I’ve often found as you approach a holiday, the nearer you get to your last day, the more you NEED that holiday. It’s almost like your mind sets a tolerance limit for what you can take in the knowledge that you’re counting down to meeting it.
As we approach what may be the return to life being a bit more normal I’m getting that way about not seeing people; getting closer to my tolerance limit. A surprise call-in on Friday by my daughter (not seen for 6 months) and a post-hospital carers check on my dad (not seen in 3 months) involving a 250-mile round trip were the first ‘cracks’ in the behaviours I’ve adopted to stay safe. But they were SO good.
My ‘sketchy’ colleague Alex May wrote a killer blog post about being back in an empty office this week and it bringing home the sharp distinction between what was then and is now.
It’s been a week of change in our team.
Firstly our lovely, smiley, and somewhat awesome colleague Akansha let me know she was leaving for another, permanent role. It’s a fabulous opportunity for her both professionally and personally so I’m really pleased for her, but it’s hard to see someone go, even when you’ve never actually been in the same room together. Having dealt with the truly abysmal reference form sent by her new employer I realise how much they need her content design skills there…
Akansha let the rest of the Service know her news during a service meeting after she’d delivered an excellent overview of multidisciplinary working from her work at Swindon council. Sounds like it set off some thinking as I had a call the next day from James in Service Design about how we could get the content designers more involved in the service design pipeline.
This week had me holding interviews for our Senior Content Designer role as part of a mini-internal restructure. Funny how everyone still dressed up for this things despite a year of wearing casual clothes — even I reached into the wardrobe for something that wasn’t a t-shirt too.
Offering a job to someone is my absolute favourite thing in the world to do, and the reaction to the offer this time may have been the best yet. Usually letting the other candidates know isn’t so bad since you don’t really know them, but these were my colleagues that I work with every day, respect and like an awful lot, so it wasn’t that easy to do. I’m still thinking about those conversations.
But the key question is am I allowed to make my new Number Two wear an eye patch?
It was good this week to catch up with Sam, the new Product Manager at Placecube to talk about my thoughts on Digital Place as a new customer. Initially I didn’t think I really had any thoughts, but after 30 mins I finally managed to stop talking. I think I only mentioned Placecube t-shirts twice…
It got me thinking about what is it that makes a great product. For me it is as much about how a supplier works with you to improve it as it is about the product itself at any given point in time. We had a standing joke at a previous council that anything we asked our supplier to do would be a £20k quote. And while I’m not saying freebies or promises of change are a mark of a good relationship, the listening and involvement are.
This came up in a discussion earlier in the week about supplier APIs for another system. I suspect nearly everyone in LocalGov knows the attitude/approach of at least one major supplier when it comes to these — everybody pays and you get what you’re given (oh, sometimes they work too). I was pleased to hear this being smacked down in the discussion as ‘not how we work anymore’; the Digital Declaration in action in Dorset!
Those Placecube devs have been beavering away on our migration tools, and just like spring buds things are starting to appear now the sun is coming out.
Friday saw a very brief demo of how Contensis web controls have been extracted into separate content types for re-insertion into our pages, something I have to admit brought out the ‘yeah, go on, show me’ in my head when it was first discussed. Well, they just did!
726 contact cards, embedded in pages now live on our dev site and appear exactly where they did on sample migrated pages, meaning we don’t have to do this manual task on the 1,387 web pages they reside on.
All our pages are getting ready to be dropped on us on the new Dev site, so there will be a shout of “cry ‘havoc’ and let slip the designers of content” soon while we dive in to see where that leaves us.
We’ve also had some good team time this week setting out acceptance criteria for the multiple content types that are being extracted for import. Our first attempt at doing this together took 40 mins, but now the team are breaking off into pairs to work on these together, and getting through them at an impressive rate.
This week saw Purple Day 2021 being held, an event I’m ashamed to say I knew nothing about.
I say ‘ashamed’ as I was diagnosed as having epilepsy when I was 18, but as it’s never been a condition that has controlled my life I’ve shut it away in a box and largely ignored it. It only really comes out for discussion when I change jobs as Occupational Health people seem to get in a tizzy about it.
While I don’t make it a secret of it as such, I treat talking about it like a geeky t-shirt; it only comes out when it needs to or the circumstances are right. I guess the reasons are those playground jokes about ‘having an eppy’ when someone got upset, or that instant association of epilepsy with…well, I don’t know what goes on in your heads really. Leprosy? Bad breath?
So alongside people raising awareness and discussion about mental health, racial discrimination and #MeToo maybe it’s time I did my bit for my little corner of differentness and stood by my people in saying “I’m epileptic, and proud”. If it changes how you think about me then that’s on you really.
Maybe ask me a question about it you’ve always wanted to know the answer to? Here’s one: No, the term ‘brainstorm’ doesn’t give offence
And next year my hair is going purple.
Some other things that happened this week: