This week was meant to have been the quiet week, where everyone is off on Easter holidays, leaving me swathes of free time due to lack of meetings, and allowing me to get my teeth into work always being set aside for another day.
Monday looked like being just like that, with an unprecedented chunk of time in the day that I got to use on finally completing some work on a project.
After that the free time pretty much dried up and those free spaces started to fill quickly.
Looking back on the week, I’m not sure I can really point to anything I feel I achieved. I know this isn’t correct as I remember dancing around the kitchen on Monday morning having achieved two impossible things before breakfast, not that I can remember now what they were.
Overall it was a pretty frustrating week and I came out feeling very flat, reassessing how well I’m actually doing against the requirements of this role. I probably do this too often, which will always be a consequence of working with far more experienced colleagues.
Last week I had managed to push out a new release plan, an updated version of our roadmap and some customer comms so felt pretty good about things. This week felt a complete contrast.
That it takes a team to deliver.
An unforeseen emergency left the team depleted, and making progress on our core work didn’t go as planned. The retro I was to run (my first) had to be cancelled, and the team refinement session I tried to lead on Friday became a waste of everyone’s time as things weren’t ready to review. This happened on my watch so it feels like that’s on me.
Even though the emergency can be pointed to as a key cause, I keep looking back on the week and asking why I didn’t take more positive action earlier to keep things on course, or just flag up issues.
So a big learning episode but with consequences that went beyond just my feelings.
If there has been an upside, it’s been around a significant piece of work that was willed into existence by my superb teammate. Through a constant focus on getting it moving, its importance has been recognised and resources allocated to get it through.
This week saw that work get to a vital point, not just in finishing the code and the testing but upgrading our infrastructure to match, which will make life easier in future. A midweek check on status was all good, and Thursday saw more detailed planning of how next week will run.
However, I’ve pretty much been a passenger in this exercise. My contribution was limited this week to clarifying key dates and responsibilities, and browbeating a colleague into holding off on his hot tub and beer holiday until he’d published the detailed steps for the work. It was good to feel a bit more engaged with this though.
Weeknotes are a great way to force you to properly evaluate the week. As I’m sat here typing I’ve just remembered some other progress that was really encouraging but has been swamped by ‘German Holiday Syndrome’*
(*I’ve invented this term to cover what I now know is actually called negativity bias. It was actually a great holiday overall, but had a few bad bits. None of which I can remember. My term sounds better, but let’s get back to the story…)
I’ve been beavering away on a potential piece of work that has taken up bits of my time on a frequent basis over months for no appreciable benefit so far. However, in discussing it in a product context we hit upon a strategy that could involve a nice reuse of open source from elsewhere, the chance to try out some features of the platform we’ve not played with yet and the possibility to reinvigorate a product line.
This is starting next week with a major upgrade of the product with proper resource attached to get it done. I didn’t really put it all together until one of our product management meet-ups where I started describing the work to others. So that’s good, isn’t it?
Warmer weather has meant the greenhouse is open for visitors and…..wait! Those aren’t my cat!