I often find when I settle in on a Saturday morning to write my weeknotes that my recollection of the week just passed is a bit rose tinted: everything feels like it was more sunny than it possibly was.
Part of this comes from Friday’s often having a different vibe with positive outcomes, or the start of the weekend itself making me feel upbeat. But a more balanced view would probably show a different picture.
This week is rather easier to dissect in that respect, because being ill, stressed and tired led me to a partial panic state midweek where I really wondered if I was coping at all, and that maybe I’d bitten off more than I could chew in this role. But, as usual, the end of the week turned positive and I came out feeling good.
Looking at the state of my diary, this week has been an onslaught of meetings, with no real time between them to do work of any meaning. I’m finding the start of the day, before the first meeting, is my only real ‘me’ time where I can either focus on something that needs thinking through, or trying to resolve a complicated customer issue that just needs some dedicated time.
I was warned by one of my future colleagues before I started that I was going to be really busy, and this week was the first time I felt that warning had merit. I need to take more positive action to manage it and start declining meetings, or marking out focus time. But there are very few meetings that I’d say aren’t needed or don’t add value.
That it isn’t the cure for everything.
Our struggle to make a clean transition to Scrum continues. Setting clear sprint goals and giving the team some space to deliver has been increasingly difficult. A significant piece of work being progressed in parallel is creating capacity issues and some technical challenges. Planning sprints has been impacted by this and struggles to have the backlog ready with a set of tickets ready to prioritise. Velocity calculations are shot to pieces by the number of swaps in and out of the sprint while it’s running to accommodate priority bugs.
In short, it’s been a real slog and everyone feels tired and bruised by it.
Retros are still proving to be a really helpful way of focusing on how we can improve things. A shift in how we run stand-ups is already bearing fruit (what a strange expression that is) and we are getting better engagement. This week’s session was lifted by a colleague participating in a virtual turkey outfit for no particular reason. We salute you, our avian warrior!
This week saw our initial meetings for The Big Project where I’ll be the Product Owner, and my first opportunity to meet my Delivery Manager. I instantly warmed to her and could see that we’re going to work well together.
It’s all starting to get very real, very quickly, with start dates and sprint timetables coming together. There’s a sense of not repeating past mistakes being a strong part of planning too.
This project feels like an opportunity to put on my product owner ‘big boy pants’ and work through the path from discovery to user stories to prioritisation across a number of concurrent workstreams. I’m hoping that a (comparatively) narrower focus on product compared to day-to-day work will mean I can really add value to the process and help shape the work.
However, I do have some concerns about how the work and its agile ceremonies will fit in alongside an already packed diary. It will be interesting for me to read back my weeknotes in the near future to see how reality matches expectation.
There’s an old cliché about drummers in a band just being frustrated bass players (or is it the other way around?) and in that sense I think within this product owner shell lurks a frustrated designer.
I wouldn’t claim for a second to be remotely knowledgeable or competent at it. Its more like singing in the shower equating to ‘I am actually Prince, undiscovered’, or my making cheese on toast equating to haute cuisine. But I think I appreciate good design when I see it, and I like talking about it to people that get it.
So it’s been a joy to get work moving quickly this week on some design work that has involved me working more closely with our associate designer. Whether it’s been chatting about which council logos really work (shout out to the Dorset Council logo yet again) or discussing page clutter and accessibility, this feels like indulging an interest of mine more than actual work.
Rewarding to get some really great feedback from a customer on the initial outputs as the week closed. Can’t wait to see what next week’s work brings. I think I’ll just stick to singing in the shower though…