Weeknotes SO1E04 — Writers block?

Four weeks in a row! go me, and go you if you’ve managed to read them all — thank you for being interested in my ramblings, please do feel free to leave comments or reach out to me if there’s anything you want to hear more (or less) about. I’m a big proponent of feedback good, bad and ugly so any kind of input would be wonderful. (You could even chuck me a few claps… please?).

This was the first week so far that I’ve struggled to think about what to put into my weeknotes, it was a middling week for me, where I started on a lot of things and thought about a lot of stuff but in terms of tangible outputs to say “I did this” — there wasn’t as much.

Community of practice

I spent some time earlier this week catching up on everything that was covered in our Delivery Community of Practice meeting that I missed last week.

We recently worked with Emily Webber to develop progression frameworks for the disciplines in DDaT. The work done to describe the work of disciplines in terms of the outcomes they produce has been really helpful for me personally and we’ve been spending time mapping ourselves to the capabilities at our recent Community meetings.

The framing of how delivery breaks down into the outcomes we try to achieve has been really helpful for me when thinking about how Delivery Managers can support other teams who don’t currently have delivery managers.

We’re going to look to do this from a Coaching and Consultancy angle, so I’ve been doing some thinking alongside colleagues about what our ‘offer’ should look like.

We want to be careful that we’re not devising a framework that we give people or implement for them which is prescriptive, we instead want to focus on understanding where our expertise and experience could add value and where some agile ways of working could benefit teams across the organisation, taking into account their context.

I’ve pulled together a draft of what that could look like and have shared it with a sub-set of the delivery team before opening it up to the whole community, so hopefully more news about that soon!

Checking out with the GOAT

No, that isn’t some obscure reference insinuating I’ve been playing darts with Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor.*

As you’ll recall from S01E01, my team have a weekly checkout, we use it as a way to decompress and release from the week just gone and usually use a “minus one, zero, plus one” scale to describe how we’ve felt about the week and adding some context before checking out of work for the weekend. The following week we then check back in about how we’re feeling for the week ahead.

Checking in and out is something that I first came across when (the artist formally known as) the Customer Journey team had Lauren Currie leading on parts of our team away days, to build our psychological safety. It’s such a simple and effective way for everyone to feel present and heard. However you’re feeling is valid and the check out in particular offers time for reflection and the opportunity to close the loop.

I thought we could mix up the format a bit this week and used the below picture and asked everyone to say which goat they were this week and why.

One of the best things about what I do and who I work with is that we’re all open to bringing a bit of fun and silliness into work (especially at the end of the week). If anyone has any other interesting checkout formats I’d be keen to hear about them.

Non-work life

No quizzes from me this week unfortunately, though I did achieve a whopping 1 out of 5 answers correct in Rhona Buttress’ space based quiz.

Last weekend was taken up by two very different birthday celebrations, a BBQ on Saturday for Mum’s birthday — where I consumed far too many Heinekens before being offer the “One Chip Challenge” by one of my brothers.

For anyone not familiar the one chip challenge is singular nacho which measures around 2 million Scoville heat units (SHU being the measurement of pungency of chili peppers, based on the concentration of capsaicinoids — capsaicinoid’s being the thing that makes them burn!)

For reference your average jalapeno is around 5000 SHU.

I won’t be in a rush to have a second one, that’s for sure.

on Sunday (still feeling the effects of both the Heineken and the One Chip) I went to a 3 year olds birthday party, thankfully I was provided with scotch eggs rather than bonnets for sustenance!

I’m incredibly excited to be going into this weekend planning on going to the pub to watch England on Saturday, I’m not sure I’ve ever been as excitedly nervous as I was on Tuesday before the kick off of England vs Germany.

Fingers crossed that this time next week, I’ll be looking forwards to similar plans!

*Incredibly niche wordplay. Phil Taylor is a darts player, you win a round in darts by checking out and GOAT is often used to mean, the greatest of all time.