Sometimes the title for my weeknotes comes easily, but more often it is pretty contrived. I thought of a few this week;
Instead I decided that our Atlassian tool for every occasion merited a special mention since it featured heavily in the week just gone.
The first of these boards was to help gear up for the arrival of our new content designer, also from ‘up north’ (as we seem to be to native Dorseteers), inspired by the GDS approach to onboarding using Trello and from my own experiences of onboarding remotely during an ongoing crisis. Breaking up a long-ish Word document into bite-size nibbles simultaneously brought the content alive and (I hope) made it more digestible. I found lots of things I’d missed as an inductee in putting this together, so at the end of the week at a newbie welcoming event I shared it with senior managers outside of Digital to see if it would resonate.
In truth there were two induction boards, with the second focused at our content design team-level. The team were great in pitching in to help on this, including short bios on each of us to make up for the lack of face-to-face contact and trying to personalise the whole process. The other thing that stood out for me was how the existing managers induction checklist is heavily skewed to office location (desk, fire exits, toilets, kitchens etc) which now feels like a remnant of a world left behind.
The right-hand board reflects a sudden upswing in our house move status from ‘it will happen after Xmas’ to ‘we have just over two weeks’. However, with as chain as long as the one for the Sandbanks Ferry it’s anything but certain. A move to order broadband at our new house resulted in the current owners being notified their service was being terminated, followed by cancellation, apologies and not-so-quiet recriminations with our provider. We did at least manage to arrange our milk delivery. Yey….
We’re into our second round of 1:1 meetings so have moved from a meet and greet to focusing on what we all need to achieve. Dorset have developed a great tool called My ROAD Map (I’ll spare you the acronym explanation) which staff played a big part in helping design. The result of this is an approach that, as a new manager, feels less like a process and more like a working relationship. I particularly like the My Achievements section that allows you to keep track of what you’ve done, uploading evidence and notes. It’s too easy to move on to the next thing when busy and forget the journey, so a record like this is right up my street.
After a long team meeting we also realised how much we’re valuing a regular get together as a smaller group; there are huge changes on the horizon, we’re exploring how to work differently and there’s still a remnant of discomfort over the unitary restructure. We’ve set up an extra quick-fire meeting to supplement this.
These meetings are also really productive. We agreed to prototype a hack to share work requests and balance workloads across the team, stepping away from siloed work allocations ahead of introducing a formal workflow approach change. By the end of the week this was taking shape and bearing some fruit I think, but as my favoured expression goes “if it doesn’t work we’ll do something else”. The enormity and scope of what the content designers do is beginning to land.
Monday saw the first proper meeting focusing on our CMS switch. I’d been doing some prep for this to make sure we didn’t miss any angles. Alongside my Airtable creation, mapping the content types and components, I’d been talking to our (awesome) GIS team about location-based functionality. I’m still debating how we communicate the exact functionality we need and may move to creating good-old user stories in the end.
Scoping feels like it’s been brought down to a more manageable size, and after a week checking out some errant references to other domains on the CMS (“is this your website or ours?”) I think I have a measure of the beast. We’ve got a number of spin-out workshops planned to focus on the key issues to resolve them in the coming weeks.
And much like the house move suddenly things felt like they were moving quickly from a standing start. We’re expecting a spin-up of our environment (themed as well) next week, and the content design team will be the first to be trained the following week to really get our hands dirty and learn through doing.
Looking back on the week there is so much other stuff to report that could turn this weeknote into a novel. Another reason for this self reflection stuff is to make you stop and think that while it may feel that nothing has been achieved, actually the exact opposite is true.
So, to avoid missing anything, the week also involved: