanted to optimise the obvious things. Want me to build a web server? I’ll try and make it return pages as fast as I can. Ask me to design a solution? It’ll be as cheap and effective at its stated aim as my skill can make it.

To be honest my approach is more than a little lacking in imagination. Of course the people I work with want these things, but after a certain point, no-one notices. Initially I was horrified that someone might give me a task either to keep me distracted or to act as a lever in some other process, and then my horror gradually mellowed into cynicism and, finally, acceptance.

And therein lies the story of my long slide into middle-aged mediocrity. Except that there’s another side to this. In the comments on my last post Mike Lamoureux commented that politics can act to show “who is passionate, and about what, you just have to read between the lines”. There are some other reasons why politics might also be good:

• it can ensure that a one-dimensional view of the enterprise doesn’t get railroaded through
• it can be a way for the brightest in the organisation to rise to the top
• it might be needed to provide for change that is blocked by formal systems of governance

(list adapted from Mintzberg 1998: 243-244)

As we previously noted, politics is everywhere. So if all Enterprise Architects have to deal with politics, and it isn’t all bad, what do we do with it?

I think this lies at the heart of many of the problems with modern EA practices. Those with more political savvy can bypass, leverage, ignore, or exploit an analytical architecture group in more ways than the group itself probably understands. It may seem unethical to someone with a purely analytical education – it certainly did to me – but that’s the way humans are.

It’s time to man up. As my colleague Carl Haggerty might say, lets do Black Ops.

I think that one of the things an EA team needs to decide at the outset of its practice is what its political goals are. Political EA means having a future state vision, not just of the shape and plumbing of an organisation but of how power flows through it and the desired position of EA in that power flow (if you don’t include yourself in the design, don’t complain that you’ve been sidelined – that’s what you wanted, yes?). In other words, we need to architect the power architecture as well as the delivery architecture.*

EA teams also need to manage stakeholders differently. Now the idea that communication is essential is not new for an EA team. But I think we haven’t gone far enough: we need to explicitly play some games to make our future state a reality. If our future state doesn’t make it, someone else’s will: and then we have stopped being the architects of the enterprise and we might as well go home or go back to coding or whatever it was we were doing before. So lets pick some winners early on and put our weight behind them. A covert prediction market might be a good way to identify those people who are rising in the organisation and those who are on the way out. Quietly aligning some EA artifacts with the ambitions of those rising stars is one way to accelerate our own influence.

Finally, we need some political strategies of our own if we are to get our (analytical) architectural projects through. I’ve noted some basic ideas in a previous post but these can be expanded and seem to fall into five categories (thanks again to the awesome Mr Mintzberg 1998: 244-246):

1. Accept and manage political realities. If one thing has no chance of getting through, request something else. Lets not bash our heads against the wall fighting battles we’ll never win.
2. Target middle management. Most resistance to any kinds of change will lie with middle management (and lower). These are the people you need to be actively managing to find out their sweet spots and pitching ideas at to ease their pain. (ISO27000 standards, for example, systematically do this by devolving risk ownership to middle management, thereby making these people change the behaviour of their staff)
3. Use classical political tools. Politics is the art of the possible. Focus on ends, not means: “good enough” results are sometimes good enough: increase management options by focusing on broad issues rather than sensitive narrow ones: anticipate problems and show how they might be dealt with (you may get your way even if you don’t get the credit!): anticipate what coalitions might form against your ideas, who might be in them and why.
4. Manage coalition behaviour. For example, change the order in which issues are addressed to make different coalitions form: increase the visibility of some issues to influence coalitions: unbundle some of the issues into smaller issues. We can adapt strategies to satisfy some coalitions but its easier not to (unintended consequences and all that).
5. Take direct action against a coalition. Pre-emptive coalitions, counter-coalitions, re-shuffling (or removing) coalition members in an organisation, co-opting coalition members, or increasing communication efforts all fall into this rather high-risk category.

There’s a lot more on this subject that a blog post can’t do justice to. I have yet to read any political theory, but am sure there’s a lot of stuff in there we might be able to use. But that’s for the future, I hope this post gives some practical stuff we can use now to get better outcomes for our organisations.

*One thing I’m missing is an actual reference architectural model for an architecture of politics. If anyone has any ideas how I could develop or steal one, please let me know in the comments. I promise I don’t bite!

Reference: Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, Lampel, “Strategy Safari” 1998 FT Prentice Hall

The discipline that dare not speak its name

Just over 3 years ago I was appointed to a position in my organisation called Enterprise Architect.  Naturally I researched the job before I interviewed for it, read the 50-page job description (I kid you not), bought a couple of books and read a metric shedload of internet articles and (since we were a client at that time) Gartner documentation.

I got a vague impression from all this that Enterprise Architecture was something that bridged the divide between business and technical people, that it was involved heavily with strategy, that there were a number of different competing frameworks involved, and that there was a high level of debate amongst practitioners with some people claiming to be the only ones in possession of  the One True Way of doing things.

In other words, par for the course. I had graduated through relentless discussions about what was really free software and what wasn’t, and I think I could cope with a few internet trolls. And surely as the discipline moved forward we would sort some of these issues out?

Seemingly not. And three years on from those heady days, the “enterprise architecture” team that I spent so long helping to try to form and drive forward along lines roughly similar to others in the industry and – most crucially – in a way that actually added value to my employer, is being de-scoped and effectively disbanded.

Initially this news was devastating to me, as I felt we were just about starting to get somewhere. But now I’ve just about settled with it and I’m starting to learn some lessons. Well, just one lesson really: and it’s one that I’m sure every enterprise architect, enterprise IT architect, technical architect or indeed anyone with an analytical nature who wants to succeed might do well to take on board: it doesn’t matter how clever you are.

We started strongly and soon had a very elegant programme for exploiting the organisation’s resources to drive higher productivity, better outcomes and lower costs. But no-one was interested. I now believe this wasn’t because people disagreed with it, it was because people didn’t understand it. And I think that has more to do with demographics than anything: there are still a large number of people at or near the tops of big organisations that have a blind spot when it comes to anything new: they can’t cope with big paradigm shifts and clever methods changing the way business is done.

So here are my four tips to anyone who calls themselves an Enterprise Architect:

1) By all means do the clever stuff. Analyse the current and future states of your organisation in its environment as well as you can. Use an expensive modelling tool or proprietary architecture framework if you must. But under no circumstances should anyone find out about it. Keep it under your hat. This work is just to ensure you have a good understanding of what the organisation has and what it’s trying to do so you don’t suggest anything stupid.

2) Break up the programme for reaching the future state into small chunks. And then break it up again. Projects that cost less than £100K at the very biggest. Less than £10k is ideal. Mainly though, they must be simple in concept and non-threatening in appearance. You aren’t re-engineering your financial payment processes: you are simply linking the website to your payments system. Because it makes common sense.

3) Build a business case for each project separately and gain business sponsorship, then get them through.  Sugar-coat each project with all the benefits you can find. Invest time and resources, if you have them, in ensuring they deliver what they say they will. Do the small stuff. Help people on the ground to implement and don’t compromise on quality.

4) Be clear about the services you provide. This is about how you work with people and the channels you use for delivering value: consulting on projects, providing and customising models, participating in governance and assurance, educating people about new developments, and doing research.

As for me, whatever role I find myself in in future, I think I’ll always be an enterprise architect. Even if I stay in IT I’ll still use these models and think this way.

Even if no-one I work with ever gets to hear about it.

some holiday reflections

As I said in my last post, I’ve had a lot of time to think recently. For those that are interested in the working of my brain (hi Mum) here is what I’ve concluded:

1. I’m not a people person. Sure, I love my family and friends, and I’m not sociopathic by any means: but I’m happiest when exploring places rather than people, and things and ideas rather than “being social”. My other half is the same, I think.
2. In the long run, the success of relationships depends largely on tactful reserve and not taking yourself too seriously. Having  spent the last 30 days cooped up inside a variety of tin cans, I think I can say we’ve cracked it.
3. Fresh air is seriously underrated. Get some, every day, you won’t be disappointed. If you live in a city, get up early and get some – it’s cleaner first thing.
4. My head is the most waterproof item in the known universe.
5. Health is the thing that is most important: I realise I have had low levels of illness virtually non-stop for about 20 years. Outdoor living, less food, and daily gentle (and sometimes not-so-gentle) exercise has left me feeling very differently about a lot of things.
6. I now haven’t watched more than 20 minutes of TV in the last 5 weeks. I don’t miss it and am thinking of terminating my cable TV contract.
7. I’m now healthy, but I’m not fit (and I’m a bit overweight). My next priority is to get fit: I think it might make me feel differently about the world – again.
8. New Zealand is beautiful and a great place, but it would benefit from an influx of talented advertising copywriters and urban planners. There is too much tendency to stick factories in beauty spots, paint buildings luminous colours and many town centres resemble industrial estates.
9. I need to blog less, tweet less, and get off my fat arse and do something.

Black and White Gold

When you spend a lot of time driving along roads in New Zealand, as I have recently, you tend to get a lot of time to think. My thoughts to begin with were around the massive earthquake that hit Christchurch on our first day in the country, but after that I started to consider other kinds of seismic shifts that are perhaps slower moving.

Our host on the first day remarked to us that there was a debate in the country about the price of milk – the “white gold”. Apparently Kiwis pay a lot for their milk and no-one can really understand why: it is thought that there are too many middlemen in the supply chain. The fact that milk is expensive is surprising because New Zealand produces a lot: there is a lot of space per head of population and the farmland is largely productive. Now I’m no expert on dairy farming but where I come from in the south-west of the UK there is a lot of it and my impressions were that Kiwis tend to farm more intensively (more animals per square metre of land) and I saw a lot of animals moving about jammed into trucks. This is big business. What Kiwis seem to have less of is supermarket price wars: I only saw two major supermarket chains and – perhaps – the lack of competition is keeping the price higher than it would in the UK. I sense that a shift will occur here: as consumers get better informed the middlemen will be squeezed out but farmers may also have pressure put on their margins and they will resort to more co-operatives, such as happens a bit here.

The second thing I noticed was the variation in the price of petrol around the country. We visited a lot of remote areas and obviously transport costs mean that petrol is more expensive in these places. What slowly started to sink in, though, was the extent to which oil was the primary means by which communities were connected. I’ve done a bit of work with people who are concerned about bridging the digital divide in rural communities, and I can report that mobile signal is non-existent in many parts of the country: it is roads that connect communities in these places and the extent to which the entire economy is built on oil slowly started to dawn on me. Of course, New Zealand isn’t unique in this – it’s a truism to say that the world economy is built on the stuff. If peak oil theorists are onto anything at all, however, this can only mean that everything is going to get much more expensive in the future. And this is the second seismic shift: economies will be successful only to the extent that they can wean themselves off the black gold. We always think about our cars and energy when we think about this, but oil is everywhere in every part of our economies, and it will not be an easy task.

New Zealand is blessed with awesome landscapes – but you can’t eat scenery and it won’t go into your car’s fuel tank either. Its abundant fisheries, mineral and energy (hydro and geothermal) resources and fertile land give it everything it needs to succeed, but without oil no-one will visit and the resources will lie unused.

Having driven a few thousand kilometres around these beautiful islands, I’m increasingly convinced that I’m now part of the problem: we used up gallons of petrol (UK equivalent average price: £1:10 a litre of standard unleaded) and I don’t see a sustained effort to replace this resource anywhere with something better. I should do something about it.

I’m just not sure what.

A month of Sundays

In my household Sundays have tended to fall into a pattern: we wake late (some later than others), have a leisurely breakfast, do the housework, have a leisurely lunch, then drive out to one of the beautiful places near me and walk, chill out and take photographs, all the while letting the munificence of nature stroke our stressed-out brains.

Not very exciting, perhaps. Almost certainly not exciting enough for some of my readers. But it’s what we do.

The last four weeks, however, have seen this pattern repeated, but on a daily basis, as we toured New Zealand in what turned out to be a very small campervan. I didn’t keep a diary during this time as there wasn’t time or space to write. So I’m just jotting down here what we did on each day to remind me for when I get it together to upload photos and suchlike (at the time of writing I am still feeling quite dozy with jetlag).

Monday 21st Feb: Arrive Auckland 7am. Witnessed a road accident on way to hostel from airport. Spent day asleep and then had fish and chips, then slept again.

Tuesday 22nd Feb: picked up Nissan Vanette campervan from North Auckland. Decided to get as far from the city as possible so as to minimise the risk of becoming an accident statistic. Drove down SH1 and then a spectacular road up the west side of the Coromandel peninsula, booked into campsite. Saw the devastating news of Christchurch on the TV and started ocntacting people to let them know I was ok.

Wednesday 23rd Feb: Coromandel. I fell in love with Kiwi engineering and native Kiwi bush country on the Driving Creek railway. Then we drove East and camped in Whitianga.

Thursday 24th Feb: Whitianga – Hamilton. After a wander and leisurely breakfast we headed for Hamilton to see an old family friend. The drive went through some of the less interesting bits of Kiwi scenery: farmland, sheep, cows, abandoned farm machinery and vehicles on bricks. But I found our friend Joy Homewood easily enough and she was as lovely as I remembered from my childhood.

Friday 25th Feb: Hamilton and Waitomo. Joy drove us down to Waitomo to see the caves and we were guided through them by Maori. For a brief few moments, in a boat beneath a constellation of glowing insects, it was magical. Exit through the gift shop. Then we took Joy out to dinner at Genjy’s in Hamilton – a good fun place to eat. Good times.

Saturday 26th Feb: Hamilton – Rotorua – Tongariro. We reluctantly left Joy and headed to the volcanic centre of the North Island in Rotorua. A Maori guide explained some history and took us to see the most reliable geysers and boiling mud pools. Exit through the gift shop. Then a drive round the shores of the beautiful lake Taupo and an overnight at Tongariro Base Camp.

Sunday 27th Feb: Tongariro. This was my unfinished business. When I was 10, my family attempted to cross the Tongariro saddle but were turned back by bad weather. Today, we finally conquered the mountain. It was a tough walk amidst awesome scenery. I will never forget.

Monday 28th Feb: Tongariro – Napier. We were sore from walking so decided to head somewhere chilled out to cool off. Napier, famous for it’s Art Deco architecture, seemed suitably cultured so we set off from Tongariro Base camp, taking the Desert Highway before heading back round Lake Taupo and East to the coast. In the event, it was a long drive.

Tuesday 1st March: Napier. We spent most of the day doing chores, a bit of shopping, and exploring the town and observing the port from the hill. We also got some working internet and started booking some things up for the days ahead. Next time, I’ll do more planning up front.

Wednesday 2nd March: Napier – Martinborough. Our morning was spent taking a tractor trip out to see the gannet colony at Cape Kidnappers. The trip was good fun and we likes us some gannet, they are fine birds and the viewing positions were right up close. In the afternoon we headed South to wine country. New Zealand has lots of good wine and Martinborough is right in the centre of a great wine-growing area. I drink beer. I hate wine. Ho Hum. In the middle of the night I get out of the van to go to the loo, and the stars are out. I had no idea there were so many. I feel very small.

Thursday 3rd March: Crossing. Up very early to catch the ferry from Wellington over to the middle island on a perfect day for it. In fact the weather has been utterly glorious all the way so far with only the occasional shower at night. That is all set to change, however: we book into a campsite on Queen Charlotte Drive after watching a ray cruising around the bottom of the water nearby, and go to bed. In the night, the heavens open.

Friday 4th March: Picton – Farewell Spit. After a quick, rain-soaked breakfast, we headed west towards the far north-western corner of the middle island. The weather clears as we drive and in bright sunshine we reach the Farewell Spit in the late afternoon. On the far side is a beach that looks like the Skeleton Coast – all surf and sand dunes, and no-one about. Wild, sunny and raw. It’s unforgettable.

Saturday 5th March: Golden Bay. In the morning we visit the Farewell Spit again and spend some time watching for wildlife. There is surprisingly little. New Zealand seems to have lots of good habitat but not very much living in it. I don’t know why. There are a load of Pukeko and Jane spends some time trying to get good pictures.

Sunday 6th March: Abel Tasman. We leave our campsite early and drive West over the mountains to Marahau, where we book into a campsite and catch a water taxi a few miles up the coast. This National Park is spectacular with native bush, turquoise sea and golden sandy bays. We hike back to our campsite. The stars are out again that night.

Monday 7th March: The West Coast (1). A day’s drive to Westport and some more advance planning. The roads on the West of the island are spectacular and we pass through gorges and passes. The van is coping well although it is slow going up hills and I am constantly pulling over to let people past me. Kiwi drivers are insane.

Tuesday 8th March: The West Coast (2). We drive down the west coast from Westport to the Fox and Franz Josef glaciers. Westport – Greymouth in particular is just stunning. We book into a campsite in Fox and prepare to walk on the glacier in the morning.

Wednesday 9th March: Fox – Arrowtown. The morning is spent walking on the glacier as part of a group. I’ve never worn crampons before, but it worked out ok and the glacier was beautiful. In the afternoon we drove through the Haast pass and then over Cordrona towards Queenstown. Some scary driving but the van picked out its path like a little hill-pony. Arrowtown is VERY clean and tidy. A bit eerie in some ways.

Thursday 10th March: Queenstown and Fiordland. In the morning we did a rare adrenalin thing – well, when in Rome and all that – and went jetboating in the Shotover gorge. That was good fun. Then we drove to Milford sound in the afternoon. The weather was closing in and the trip is quite a scary one involving a very long tunnel. On the other side we discovered there was nowhere to camp, but the campsite owner took pity on us when he saw our little van and let us use his car park.

Friday 11th March: Piopiotahu (Milford Sound) and Te Anu. This isn’t just rain: this is Milford Sound rain. Huge succulent raindrops the size of blackberries soaked the van overnight, each carrying a seeming payload of starving sandfly who tucked into our pale English blood with relish. I could connect the dots on Jane’s legs and it would spell something unspeakable. But it cleared just as we took to the boat and we were rewarded with a million waterfalls all tumbling into the fjord (it’s technically a fjord, not a sound), a scene that photographed itself. In the afternoon we escaped the way we had come and dried out at the comparative civilisation of Te Anu.

Saturday 12th March: Te Anu – Catlins. A long day of driving to the extreme South where we showed up at the southernmost tip of the island (no gift shop – Land’s End please take note) and Porpoise bay. Camped in a campsite that seemed more like a farm. The stars, though…oh my.

Sunday 13th March: Catlins. We visited a lighthouse and explored another deserted beach, almost tripping over a resting sea lion. These big boys are dangerous, though, so we back off pretty quickly. Later there were fur seals along the coast, some penguins, and finally a short drive up to Dunedin where we camped.

Monday 14th March: Dunedin. The morning was spent on the Taieri Gorge railway, a gentle trundle into the mountains accompanied by a commentary from an increasingly leery Kiwi version of Peter Alliss. In the afternoon more wholesome pursuits as we went to view the albatross colony on the Otago peninsula. Those birds are BIG and magnificent.

Tuesday 15th March: Dunedin – Kaikoura. We decided to miss Christchurch out and a long day of driving took us round the city and up the coast. Christchurch outskirts were busy in rush hour but we didn’t see anything untoward.

Wednesday 16th March: Kaikoura. This place is the whale, dolphin and seal spotting and swimming capital of the Island. We opted for a Maori-owned expedition out and saw some magnificent sperm whales, dusky dolphins and a humpback whale.  Weather was perfect. Again.

Thursday 17th March: Kaikoura – Wellington. An early start to drive up the coast to Picton and catch the ferry back over to Wellington on the North Island. We have a dinner date with Doug Newdick and despite us messing him about a bit, we met up. Our best meal so far, and some good company – followed by a dash to the van in the rain. Is our luck with the weather going to hold?

Friday 18th March: Wellington – New Plymouth. Doug had tipped us off about some good things to see in Wellington, but we can’t cope with being in a city again and so we head off up the West Coast in search of some space. In the event we make it quite a long way – as far as New Plymouth, after circling the magnificent Mount Taranaki. a long drive but worth it.

Saturday 19th March: New Plymouth. We lol about town for a bit. I really like the atmosphere of the downtown area and we have some good food. Then we head for the mountain and take the short walk to Dawson’s Falls and the goblin forest that surrounds it.

Sunday 20th March: New Plymouth – Raglan. Our time in New Plymouth ends with an entertaining trip around the harbour and an excellent lunch courtesy of some cafe who’s name I can’t remember. Then we drive north to Raglan, home of one of the finest left-hand breaks in the world. Whatever that means. We eat at the excellent Namaste Kitchen. Namaste New Zealand. I honour the place where my wallet meets your gift shop.

Monday 21st March: Raglan – Auckland. Ah, so that’s what “left hand break” means. Surfer’s paradise. If I had more time I’d learn to surf here. But sadly, we are running out of time and have to return our trusty van in Auckland. Our flight finally takes off at 11 pm.

And that was that. Overall there was too much dashing about and not enough chilling out, but this was still the most awesome holiday I’ve ever had and I’d do it all again like a shot. Some more general reflections to follow once my brain settles….