Week ending 20th January
Wins
- (Finally) completed my house purchase! It’s been a long time coming, and I was delighted and relieved when the estate agent handed me the keys. I’m excited for the creative possibilities of decorating and furnishing my space.
- Despite that major interruption to my week and time off for moving, I had a productive week at work. I hosted a Q&A/ask me anything session for the designers on our alpha team (service, interaction and content) and was pleased that I was able to answer nearly all of their questions. They told me it was a useful session as they get up to speed with the programme, and it was useful for me to to reflect on everything we’ve done to date and remind myself how much I know: win-win!
- Since the New Year I’ve been posting a joke every morning in our team slack channel. It takes hardly any time to Google a joke and post it, and it injects a bit of fun into the day (I think fun at appropriate moments is particularly important for teams working in high pressure situations), particularly when the team try to guess the punchlines — often coming up with better versions than the original. I was delighted to return to work after my move to see the jokes had continued on my days off. Self-organising/multi-disciplinary team fun, what a wonderful thing✨
Challenges
- I tried to fit too much work into 3.5 days, exacerbated as our user researcher (who was also part of our discovery team) was off sick, so I had additional pressures on my time to attend meetings that they would usually attend / lead.
- I can’t remember the last time I felt this tired. I’m feeling the cumulative effect of two months of acute stress and disrupted sleep. I was hopeful that my regular sleep pattern would kick in as soon as I completed on the house but it hasn’t happened yet, hrmph.
- It’s taking time to settle into our roles and routines as a new team. I’ve had some interesting but challenging conversations about alpha scope; in my mind it was clear, but the more we discuss it across the different research, tech and design disciplines the more we find the fuzzy edges and omissions from the original brief.
Lessons
- The short week has forced me to delegate more, as I simply haven’t had the time to take on as many jobs as I usually would. On more than one occasion the person I asked to pick up a job has been better and/or faster than me 👍
- We’ve been trying different styles of agile ceremonies as we settle as a new team. It’s been fascinating to participate / observe so soon after completing some facilitation training; I’m seeing what I learned in action, and finding out in practice what does / doesn’t work.
Next week
- UKGovcamp 2023 tomorrow!
- Hosting digital colleagues visiting our Birmingham office
- Hopefully a quieter week of meetings, so I can delve into design requirements for prototyping
