What happened in the last fortnight? Feb 19th – March 4th

SNOO HAPPENED

Louise Cato
Web of Weeknotes

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Feb 19th – 25th I worked Tuesday, Thursday and Friday.

Last week I worked every day, but from home in snowy Somerset on Thurs and Fri. We went walking in the snow, it was crunchy.

Such snow, much cold

Ticket tidying and planning

In week one, Andy, Alan, Jess and I spent a day out of the office going through two main sections of our plan.io tickets: those in the product backlog and those we have logged as improvements from our users. The main aims were:

  • To get a full picture of exactly what we have ticketed
  • To identify and tag the tickets which fit with this year’s focus areas
  • To remove, merge or otherwise tidy any which are no longer relevant due to other changes we’ve made to the software or progress elsewhere

This was a useful exercise, it gave me clarity around what we are and aren’t doing this year, and why.

I’ve follow-up work to build a clearer process around our user feedback tickets. It needs to be even more obvious which organisations have added suggestions to the tickets so we can keep users updated when we’re completing work based on their feedback. We already notify everyone via release announcements whenever there’s a product update. We occasionally update individual organisations who may have specifically suggested things, but it’d be good to have an easier and more consistent way to see and individually notify people who have contributed their ideas to the process.

I also want to make it clearer for us internally where we’re up to with the development stories for feedback and how they link into the overall focus for the year. If it’s a ‘no’, why it’s a no and if it’s a ‘yes, but not yet’, why it’s not yet. I’ll be creating a template ticket for this which is more user-friendly than the current long lists of notes to read through to get a picture of where we’re at.

As always, finishing and communicating the work from that day has taken a back seat due to incoming customer commitments and me being in and out of the office a lot. I hope to pick it back up next week.

Things I haven’t finished

I got woken one day at 4:30am by our site monitoring. I’ve had to focus much more on account management than anything else these past few months, so I haven’t been able to progress the project to schedule notifications for waking hours. I’m really frustrated by this. I feel everyone else is frustrated with me about this, too.

N.B I wrote the above paragraph on Feb 25th which pushed me to finally have discussions with people and to move this along again last week. Now the implementation is in sight.

Rowena returns and meetings

Rowena returned from Australia, it was good to see her again. We went out for a smoothie and catch up. Lots to think about for the future.

Nat, Katherine, Rowena and I spent an afternoon together so that she could tell us about her time in Australia and so we could run through the health of all of our accounts and put some plans in place to manage them this coming year. We went out for a nice lunch too.

Wearing a different hat

A owl in an lovely hat

A lot of the past week has been spent taking an incoming sales lead from initial demo on Monday evening through to contracting, then deployment Wednesday and published consultation on Friday. The quickest turnaround I’ve ever experienced on the part of government!

I don’t normally do demonstrations of our products, but Ben was away so I had to. I’m really proud of the speed we turned this around for the (now) customer. It’s a great result on an important topic. It took a lot of phone calls, emails and screenshares, with the snow impacting both the customer’s team in London and me in Somerset, but it’s a great result, especially in such a tight timescale.

Deployments and smouldering things

I had another deployment and launch-list to complete, another long set-up call, and some hosting and server upgrades to discuss and schedule as well.

We had a few troubling support issues rumbling away this past fortnight. These were frustrating for us all and when Alan returned to work we finally unpicked them. It’s not sustainable to rely on one person in this way, but it’ll be a positive result if we can use this situation to more quickly get everyone to his level of knowledge. The puzzle we ended the fortnight on is how do you share years of intimate product knowledge and instinct from one to many? We have documentation, but it’s more than that. It’s skin in the game, as Andy would say.

This is one of those fortnights where there’s loads more I could say, but I can’t share it in any way which will be useful to me or anyone else.*

I struggled again with self-doubt at the end of last week. I’m feel as though I’m really pushing, pushing, pushing but it occasionally feels a bit Sisyphean, where the rock is what needs doing, the steep gradient is other people’s expectations, and gravity is my ability to achieve it all.

Dang this dung

PLUS SIDE: I feel a lot more positive than my last notes. I had a wobble last weekend where I worried if I’m actually a decent, likeable person able to do the things required of me. Then I just decided to try and BE a decent, likeable person who is doing the things. If I try to more frequently put myself out there in a way that I would want a friend/acquaintance/colleague to do then hopefully I’ll get some things right for some people and the rest I can learn and improve.

I feel positive about how it’s gone so far: I’ve made a new friend in my village, made bread and went to the shops for neighbours in the snow, tried to be more communicative and inclusive at work, and to be more supportive of others on social media and elsewhere.

From reading Richard’s excellent post on helping people get to know you, I started looking at the Manual for me site created by Matthew Knight and others. I’d like to see if it might be something the rest of the Delib team are up for. I’m keen to do one just to understand my own preferences better.

Reading

I finished Jesus’s Son, which was lent to me by Kit. A searing and amazing book. I’ve not read much else since then.

Running

35.2 miles this last fortnight, not as many as I had been doing due to the snow and some time away.

Fortnight’s theme: POWERING THROUGH

*When present-me read this (which was written by past-me a week ago), I realised it looks so loaded and cryptic, but actually it’s because I hadn’t and haven’t worked out how to turn a cloud of thoughts on a few things into anything useful. Not because of any major goss or beef.

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Delivery Director at Delib. Doing democracy (and alliteration, apparently)