Weeknotes S01E03 — Hopes, Fears, Quizzes and Cupcakes…
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They say time flies when you’re having fun — I can’t believe this is the third instalment of my weeknotes already. If you’ve been reading since episode 1, you’ll only need to collect 3 more stamps to get your 7th free if you make it through this one!
Planning
This week has been about one thing and one thing only for me.
Planning, facilitating and attending planning sessions has made up the bulk of my week.
On Tuesday I facilitated some planning for the extended scope team, where we looked to build out a timeline for the quarter, we focused on identifying and discussing:
- Key dates, where we may need to influence or be influenced, for example points where members of our leadership team will be meeting with external stakeholders.
- Milestones, the points at which we need to deliver things or have answers to certain questions, the important thing here was to remain open enough to allow for our research to influence what we deliver and what answers we give at these points.
- Risks, what can we already see coming that has the potential to alter our path or derail us, we’ll be able to discuss these with each other and our stakeholders
- Dependencies and crossover, what do we need from each other or other people to be able to realise our ambitions?
I’ve often heard it be said that agile teams don’t plan, when there is a definite argument to be made that we plan more than other types of team.
Our quarterly plan looks great — we’re fairly sure about what we’re going to be doing over the next 6 weeks or so, and very clear on where our key decision points and influences will be coming from. But we’re less confident beyond that, as evidenced by less sticky notes on that end of the timeline.
We know the things we’re trying to make better and the questions we need to answer, but we’re agnostic about what the solutions actually are right now.
We know who we’ll lean on to help us make decisions (beyond our users and clients) and we’ll talk about what we’re doing, discovering and what all of that means for what comes next every 2 weeks to add to and refine what’s in our backlog.
I was then able to take part in the second session of the Help to Claim programme quarterly planning (the first of which I mentioned last week), which has really given me insight into the breadth and depth of the work going on and how ambition everyone is. I’m looking forward to playing a bigger part next quarter.
The future of work
As the last restrictions start to lift and we continue to gradually work our way back towards normality, I don’t think I’ve been alone in feeling a certain amount of anxiety about what that will look and feel like.
Covid forced us into home working, to adopting and adapting to remote solutions and tools. We’ve just started to see people be able to go back to our offices and while the take up has been low so far, I don’t think that will be the case for long.
Our Continuous Improvement lead — Joe, ran a session with us this week on our hopes and fears as more flexible working becomes an option, the biggest theme to appear was the pessimism and caution about hybrid collaboration and meetings (where some people are together in a location, like a meeting room and others are dialling in separately).
It was great to be a participant in a session like this, usually with me being the facilitator I’d begun to lose sight of how good it feels just to be able to surface things and get them off your chest.
Supporting people to become comfortable with everything remote was such a big thing last year, so much so that I penned my first ever medium article on the subject of making online meetings feel less of a chore.
Adapting our culture again to define when we meet online, when we meet in person and how we make hybrid work when neither is fully possible is going to be hot topic over the next few months. I missed our delivery community of practice session as it was on Monday, which is my non-working day but it seems there were some really good conversations started around this there.
If you’ve already got this cracked, please do reach out!!
Working at Citizens Advice
Just a reminder that we’re recruiting for Delivery Managers and quite a few other roles across DDaT (Design, Data and Technology) and the organisation.
My colleague Quinn Daley wrote a medium article recently about what it’s like to work in their team. Whilst our experiences before and during our times with Citizens Advice are different, the key message remains the same. Citizens Advice is a place that I’m proud to work at and that actually, I think is proud to have me as well.
My time and efforts are valued not only through the monetary reward of my salary, but with support, training and progression opportunities. It’s somewhere that I’m able to be me, the real, whole me at work — which I’ve never been able to say before (okay, maybe I swear a bit more at home) and somewhere that I feel like we’re at least trying to always do the right thing (acknowledging we’ll sometimes get it wrong and learning from it) and making a positive impact.
If that still hasn’t sold it to you and you want to hear more — you can find the details of the hiring manager for all of our roles in the job packs attached to the job descriptions, we welcome informal chats from anyone who’s thinking about applying.
If you’re thinking about a delivery role you can also chat to me, Jo Garwood(delivery lead) or Matt White(Head of Delivery).
The Friday quiz
We have a weekly quiz on a Friday, with a quizmaster nominated each week by slackbot on a Wednesday afternoon.
I came to the conclusion that my colleagues think I’m predictable — when the immediate reaction when I was chosen as quizmaster this week was that my quiz would revolve around football and/or Formula one.
Here are the questions I used this week, see if you can spot the theme, the answers will be at the end!
- What word do the military commonly use instead of the word “minute”?
- What is the element symbol for aluminium?
- I’m one of a pair, but I’m not a twin. I can be shined, but I’m not a torch. I have a tongue, but I cannot speak. What am I?
- Which word is this the definition for according to google? “The ratio of the speed of a body of sound in the surrounding medium”
- Douglas Ross was a character on which Chicago based tv show in the 1990's?
0 questions about Football OR Formula one!
Non work life
My weekend was actually more hectic than my work week, believe it or not!
My wife runs a cupcake business from home around her day job, with this weekend being Father’s Day, it meant my little kitchen (and living room…) became a cupcake factory for 24 hours.
Though she likes to wind me up by telling me to “stop delivery managing” her, everything was baked and boxed up by 3pm on Saturday this time around (that was NOT the case on Mother’s Day…). We used a new incremental approach to preparing the cupcakes and filling the cupcake boxes which was a definite improvement. I even got to use post it’s and a sharpies!!
Yet to convince her to use a Kanban board… though.
In real non-work life, I’ve lost count of the amount of football I’ve watched in the last week — all I know is I’m not getting any better at Fantasy Football and my teams across multiple sweepstakes aren’t fairing much better.
Seeing as I’m not doing very well at games of skill or luck, maybe the trip to Vegas next year isn’t such a good idea after all…
Quiz Answers
- Mic
- Al
- Shoe
- Mach
- Er
Or Michael Schumacher — If you’d prefer!
