We are working with Placecube
Finally this week I’m able to talk about our new customer platform; working with the awesome crew at Placecube.
This has felt like a long time coming although lots of work has already started. And I’m itching to get going. I spent a fruitless day on Sunday with Docker attempting to get a local copy of Liferay portal (portal? really?) running, but gave up after six attempts. I don’t think the poor ol’ Macbook has the grunt needed to run it.
I also turned to the archives to check what was specified for our current site. Futuregov did some great work with Dorset prior to its move to unitary status, setting design principles, web team structure concepts and focusing on user experience. But a key conclusion they made was that it needed a custom build. This has left us with a large technical debt and a small number of people that can actually wrangle the beast.
I spent a chunk of time using Airtable to capture information from the back end, working out the relationships and dependencies in the functionality. Although this felt a bit cut-and-paste/admin it did help me get a much better understanding of how things work. Buried in the complexity I can see the ambition of the vision, parts of it now redundant due to other changes.
I’m hoping this detective work will stand me in good stead going into forthcoming scoping workshops, bringing some clarity around what we need Placecube to do with us.
We finally had our first team meeting this week, starting to talking about the Placecube changes, the all-important xmas leave decisions and also to turn our minds to how we organise our work. I’m trying to create some headroom for the team to help them focus on the important stuff rather than just react to work coming in.
This week I felt I needed to step up and back the team on a few battlefronts; the ever-present education around accessibility, the merits of content design over lengthy, complicated text, and being clear around website content inclusion decisions. It’s less about them knowing what to do and more that they can be sure someone will be in their corner every time they do.
This week I also got to grow our team by one more, and we’re all really excited about her joining us later this month.
Offering someone a job is absolutely my favourite thing. I did toy with sacking the rest of the team so I could offer them their jobs back, but someone pointed out that might not be legal. Bureaucracy, eh?
Funny thing being on the other side of the recruitment process, seeing the forms, letters and emails fly about once the decision got made. I did reflect on how easy it was for me to get signed up, equipped and started at Dorset, and I started to see that happen for my new starter over a much shorter period. It’s the kind of work that can get overlooked so I took the time to say ‘thank you’ to colleagues involved and feed that back up the chain.
It will be interesting to see to what extent remote recruitment, onboarding and working establishes itself as the norm. As our new starter is only with us for 12 months she’ll be working remotely, so we’re unlikely to meet her face-to-face. That feels odd too.
I know, right? Why even? But the six webcams running in Dorset are pretty popular. Anecdotally we’ve heard about people ‘meeting’ each other over a viewing to catch up. So who are we to argue about what is important to our users?
The issue is informal arrangements on private buildings and poor quality broadband connections make the service a bit wobbly, so I’m looking at what we can do. This side project took an unexpected turn by the end of the week through a chance conversation, and now we might explore 5G webcams as a way forward, perhaps even adding more cameras at popular spots. Serendipity, innit.
Almost the whole Digital and Change Service came together on Thursday for a 3 hour session on Insights Discovery Colour Energies. OK, it does sound a bit New Age/crystal therapy, but it has its roots in Jungian theory and I did learn more about myself and my colleagues.
I was a bit surprised that see my determined/strong willed side (Fiery Red) came out slightly stronger than my outgoing/positive side (Sunshine Yellow). But the real surprise was the analytical side not being there at all, which I think many people would associate with me (and actually did during the session itself). But the further we went into the exercises the more it felt like picking 10 words to describe yourself did somehow manage to get under the skin of who you are.
Of course, a remote training exercise using colours ran into issues with accessibility, as a visually impaired colleague and one with colour sensitivity both struggled to identify the coloured words needed for grouping during one exercise. This did make me a bit cross. The more work I do on accessibility the more determined I get to push out the message that it isn’t just about the web, and we need to think of our impact on others in everything we do. I may get more involved in wider equality work
As bored as I am already talking about moving house to anyone, this week did see some progress. In the wrong direction.
After weeks of waiting for something to happen we learned initially that our chain had grown by three at the bottom end, making things more precarious at our end. Finally, on Thursday, our estate agent called in frustration about being stonewalled by the buyers further down the chain and advised us we needed to put the house back on the market.
As my wife observed, I took this pretty well. To be honest, at least it feels like doing something rather than sat waiting. Our buyer is still keen, as is our seller, so if we can make something happen quickly we could still be OK. Hopefully.