Another truncated weeknote as I take an awkwardly-timed Friday off to sort out some personal stuff. A week that had its challenges, but some real wins I think.
One of the first things I needed to do this week was get somewhere for the team to work together at County Hall next week, for a few days. We’d agreed last week that coming together in the same space would be great to kick-start our content freeze period and work on issues together. Problem was, how?
Salvation came in the form of a really excellent colleague (Jess from our Assets and Property team) going above and beyond in hunting down a space that would meet the necessary rules while still being somewhere that would work for us (even if this means sitting 2m apart in the same wing).
It was really useful to hear the issues from her perspective. While some of us may be chomping at the bit for some in-person time with colleagues, people like Jess need to follow a set of national rules that are more demanding than those of a pub, and if breached could lead to a HSE prosecution (not to mention the whole COVID spread risk). Jess, we salute you!
Our regular CMS Migration planning sessions are a good opportunity for us to catch up as a team on all the various workstreams that are running at the moment.
I’m just so impressed (and yes, proud) of the amazing work on developing user roles and workflow that Nat and Lacey have battled on with, and it’s been great soaking up the enthusiasm for user research sparked by Claire and Susie. At the same time Amanda and Gillian have been working on our new approach to work requests that will enable us to view, manage and measure what work comes to us and how we can plan and allocate it effectively.
At Thursday’s session we went into a huddle to work on how we would approach our content freeze period. Our final delta migration is coming soon, which will be the last refresh of content from the current site, so we needed to be clear who would do what, what jobs had to be carried out and how common issues could be fixed. I’ve been developing a mini-library of How To notes to fix common problems as a reference for the team (and also a reminder to me).
It was important to move us from ‘problem finding’ mode, where issues get passed back to Placecube, to ‘problem solving’ mode where we resolve issues ourselves, as there will be no more tweaks of the migration script to help us with content issues next week. We already know there will be things that won’t work like they did (and some that will work better) but we now have to take charge of our own destiny to an extent.
It reminded me of learning to sail, where you have to practice capsizing to pass the course. My wife wasn’t keen on this bit, and struggled to right the dingy while still in the water. Our tutor was pretty clear; if this happens out at sea there’s no-one there to help, so you HAVE to make it work. So do we.
But we aren’t going to capsize — we are going to triumph. Everyone is keen to finally get ‘hands on’ with the CMS and make it theirs rather than watching things happen to it. It’s also gonna be a blast actually working together in the same place at last.
All this positive stuff followed on from what was, for me, an uncomfortable discussion in the team on Tuesday. At a wider service team meeting everyone had been assessing how we were doing against the Team Agreement; a set of promises we make about how we work.
What became clear from the feedback was that more structure was being looked for in 1:1 meetings, and this was an area I was falling well short. In my naivety I’d thought that pushing the responsibility to arrange 1:1 sessions to when individuals wanted them (irrespective of a set frequency) was a way of working around the needs of that individual, and the topics for discussion would be what they wanted to discuss. Even as I write this I’m wondering how I thought that would work. I was even challenged about if I valued 1:1’s at all, which just shows how far off the mark I’ve been.
So we talked this through in our own team meeting and agreed together what everyone wanted; set monthly sessions (but more if needed), a list of topics to cover each time, sessions recorded for referring back to, and me taking the lead on organising them. The prototype approach was tested on Thursday and worked for both sides, so now I can roll that out to everyone and get back on track.
It also became clear during discussions (or at least my reflecting on them after a sleepless night) that things hadn’t landed properly with our mini-restructure, with some ambiguity or misunderstanding about roles. So I need to get this straight too to make it work properly for everyone.
I found this a tricky set of information to process at first, but (and this is why I do weeknotes) as the week has gone on I’ve realised that I can’t make assumptions about how people are feeling about things and I need to step up to provide more support to them, not less. Bringing it into the open has helped me, and getting a shared view of what people expect means I know I can approach this with more certainty of meeting their needs in future.
Another challenge I’ve had lately, with all our focus being on CMS migration, is making sure that our temporary content designer, Lee, didn’t feel left out of the team as he’s not involved in that work. So I’ve tried to make team meetings a ‘no migration’ zone to talk about other stuff.
Also, onboarding a new colleague during a pandemic and at the closing stages of a massive project hasn’t been conducive to giving him the time he needs for support from me. But I’ve done my best and we’ve had some good discussions about his work focusing on supporting and improving our Adults care website.
Well, talk about him hitting the ground running….
This week he shared with me his initial findings and conclusions on the site’s performance. It turns out that he’s a bit good at this stuff! Analytics and HotJar weren’t enough for him, so he went talking to stakeholders, particularly the team that take calls from people with care needs. It was a great assessment (not to mention a beautiful slide deck) that really moved forward our understanding.
I got so excited about this work I press-ganged him into presenting it at our team meeting as a dry run for reporting it up the chain. They were all so impressed with what he’d been able to achieve in so short a time, and the clarity of the findings — it sparked a whole set of discussions and enthusiasm for this work.
I love it when a new team member brings in a new set of thoughts, ideas and experience to the crew as everyone benefits from it. It’s also presented a golden opportunity for us to bring together next steps on this with the performance framework approach I’m looking to adopt, based on work on the UK Parliament website. I can’t wait to see where this goes!
Last week we realised that with all the focus on the main website migration we (or I) hadn’t done enough to keep our colleagues in Public Health up to speed on where we were with migrating their website.
There’s been a risk of neglecting attention on this (far smaller) site, but in many ways it’s been more challenging since my ICT colleagues have been developing it largely on their own with a custom theme, and wrestling with the differences between a main site and a microsite in the Liferay ecosphere.
It’s been a delight to see the developers grow in confidence (and supporting each other in learning) as the site has come along, under the steady hand of Glen Conroy. As things had reached a stage where the site was looking ready to talk about more, they took the lead on showing the Public Health team around this week. I think we were all relieved that they were happy with where things had got to, and I was able to give them some reassurance on timescales and web editor training.
We have a major milestone in a delta content migration being dropped on the site while I take a day’s leave, so fingers crossed that works out as well as it has on the main website so we can take the final steps in getting this site ready to launch too.
One of the things I really value is the ability to work with peers in other councils on common areas of interest. Some years ago, Ally Hook and I took that view as customers of Jadu and pulled together a Slack team (with Jadu’s support and assistance) to get people in the same virtual space to kick around ideas and issues. It kind of worked.
We’re moving to that point as customers of Placecube with a batch of councils now starting to get together. This week was the second Placecube-organised event with extra faces (hello Brentwood!) taking the form of a show and share. To be honest, I was pleased to be listening rather than presenting for once.
Lee Kevern took everyone through his 10-week discovery of Dorset’s customer account project, which (in typical Kevern style) was a wondrous exercise in Powerpoint animation covering a huge amount of ground, and was really easy to follow. For me it came a bit unstuck following a great question from Philippa Newis asking what user needs the customer account was meeting. I’m not sure we’ve got that properly covered off just yet.
The informal community network is also starting to come together. I had a great discussion with Kingston & Sutton following on from my Digital Leaders talk last week digging in to the highs and lows of our migration work and looking at options for how they could meet their ambitious plans. They are also up for a pattern library approach so we could make sweet music together.
There are going to be lots of areas where us all sharing what we’ve done (and, just as importantly, what we feel/think) is going to work for everyone; mastering Elasticsearch, developing more GDS-style patterns, sharing user research….so I’m going to keep this flame burning.