Weeknotes: week 7
A bit overdeveloped
I mentioned in my weeknotes (week 2) that I wanted to build in development time each week. Personal and team development is an altogether excellent thing, but this week I’ve found it causing a bit of a strain.
In all I spent 7 hours in 5 different learning events and had to call off a 6th as my brain was so fried by Friday afternoon. I also had to miss one training event to attend another. If you count time spent developing others (induction) that’s another 4 hours on top I spent.
It’s easy to say “you must make time for it as it’s important” (and I absolutely think that) but in a crisis people are juggling multiple priorities and deadlines, and just saying it won’t make those things go away. As a manager I feel I need to do what I can to make some of those things go away where I can.
But it isn’t easy. One of my team is participating in Springboard; for a part timer that’s three hours from an already shortened day, plus the prep time needed for attending. So a whole day, in effect. It’s tricky finding ways to claw that kind of time back.
In a time of remote learning there are additional challenges:
- it’s very easy to get distracted when not actually in the room with people. I found this out to my cost during a quick quiz during an induction event where I got the lowest score as a result of keeping half an eye on dealing with incoming emails and Teams messages
- if you miss an event, often the whole thing is recorded so there is an expectation that you will make time at a later point to catch up.
Great conversations with great people
A theme from my weeknotes in week 1 was learning through conversations. It feels like that’s shifted now to starting to give out more advice than I’m getting.
Icebreaker was recently introduced on a trial basis and I really like it. Operating much like the Unmentoring scheme of old, you are randomly allocated a slot with someone you may or may not know, and it’s down to you both to make arrangements to book time and meet.
Through this I had a great chat with Ian, another new starter (currently in Lincolnshire but like me moving to Dorset) so we swapped notes on first impressions, the absolute lack of joy in moving house and on things to come working for Dorset.
I also felt a bit like a wise old sage (well, old at least) in the first of regular meet-ups with a colleague this week. We used the time to talk through an issue she was having and look at ways she could adapt not necessarily how she worked, but how she reacted to situations.
By contrast, another colleague needed time to share with me some stuff going on in her personal life. My shutting up and listening was probably more helpful than trying to dish out any kind of advice on things I can’t even begin to think about coping with. I know that when I’ve struggled, just knowing someone was willing to listen was a real help to me. We can all do a bit more of that.
Cubing along
This week I’ve been finding time to look at the implications of moving CMS in a really short timeframe. One of the issues hanging over the project is that we also need to move the site for another ‘tenant’ who hasn’t been aware of the changes, so this week we had to break the news. It went down fairly well, although more meetings are needed to iron out the details.
Work I’ve been doing on understanding the current CMS has revealed the absolute complex horror of our landing pages. Right now it looks unlikely we can just lift and shift so that will impact on how much content designer input will be needed. We’ve got a session dedicated to migration soon so we can begin to unpick this one a little.
I’ve also started writing down the functionality we need from the CMS, via user stories, MoSCoW ratings, acceptance criteria etc in an attempt to not miss anything. Once the format feels like it’s landed I can open up this to others to contribute to. Developing it has meant ploughing through design docs from the last build to identify what functionality we asked for and working out what actually made it/has been retained in the current site.
One of my team shared some kickback she was getting from web editors on content rejection messages (no matter how nicely they are written), which lead to a discussion on if we could adapt workflow in the new CMS to work how we needed it to. Instead of taking this one on I encouraged her to post that question herself in the project Teams channel herself to get us more engaged as a key set of stakeholder so we are more shaping the process than observing it happen to us.
Next week will see us, as a team, get our first training on the CMS. I am itching to get my hands on the product to see what its capabilities are. Hopefully by then we’ll also see our embryonic site stood up by Placecube to get a real feel for what it will be like to view and edit.
The League of Awesome Dorset Women Weeknoting
A major grin for me this week has been the absolute onslaught of weeknoting in Dorset. Kicked off by a call from Sam Villis for more women to grace her weekly catch-ups, and a smattering of interest in my efforts, things have raced forward this week.
We now have:
- Lisa Trickey, our absolute star of a leader (who to be fair started weeknoting before me)
- Sarah Dackham, one of our fabulous Digital business partners
- Cllr Laura Miller, yes, one of our Cabinet members is giving it a shot too. How great is that?
- Melissa Craven, from our excellent Communications team
- Vicky Mears, one of the terrific Service Designers in our Digital team
- Claire Ryan-East, one of the Content Ninjas in my team weeknoting within the council
And in a desperate attempt not to be left out (despite the obvious gender issues) the actually quite fabulous Alex May is sketchnoting too.
I’m so proud of my colleagues in taking the plunge like this. Follow them all immediately and say lovely things to them please so they keep going
In summary
Stuff that wouldn’t fit in above, but made for an interesting week:
- a LOT of business as usual stuff for the team, with everyone working to absolute capacity while I nag them to not work after their hours
- trying to find a way of helping with the conversion of documents to HTML that doesn’t involve a single team member spending 3 days on one document
- having a new starter with no work laptop, and trying to juggle her meetings to work around the problem. The remote working tech does make this more possible
- getting some nice feedback about my Trello induction boards
- having some great training by my team this week in how to use our CMS’s (plural) which has been a nice insight into what they do and teh challenges they face
- there was a whole discussion about nicknames for each other in the team that may have unleashed the beast (how did I end up with Noo-Noo?)
- this week’s catch up with my manager felt on more solid ground due to a bit of prep time on my part. What happened to me preparing a note every week?
- I have decided the best litmus test for any organisation’s digital maturity is the process for applying for funding an eye test. Some horrors were revealed…
- being asked by a peer/friend I really respect for some thoughts on her website. Hey, I could do this for a living maybe
- a thought forming itself on how the acceptance of vaccination is analogous to progressing change in an organisation, but I’ll need to come back to that another week
- I’m so absolutely bored with house moves and am boring everyone else about it too
