(Polishing this a week late!)
Catching up again after missing last week, largely down to a lack of colleagues and also a singular focus on our CMS migration.
This week has been much the same. There’s a large volume of content to check (4,000+ pages) involving a significant shift in presentation (navigation menus to landing pages) and the adaption of a multitude of display controls.
The initial migration has also revealed a few things that have given us pause for thought, extra work and a few headaches:
Although the list of service tickets identifying the remaining issues is longer than I’d like, progress on this complicated part of the migration is really taking shape. There was a sweet moment when we took a step back during the week and just admired it, like finishing putting together an expensive and highly technical IKEA sideboard. Probably need to give it an IKEA name too. Moovpägis, perhaps?
Daily standups are really useful in showing us progress on key areas of work. We’re recording mini-videos of demos to add into standup notes so others can get a first glance of what the outputs of development are looking like. The last week has really seen an acceleration of this output.
We had some honest conversations with Placecube this week about the likely dates for completing development work, which has shown it really was the best move to extend our launch date. There’s still some more assessment to do before I’m really comfortable with naming a day, but the aim is to have this done by the end of next week. Still plenty of things on our side of the project to nail down too.
I had a timely reminder on Wednesday that our leadership team had been assigned some homework (hey, all work is ‘homework’ currently) in looking at our skills and capabilities around this whole product management thing.
This turned out to be a really good opportunity to shake the sheets and assess where we are as a team in relation to taking on a more clearly defined role around presentational services. It chimes really well with our ambitions to take content design out into the ‘real world’ and include more of the user journey for services in letters, emails etc. As well as a SWOT, I put together a narrative around the journey the team has been on, which I’m often reminded about in our day-to-day conversations with them, and the observations I’ve had about how the opportunities arising now will really help us move this on.
Alongside the SWOT I needed to do an assessment of our technical capabilities for delivering the service, including the tools we use. This was a great chance to involve the team a bit more to see if what we had was fit for purpose, and what the impact of moving platform would have on this.
A spin-off of this part has been some useful Twitter and Slack conversations around Hotjar alternatives and ‘no cookie’-based analytics that we could consider as part of the new platform. We really need to move off our reliance on an advertising platform posing as business intelligence telling us what people do on our site (or at least trotting out some numbers that give the appearance of information). The awesome Matt Cooper was great in giving me an insight into Lucky Orange and how they are using it at Herts CC.
As things moved a bit quickly with job changes just before Easter it wasn’t really possible to take any time with my Senior Content Designer to talk about how we will work together, and next week looks just as bad for doing this as we’re trying to organise a handover as one of the team leaves.
Also, hands up here; I’m a bit crap at delegating. I have a tendency to hold onto stuff or micro-manage just so I can feel ‘comfortable’ that things are happening (while I simultaneously drown in detail or drop spinning plates). Not good, and not sustainable.
I know that this is going to be great for the team (and me) in how we work, so gotta get tough on this and be better at handing over things.
A summary of other stuff that happened this week:
A feature celebrating the finest journalism on offer in Dorset this week: