Weeknotes (18 July 2020)
It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster of a week.
I’ve had highs and I’ve had lows. I’ve had dance parties and I’ve sobbed over my keyboard. I’ve made progress in some places and I’ve ground to a halt in others. There’s been both anxious panic and zen calm.
It’s all a bit weird in my head really right now.
How are you doing? I hope that you are hanging on in there. 2020 will end. Eventually. We will get through this.
Work this week was all of the above in terms of emotions and turmoil. I won’t go into it all here but I have been left incredibly frustrated at times. There has been a lot of venting going on and I’m trying so hard to just let it go. Unfortunately it’s never quite that easy! I’m working on that.
On the really good side of things, we started our 10th and final content sprint before launch! By Friday, we had finished the initial migration work for all areas.
This sprint I’ve was working on procurement content. If you follow me on Twitter you will have seen me complaining about the fact that I couldn’t get my head around some of it. Thankfully, after I’d calmed down about the above drama, I managed to get going on it and it started to make sense. It is a really complex area though, and I’m hopeful that the work we’ve done will make this easier for staff to understand. User testing will take place on Tuesday so we can start to see any issues that remain around it.
In terms of content migration from the old intranet to new, we have now moved some 400 pages. We’ve ended up with almost 700. We’ve actively turned PDF content into page content, and you can see the effect of that on our page count. This is kind of scary in some ways, but also amazing progress in others. Not to mention the opportunity to remove mentions of our old, old intranet from some of that content!
We also got sign off on our launch date — 12 August. That’s not very far away now! In all honesty, I kind of just want the whole thing to go live now, but obviously it’s not quite that simple!
It’s not really going to be much of a launch as we can’t meet to celebrate. Instead, we’ll be having an open Teams call to run a demo and take any questions. I may bring my own cake and party balloons.
It is really exciting to see this part of the finish line in site. We’ve had a hard deadline to meet and we’ve done that (and then some). After sprint 10 finishes next week, we’ll have around 12 days to run a Sprint 11.
That’s going to be our ‘catch up’ sprint to make sure the early build is consistent with the later build, as well as working on creating help videos and information for staff.
There’s a lot of behind the scenes things going on to get everything ready. A lot of people don’t see this work so think it’s all just ‘done’ because we’ve wrapped up the migration part! We still have a long way to go. But, we have a great project team supporting all these things and it’s all going to be fine.
Right?
Other things from the week. Let’s see.
I put out a Twitter request for videos around accessibility and the internet came through!
Take a look at the thread for some great video recommendations. We’ll be training our intranet publishers on accessibility soon and I really wanted a way to make it ‘real’ to them, rather than just a legal thing we have to comply with. I’m hoping some videos will help with this.
I got my school report. No. Sorry, that’s not right.
I got my appraisal back! Which is like an adult school report. It was a good one, and I was very happy with it.
I’ve got some great objectives for the coming year and I can’t wait to start work on some of them. I’ve updated my Trello board with them to try and keep myself on track.
This was really useful last year as it meant each objective had it’s own list to add items to. When reviewing progress to write up my year, this helped immensely, although I’d kind of stopped using it in the last few months.
Plus, who doesn’t like having a pretty place to put their work tasks!
Currently
Currently trying to be healthier
Keto cake stress eating aside, the diet is going relatively well.
We’ve also started going for lunchtime strolls around the local park, in addition to our ‘garden exercise club’ on a Saturday afternoon. It’s a small park but is always full of people exercising, playing with kids and so on. It’s nice that it’s well used.
We’ve also now got some kettlebells and a plan to do that daily. Whilst everything hurts right now, it is so good to do something physical everyday!
Currently watching
I finished The Babysitters Club, which I absolutely loved. Make sure you watch it if you want something fun to watch.
Last night I watched ‘Feel the Beat’ on Netflix. Again, cheesy but lots of fun. Made me want to dance.
I also watched both Princess Diaries and Ice Princess on Disney+. I was just reliving my childhood movie watching really. I do love cheesy Disney movies.
Notes about these notes
These notes were written in one go on Saturday morning. They look me about 90 minutes.
