That was a quiet week. I know it’s far more acceptable to say you’ve been rushed off your feet or in back-to-back meetings, but I’ve often found those weeks easier to deal with than the quieter ones.
Quiet weeks leave you time to think and plan. And discover the holes.
This week was all about thinking CMS migration project, partly in preparation for my first Show and Share session on the project next week, but more in terms of my understanding of what we’re dealing with. Knowing my numbers helps me model the confusion into a shape I can deal with, and there were lots of numbers to consider.
I sometimes bore colleagues with the first team I came across that knew their numbers; the street lighting team at Oxfordshire County Council. For any issue they could easily reel off what impact that would have, why taking a course of action was the best one to take, and they did it all with an amazing spirit of camaraderie that left other teams in their wake. Maybe me adding up the numbers is an attempt to recapture that team’s spirit in my own work?
So the week finished off a batch of conversations to arrive at those numbers; four workshops, two training sessions, one requirements session and an assortment of conversations in between. A single slide doesn’t look like much of an output to encapsulate these (I do have others, honest) but this is the one I can talk to an explain the complexity, the risks, the problems to solve in the project and carry those in my head (go on, test me).
This week we also had a conversation with our current CMS supplier to let them know we were moving on, which was a lesson for me in how I can learn from Lisa Trickey — I blundered right in with questions about data extraction and she took the time to think about the person receiving the news and how they might be feeling, assuring them that it wasn’t a reflection of their product or our time with them.
Reflecting on this now I guess it’s a sign of my fiery red style of dealing with stuff, which we dwelt on again this week in a second really useful Insights session with the whole digital team. Some valuable stuff came out of this in terms of the preferred styles of different people, but also our ‘opposites’ in terms of differing styles and how we might adapt to them.
That wasn’t my only slip in the week. In the ongoing effort to improve our web accessibility and back up my fantastic team I got into some well-mannered disagreements with colleagues and as a result got more and more grumpy. This culminated in snapping at one of the nicest people in our Comms team while she was making a perfectly reasonable request. Thankfully she was gracious in accepting an apology early the next day, but that’s a relationship I’ll need to work at repairing properly.
If I was looking for excuses it could be the lack of a real holiday, our impending house move, never having met my team in person and having to make care arrangements for my father as I move 120 miles away from him. I guess I need to watch for the signs and recognise that we’re all on edge and are going through our own issues during this crisis. I’m starting to really miss working *with* people instead of *at* people on a screen.
Other stuff that happened this week: