A day in the life of: Jenni Allen

Trusty "Outlook" starts my working day, with a quick check of calendar schedules and a scan of mail responding to my Friday outbound queries. A couple of useful responses from third parties start the day well today: I'll be able to get some external services back online after a major revamp of the London Stock Exchange site "rearranged" some reference data last week. That's a relief.

Round the office to discuss project expectations for the week comes next: we're busy at the moment so there's lots to cover - 4 live projects on the go, plus a couple of others with minor amendments required. One test release is due out today, while another team need to close off the design phase of a site and hand over to the applications development phase, so there's a fair bit of contention for time and resources to be ironed out.

We also have an internal workshop today to review our control and release systems, which are getting an overhaul based on a big enhancement to our systems infrastructure and the introduction of an additional test platform, which turns out to be extremely constructive, and will be good to have in place before our new developer starts next week. Have I got his references returned and OK? Ah, yes. Now we just need a workspace configured for him.

There's the usual flurry of phone calls around lunchtime to update clients on progress and prod a few suppliers, then a quick break for lunch (a euphemistic term here which actually represents the taking-the-dog-for-a-walk break) and back to some estimation and scoping for Phase 3 of an ongoing project (Phase 2 goes live later this week!)

Scoping takes a while and calls in a couple of other team members for second views, so that takes most of the remainder of the day. Then there's 10 mins to jot down this note so I can bear some of the load I imposed on the marketing team when I insisted that the new version of the website should be "a lot more dynamic and representative of what we do". Perhaps I should have kept schtum!