Weeknotes S01E01 — The Start..
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I’ve wanted to write weeknotes for a while, but haven’t taken the plunge.
In fact, that’s a huge lie.
My unorganised, chaotic personal google drive has at least 10 “untitled documents” which each contain roughly 60–90% of what could be loosely described as a weeknote, but I’ve never gone as far to publish them.
I read colleagues weeknotes and through that occasionally find myself falling into a weeknote rabbit hole — learning as much about their authors as I do their work. What’s always struck me is how good they must be to go back and read retrospectively. Whether they’re focused on a specific challenge, a mindset or a “normal week”. Either being able to see what you’ve overcome or have a literary time capsule to re-capture what you were doing and how you felt at the time. I think what’s always stopped me was worrying “would anyone care?” but does that actually matter? This serves a purpose for me, to cleanse and debrief myself from the week that’s just gone.
Anyway, enough of that — let’s Just Do It, shall we?
New(ish) Horizons
I started a new role at Citizens Advice last month, becoming a Senior Delivery Manager on our Help to Claim Programme.
I always hated being a ‘Junior’ Delivery Manager at 26 because it made me feel too young, now the word Senior makes me feel like I’m almost ready to claim my pension. (But alas, JUST the 39 working years to go…).
It’s been an interesting switch, for the last few years I’d worked mainly with our advice content teams, whether they’ve been our business as usual teams or project teams focused on responding to Brexit and Covid. I’ve been amazed by just how much there is to take in when starting a new role — even with an internal change and will admit I’ve had moments of self doubt and imposter syndrome where I’ve thought “damn, what if I only really know about content delivery?” Or “what if the teams have all just been really good (they were) and I’m about to get found out?”.
Having taken a few weeks to learn about what the team looks like, what they’re currently doing and what they’ve wanted in a delivery manager (the Senior level role here at Citizens Advice is often a lot more flexible and looks a bit different dependent on the team need.) this has been the first week I’ve felt able to contribute with recommendations and changes — all of which have been really well received and helped me to calm down some of those pesky internal voices.
Tightening up
The main change I’ve recommended and begun to implement this week is tightening up communication across work toward three of our milestones.
Work towards each of these is being led by a different member of the continuous improvement team and all will dovetail, crossover and have dependencies on one another at different points.The team had done a fantastic job at self organising to check in and out every week, looking after one another’s well being, and making themselves available to one another.
However the team felt more could be done to share what was happening, what we were learning and what’s coming up.
The work is too separate to need to formalise it with a proper scrum calendar of ceremonies. But we’ve tightened things up by:
Holding fortnightly planning sessions (the first of which was a success this week) where we focus on setting a goal for each milestone and calling out the activities we need to complete to get there with the space to question one another’s work and any dependencies.
And fortnightly sharing sessions, opened out to a wider group with the key purpose of sharing learning and progress and reflecting on whether any developments will impact other work.
As well as, extending the weekly check ins and check outs to allow us to update and review progress using our snazzy new Trello board.
They’re simple steps and while I kind of wanted to avoid being the delivery manager that starts and says “OH SO YOU NEED TO SPRINT PLAN “- as if that would solve all of the wolds problems, they feel like the right ones for now.
Stakeholder mapping
I’ve also been working with our continuous improvement lead to design a session on stakeholder mapping for the team away day next week (which I’ll unfortunately miss as it’s my wedding anniversary and I’ll be at a spa).
It’s been really interesting doing a deeper dive into something and working out the best way to pitch it to a varied audience — with the team working across lots of different functions at different levels.
Figuring out something which was scaleable as a learning and testing exercise for 50 people but specific and focused enough to easily translate into a template to work through in a real situation was something I really enjoyed.
You’ll have to come back next week if you want to know how the session went, though I won’t be running it I’m keen to hear how it lands with the team and if they found it useful.
Community of Practice
If you read Jo Garwood’s weeknotes, you’ll already know all about our Delivery Community Practice.
We encourage delivery managers (and those interested in/ already doing delivery things) to come together to share with and learn from one another. We do this in a variety of ways with one of the best (in my opinion) being monthly delivery lunches.
For these lunches we try to invite an external speaker, someone who’s doing delivery out in the world that exists beyond Citizens Advice to come and talk to us about their role and see where we can help one another.
This week we had a fantastic talk from Zalika from UCL about her role, the challenges she’s faced and how she approaches her role. She’d chosen to present using Miro, rather than a slide deck with lots of visual prompts to help with flow. The format was great as was the content and I felt that the discussion which followed around scaling agile and planning effective, engaging and fun retrospectives was something everyone could take something away from. Thanks Zalika!
Non-work life…
I’ve spent a lot of my free time over the last few months trying to prepare our garden for the summer (which felt like it was never going to arrive, and has now hit us with a massive bang, to the detriment of my sleeping pattern).
We moved into a nearly-new build last august and it was fairly evident straight away the garden had been used as the developers dumping ground before they laid the turf -shakes fist-. The whole back section was so dense with rubble that grass would never be able to take root and the rest of it was so lumpy and bumpy you risked a sprained ankle every time you stepped out the back door.
A few tonnes (literal tonnes, as in 1000’s of kilograms, not a colloquialism) of hardcore dug up and removed, ground flattened to the best of my limited ability, grass laid and meticulously cared for, fences and shed painted, patio relaid and FINALLY, we’re ready to have a barbecue for England’s first match of the Euros!
I had a trial run at making some frozen Daiquiris last Saturday before hosting our first ever barbecue this weekend and they turned out so well that I also made them on Sunday — ever the delivery manager, I did so in search of continuous improvement and added ice cream, I can vouch that it was a successful iteration.
BUT If you want the recipe to conduct your own user testing, you’ll have to read next week’s weeknote. Or should that be next week’s note? I’m not sure, but either way — same time, same place, 7 days from now.
I promise the next one won’t be so long!
