Looking back on my weeknotes from last week it’s hard to chart the change in circumstances. But this week we took the decision to implement our mini-content freeze which sets us on the road to a launch date for the new website.
The turnaround in delivering a whole swathe of bug fixes, issues and enhancements was a bit breathtaking. The checklist of problems got ever smaller by the day, and the mood at daily standups became the playful interchange again we’ve enjoyed all the way along.
It was actually a pleasure to report to our Steering Group about where we were on Friday, following a Show and Share on Tuesday where I was finally happy to do this with the UAT site rather than a bunch of screengrabs. It was also great to hear from someone slightly outside the project how impressed they’d been by the scale of what has been delivered in such a short time. Easy to miss that when you’re focused on the detail.
That’s not to pretend there isn’t still a huge hill to climb. We’ve pulled on our pragmatism pants to wear in making decisions about how much more we can reasonably squeeze from the auto-migration script. Is it worth hours more development for the sake of a handful of pages that can be manually rebuilt? So we have quite the shopping list of stuff that needs delivering by the team.
And it’s fair to say that they are pretty nervous about it. But this bunch are great at banding together, so the plan (their plan) is that we all head into the office for the 2-week period to work together, in one place, so we can swap notes, get that delivery mood going and support each other. There may be cakes. No, there WILL be cakes…
The onset (onslaught?) of Digital Leaders Week came at the wrong time for me really. Being so immersed in our migration project I didn’t really find the time/justification to book up for any sessions, which is entirely the wrong approach to take, I know.
The last time this event took place was my first week at Dorset Council, so I was very much thrown in the mix as it became synonymous with our Festival of the Future week. And last week, like then, I hardly got to anything.
But this time around I was actually running a session, with the unbelievably excellent Lorna Perry of Placecube, about our CMS migration story to date. You can watch it here if you like.
After a bruising couple of weeks on both sides of the project it almost became a healing experience putting it together with Lorna. We got to say things out loud about what hadn’t gone well. We got the opportunity to tell the other side that what they’d been doing has been appreciated. And we also got to revisit decisions made that we can now say were absolutely, spot on and correct.
Although we’re in the thick of things with the migration we’re trying to make team meetings about other stuff, not least because our new team mate, Lee, is fixed term so not working on the project.
So an opportunity presented itself to give time over to looking at Sociocracy in more depth and seeing if it would fit. I’d taken some templates from the LocalGov Drupal crowd from one of their working groups, and adapted to our scenario: a design group to make decisions on patterns, content approaches and CMS functionality.
Admittedly what I’d put together was pretty rushed, including a 10 min effort to pull together a proposal on removing carousels from the new website. A clear winner this one, thought me, as the arguments are overwhelming aren’t they? I also found a blog post from GDS about their decision to remove one from the then embryonic GOV.UK. Job done.
Well, the funny thing about empowering your team to have a voice in decision making is that it doesn’t mean they will share your views. I can’t hide my absolute delight at being disagreed with and having sound reasons pushed back at me on why we couldn’t sign off on the decision. Equally, I did see some business need arguments creeping in, so I had to push back on those.
So was it a success? Not if you count me not getting my way. But in my book it was, as I was forced to listen, to justify an opinion and to consider alternative arguments from people who know what they are talking about.
A roundup of other stuff that happened during the week: