It’s come around to UKGovCamp time again, this year in person, but I can’t make it due to my father’s bad timing in turning 101 the next day (I swear he planned it that way)
So instead, I’m reflecting on my relatively short time within this wonderful digital community I landed in almost by accident, and what has stuck out most for me.
The number one thing for me is generosity and willingness to share.
This week I’ve been pestering Tom Steel about the Step by Step feature in LocalGov Drupal and the approach that was taken. Such a useful exchange between two former localgov people, now both in the private sector, made possible by a commitment to working in the open and sharing their learning. Generosity.
I’ve also been pestering Linda O’Halloran, Alex Sturviant and Ben Unsworth about the world of community directories and the possibility of hooking them up to Ofsted data. In all cases people made time in busy days to share a few thoughts or hook me up with other people to talk to. Generosity.
Going right back to my early days in a digital role, I made a trip to London (probably for a conference — can’t remember) and pushed out a tweet to see who I could meet up with. This ended up with meeting (separately) with the utterly lovely Richard Barton, who gave me sage advice on progressing a digital agenda within an organisation that wasn’t ready, and Steve Messer who has become my Product Guru through arriving in my current role. Neither of these fine people had to give up their personal time on a workday to talk to a n00b, but they did and it made a big impact on me.
And this weekend at UKGovCamp a large bunch of people will give up their weekend, unpaid but not unrewarded, to come together and talk about how to make public services better. Even if some people might look to paint this as a negative thing, the truth is this is generosity in its purest form.
If it’s your first time at UKGovCamp this year, my advice is to talk to everyone and anyone. Don’t worry if you don’t know them — they may be in the same boat as you. Be generous in your approach, and that generosity will come back to you tenfold. The relationships I’ve managed to forge in the digital community are the best thing about this work (and one of them ended up landing me working where I am now!)
This week was a tough one.
There were things that didn’t go right, people working under pressure and some frustrating outcomes to planned work. There were a few tensions in how we work with each other too. In all of this it’s really easy to see the negative side of it, but reflecting back on it all as I write (the real purpose of weeknoting) I can see this all comes from a passion to ‘do the right thing’, create excellent products, meet challenging deadlines and keep customers happy. The key thing is that we learn from what went wrong and make it better for next time.
We’ve been working on building more refinement time into our pipeline of work to make sure everyone is on the same page when we kick off work. I’m finding it a bit challenging as my inclination is to rush to delivery, but this is all part of the transition to agile I need to get my head into.
More work on our roadmap refinement too, and it’s really shaping up into a cracking set of work. We took a team decision to adopt the GOV.UK approach to roadmaps to distill this into a more consumable set of statements to give customers a clear idea of our plans. Looking forward to making that happen.
I’m still finding the interactions with our customers amongst my favourite things to do.
This week included a fabulous business review meeting which just felt really positive, productive and like two partners working together to make things better.
I’ve also been working on guidance with helping customers go live with websites in a staged way, pulling in the features and capabilities we have in the product to make that easier, but also some of the ‘don’t forget’ stuff in planning and executing the transition. This culminated with a really positive meeting with a customer at the end of the week to go though this and make plans.
Continuing my ‘who actually cares’ feature, this week saw the return to a favoured spot on the dining room chair under the table