Weeknotes S03 E12

Not done weeknotes for a while. This is mostly because my work on Royal Greenwich’s intranet discovery picked up a lot, and because I was approaching some leave which always seems to make things more hectic.

Now I’m a week back, and resolved to try and write some sort of weeknotes even if they are very scrappy. So here we go.

What I did

Wrapped up some intranet research

Since last time I’ve been interviewing colleagues across the council about how they use our existing intranet(s) and other tools and processes to share information and connect with other staff.

This week we finished off some sessions to bring those interview findings together, find the trends that cut across them all and think about what to do next.

There was a lot to get through and I think I still need more time to fully get my head around it. As Alex (product manager) put it, we’re out of the honeymoon period (exciting early project stages) and into the weeds (problems everywhere, lots going on, trying to make sense of everything).

But the findings are better organised now, and next week we’ll start looking at how we can bring them together with what we’re learning elsewhere.

Planned some more

A clear next step coming out of the first lot of research was to start talking to teams around the council who don’t use the intranet at all about how they share information and connect with staff.

I spent the later part of the week planning and setting this up. This round of research feels a bit different to the first as it can go in a lot of new directions. It’s important for us to capture as much as we can, so preparation is key, but so is being flexible enough to properly learn about people’s experiences.

I had a good chat with Alex about how we can balance this and ways to build flexibility into our planning and processes. It was reassuring and made me feel like we were in a good place for the rest of the research, which was a nice end to the week.

Talked intranet content auditing

My colleague Alysia (content designer) has done a lot of work to map out all the content on the existing intranets. This week we talked about where to go next with this work.

As well as what’s there, who’s responsible for it and a bit about how it connects (for example, which documents are currently on which pages) we’re planning to add data on how much content is used and how often it’s updated.

I spent some time with Niall (front-end developer) setting up the Google Analytics tracking we needed for this using Google Tag Manager. Using GTM is always a bit painful for me, but I’m glad for the support I got from Torchbox to use it in my last role. Six months later I could still set up the tags we needed, so they must have done something right.

Then we talked about assessing a sample of content from across the intranets against some standards we’d like our content to meet. This led to a useful discussion about what good content means to us, which will form the basis of this later part of the audit.

Also this week

• I spoke to Holly and Alysia about how we’d like to develop the content design community of practice at Royal Greenwich. We’re still working out how we’d like to manage content requests that come to us from different parts of the council (in particular how we want to work with our colleagues in Comms). For now, we’re focusing on that and where it leads us in terms of opportunities to share knowledge and support others.
• I talked through a learning plan written by Lorna (user researcher) who’s now my line report. I’m enjoying cross-disciplinary line management so far. It’s encouraging me to think beyond my own experiences and draw on different sources of information and support.

What I learnt

Less of a learning, but I’ve been thinking a bit about imposter syndrome. I think it came up in conversation early on in the week, and I realised I feel less ‘imposter-y’ in this job than I may have before.

This doesn’t mean I feel completely confident in my role. I’m still new, the challenges are tough, and sometimes I worry that my work isn’t good enough. But it feels like a good challenge (to learn and improve) and it’s not making me feel like I overall am not good enough. It’s motivating rather than scary.

This feels like a good thing and I wanted to work out why it might be. There are definitely some personal reasons for it too, but from the professional side of things here’s what I think has helped.

• Leadership in the digital team at Royal Greenwich is really supportive. I know what’s expected of me, I get a lot of constructive feedback and on the rare occasions I’ve been more harshly self-deprecating someone has noticed and kindly but firmly reminded me that my role is important and needed. This has done a lot to quiet the more negative parts of my interior monologue.
• There’s a lovely culture of sharing experience, knowledge and support in my team (product) and more widely across digital and our projects. Not only has this been a great source of help and ideas, it’s helped me get to know my colleagues better. As a result, even when I don’t have total confidence in myself I have confidence in my team. I also feel more aware that doubting myself constantly won’t help me play the most useful role in what we’re trying to do.
• Working in digital at Royal Greenwich has been quite a unique experience because so much of the team and its ways of working are new. For a little while, this made my imposter feelings worse, as I was searching for processes or rules that didn’t yet exist and thinking ‘it must be me’. Eventually I realise this wasn’t the case, it was just that we still had a lot to figure out. This brought home for me how much we as individuals can take personal responsibility for organisational issues. The strangeness newness of this role has made me realise that maybe it isn’t always me after all.

Enough for this week — see you next.