A flat-out week with some highs, lows, triumphs and frustrations
(Honestly, I’m struggling with the section titles these days)
One of the advantages of being part of the Placecube family is having others over to tea. Well, not exactly, but those lovely people from Rugby joined one of our Customer Platform sessions to walk us through their development of their Customer Contact Management cube on the platform.
It was like a glimpse into the near-future of when we are up to speed in developing on the platform and able to chart our own course, but also in seeing how we can adopt the hard work already done by Rugby through the ‘re-use, not re-invent’ principle behind the platform.
The inaugural meeting of the Technical Architecture Group (I like playing TAG) took place this week, which had been a culmination of lots of thinking by large brains into how we could approach the adoption of a platform with a move to product management.
Unfortunately there was no curtain to pull back, or X Factor-type over-delayed announcement of the winners, but the names and scope of product owners were revealed. My area has the (currently) uninspiring name of Presentational and Non-Transactional Services, but does contain all the bits that float my boat, like content design, accessibility etc.
There was a bit of a debate about it also containing non-transactional forms (“isn’t a non-transactional form just a web page?” commented JB) but getting past the awkwardness of the phrasing it does make sense by saying the transactional bits sit over there, but the type of questions and how they are presented sits alongside content design and accessibility.
All still early days on this, and probably many more discussions to be had, but this is feeling like a good move.
That perfectly innocuous question sent me into a panic. Somehow in the midst of everything I’d failed to spot that a member of the team was returning to work from a long maternity leave. Bad, bad manager….
Luckily the ground work I did for another colleague joining us this year meant that only a few adaptations were needed to my induction Trello boards to have them ready to go, and a hastily arranged chat the next day (yes! the IT worked!) means all is set for next week.
I’ve set another colleague up as my ‘maternity watchdog’ to make sure I don’t make the same mistakes that were made for her when she returned from maternity leave; allocated admin jobs, too light a workload etc. Luckily I work with a bunch that are OK with telling me honestly when I’m off track, and I’m not dumb enough to think all the decisions I make are solid gold.
The frustrations of remote working came out a little bit this week as we ploughed on with our CMS migration planning. Tuesday’s session required a change of focus which, as it turns out, left lots of people confused. In a room together you’d be able to see that on faces, but focusing on a Miro board those things get missed.
I needed to spend some extra time in a separate session doing what I probably should have done in the first place: make sure everyone was on the same page and understood what and why we were doing. That extra time invested paid dividends as at the next planning session something clicked and it was really productive.
I’m really, really missing being in a room with people, and the team echoed that sentiment as we did a further session together on our contribution to the Digital Team service plan. The ideas and enthusiasm flowed as we worked together on ideas, and started to sharpen conversations we’d had into tangible actions we’d pursue next year, but I suspect we’d have gotten there sooner if we’d been in the same place.
Inevitably when you’re working at pace, something unexpected crops up that can throw things off course. That was Thursday, with what we will just refer to as The Event. The details are less important than the learning.
As with all crises, it’s less about the details and more about how everyone rises to the challenge. A lot of learning points came out of The Event for me:
By the afternoon we’d had confirmation that all was probably, and a confirmation on Friday that the solution identified would most likely work.
So big shout out to Lorna and Dave for being unflappable and totally awesome
Some other things that happened this week: