No I’m not moving house again. But we are moving our main website to a shiny new Placecube Digital Place site by May (yes, I did say May).
This week was largely pouring over the plans from Placecube on how we could do it. I have to admit I got really excited about the proposed approach and spent much of the week trying to get others to feel the same way.
I’ve been through three previous site migrations:
So an ideal scenario would be having an automated migration to a better design starting with pretty good content. Welcome to my latest migration!
This week saw some feasibility testing of the automated approach, and so far so good. I also dived into a bit of output-based planning (that took me back to PRINCE2 days) by building a series of mind maps to capture every angle and task I could think of. Then exporting that to CSV (hey Miro really sucks at that), classifying every task by likely time, owner, status and pre/post migration to see if we can get it all done.
I got some great challenge by a colleague as to if everything needed to be pre-migration (why tidy up the images before when you can do it after?) and spotting that the gap in the plan was how much Neil Lawrence there was to go around. ICT colleagues are now weighing in with technical help and it feels like the momentum is building.
Now to tell the rest of the council!
I work with awesome people. So if I can find a way to help encourage them I try to do that, mostly by just having their back or recognising and amplifying their contributions.
This week felt like that backfired a little as I saw a few examples of empowered colleagues using their professional expertise to make recommendations but having this overruled.
On the one hand it was inspiring to see such dedication and passion directed towards doing the right thing, but it pained me to see the frustration (and anger) that not getting others to agree with them caused. I’ve tried using cliches like ‘losing the battle but winning the war’, but thinking again about the Yapp triangle I need to accept that culture change is going to take time and people won’t agree immediately.
A thought occurred to me about the Civil Service fast-track recruitment process that a friend once told me about. In it she was required to argue the case for a position she strongly disagreed with, and she found it a real challenge. The idea was that by putting yourself in the other person’s shoes you better understand their thinking and motivation.
I think we need to start doing a bit more of that in how we communicate our #ContentDesignRevolution to colleagues going forward. If they don’t understand why we’re trying to change things they’ll find it harder to agree with us. Just think climate change.
And on that note, read this brilliant blog post from my colleague Claire. Absolutely nailed it on FAQs.
I’m writing this down before I forget it, as I was so stupidly pleased with myself for coming up with it.
This week we had an accessibility audit report on one of our microsites, and I handed the reigns to my lovely colleague Akansha to lead on it. While we were having a chat about the various levels of WCAG accessibility I struck on a way to explain the relative importance of each one. Here goes:
Feel free to reuse (CC BY of course)
The viral video of Handforth Parish Council’s turbulent Planning and Environment committee gave me some great entertainment this week, and there’s something I love about it being discovered by a 17 year old politics student. It almost came at the perfect time and was the distraction everyone needed.
But it did make me a little sad to see this become another excuse to ridicule what remains the backbone of community governance in the UK.
Some people like to imagine councillors as either corrupt, incompetent, lazy or just plain stupid. At any level. In 37 years working for local government - including a spell being a part-time parish clerk - I’ve found exactly the opposite to be the case. I’ve been stunned by the expert knowledge of councillors that have a specialism. I’ve been blown away by local councillors (with no expenses) taking the time and trouble to speak face-to-face with local people about issues that affect them. I’ve been chased to deal with an issue by councillors that want to give a clear explanation to their constituents when I’ve dropped the ball. And I’d also like to think I count some of them as friends.
Our experience of moving to a rural village has been that the local council has been invaluable as a source of information, central to protecting a closed village pub from becoming another housing development, and a friendly face (at the door!) to welcome us when we arrived.
Are there some archaic ways of decision making in local councils? Absolutely. But more often this is more about compliance with the law than pettiness or personal fiefdoms. We may think it funny to watch (often) older people struggle to master the technology of video conferencing, but is it that different to colleagues suddenly pitched into home working?
If we continue to hold local councils and councillors in low regard we only have ourselves to blame when their average age remains high, seats go uncontested requiring co-option, or they struggle to engage the wider community in key things like neighbourhood planning.
Wow, that went on a bit. Sorry…
That amazing Sam Villis shared her thoughts on coping with anxiety and mental health issues this week at Andy Sandford’s newly-established #corridorcamp.
Sam wrote a brilliantly honest account of her struggles earlier this year which stacks of people read and responded to. So in this session she took us through some of the ways she’s identified for coping.
I’m not going to go through it all here as if you’re really interested you should just hire Sam to come and talk to your organisation, but I did ask a question about what place colleagues take in helping, as it’s an area we’ve tended to focus on.
Sam’s view was really interesting to me. While you may get some understanding and sympathy it’s can sometimes only be at a surface level. The better (“gritty”) discussions are left to people that understand you and your situation best.
I’m on holiday next week, which originally felt like just using up leave, but as ever the closer I got to it the more I tuned into the idea of stepping away from work for a while.
I’m also taking a break from intermittent fasting (after a 25-day streak and loud stomach noises during 1:1 meetings), no midweek beers and regular exercise. I’m going for full slob — pass the crisps!
One sign of my being frazzled is not taking the time with colleagues to sort out issues properly (see last weeks weeknotes) and once again I managed to put my foot in it with someone this week and come away feeling wretched about it.
Note to self: sending an email is a stupid way to try and resolve an issue… Luckily (again) the person in question was much more grown up than I would have been and all is well once more.
The week did finish nicely with some pre-emptive feedback from a colleague via my manager ahead of my “shall we keep him” review after 3 months working here. The words were really generous and touching, and once again a reminder of the kind of people I work with.