I was reflecting on my relationship with work this week and came across this tweet. While I didn’t tag anyone (surely that’s a watch brand?) I did think back to other jobs I’ve had and that ‘Sunday night feeling’ that came with it. Really pleased that, six months in, those feelings are all positive ones. How do you feel on a Sunday night?
I got invited this week to a cross-sector Discord server for digital professionals. Or at least I think that’s what it is. Actually I’m really unclear what it’s for.
Comparing it to my beloved LocalGov Digital Slack it couldn’t feel more different. Lots of things being said (well, a lot of waving emojis) and ideas for adding more channels. Lots of engagement (if you count engagement as more channels being created and more people being invited). There was a long exchange about someone visiting Wales….
But I’m really unclear what makes this any sort of community. If you throw enough people in a room will the magic just happen, somehow? Although LocalGov Digital Slack can be quiet at times, you know what it’s for and can be sure that if you post something someone will pick up and run with it.
Its made me think again about how we work with our customers on community building. Currently we have a platform to enable discussions, but it’s just not happening and we’re looking at ways to make it better. Having that clarity of purpose feels important as well as using the right tools (I think I might hate Discord).
Lots going on right now, with customers getting closer to going live, and two large projects on the horizon, one of which I’ll be the Product Owner for.
This will be my first opportunity to work on a project team in this role, with our own delivery manager, developers and QA already lined up. ‘Stupidly excited’ doesn’t quite cover it!
While we’ve already got an outline of what the project is looking to achieve, my starting point will be how we can ensure we work effectively together. It took me back to the chatbots project I ran in 2019 and how much time we spent discussing culture and how we wanted to work together. I felt it really paid off. We were lucky on that project to have the luxury of shared Agile training to build up relationships, and also a great kickoff session run by Torchbox, but the principles feel right.
Loving the professional touch that our new trainer is bringing to things. I was sensible enough to reach out to him for a bit of help preparing for an overview session with a customer this week.
In the past I’d been tempted to wing these sessions a little with just a bullet point list and follow the flow of conversation, adapting to what felt right. But him bringing more structure to it helped me make sure I was clear about learning objectives, what scenarios would work to illustrate them and (importantly) try out/capture the things I was going to demonstrate to make sure I was clear.
There was still plenty of room to improvise and indulge in conversation to make it feel natural. I got some nice feedback from the participants, as well as being ‘scored’ by my colleague!
Our transition to Scrum hasn’t gone as smoothly as we’d hoped, and we’re straddling the Scrum/Kanban divide a little at the moment. The important thing though is that we keep our eye on the prize and work towards improving things.
On that topic, I do love us having Retros. Although it could have been tense this week given some problems we’ve had, some great stuff came out about how we could improve things. One line of thought was around our preferred communication styles. It emerged that one colleague loves to keep things moving with lots of Slack messages, but another finds it overwhelming and would rather have quick catch-up conversations instead.
As we’re all remote (and still haven’t met in person…yet) it’s a bit harder to properly know each other. The communication example made me think of learning styles and how we try and adapt to differences when running a training session. So I took a personal learning point away to better adapt to others needs in how I communicate with them.
As a follow-on I remembered that at Dorset Council we did some work on creating personal profiles and sharing them, so I had a go at creating one for me, using a Confluence template for User Manuals, and pushing it into our Slack channel with a challenge for others to do the same. It will be interesting to see if anyone else picks up the challenge!
This week we are learning how to apply foundation properly when one has a facial hair issue. Or giving up and having a sleep instead.