Weeknotes S01E05 — I cannot escape and I cannot forget… ♪

Agnostic Agile

Agnostic agile isn’t a term I’d come across before, but our community of practice were really fortunate to have Iwona Winiarska come and talk to us this week.

She spoke about delivering user value and business value and how being agnostic of which frameworks and processes would work before engaging and understanding what a team or organisation is trying to achieve is really important.I think this was such a neat way of describing what I was saying around our consultancy and coaching in my last weeknote.

That we want to be able to help teams be more agile where it works for them but that we’ll always focus on their context before prescribing or introducing any frameworks or processes and also be realistic about where agile isn’t the answer.

There are always choices and decisions to be made, but the lead up to making them is the most important part.

Our monthly delivery lunches are my favourite part of our community of practice, we invite external speakers from far and wide corners of LinkedIn and Twitter to come and chat to us about anything Delivery. Whether it be something they’re particularly passionate about or expert in — or to give us a day in the life of what delivery is like where they are.

They’re always so interesting and engaging and one meeting that I’m always happy to make the time for.

What to do, what to do, what to do….

I’ve been lending some support this week to the Advice Content team whilst their Delivery Manager is off upholding the sanctity of the British justice system (on jury service).

Our Advice Content team is one of our most complex teams, we have over 1500 advice pages, which received 60 million views last year.

This week we’ve been considering what should be pulled into our three delivery teams (Tina, Cher and Whitney — because why wouldn’t you name your teams after pop divas?) roadmaps and it’s been helpful to spend some time with some of our content strategy managers, legal leads and our senior user researcher to zoom out and re-focus.

The way I’ve approached framing our conversations is pulling right back to the basics of what the team exists to do:
1. Make our content more sustainable
2. Make sure our content meets the (changing) needs of our users
3. Keep content accurate and reliable

Maintaining our content is a mammoth task within itself, but we also need to make sure that the advice we’re giving is meeting our users needs, finding the balance of how our content designers, subject matter experts and user researchers split their time across different types of work is extremely challenging when you have the amount of content that we do.

There are thousands, if not millions of different ways you could legitimately prioritise.

I’m hopeful that focusing our vision on the value we want to give to our users and ensuring the work we do contributes towards it, will mean we never go too far wrong.

Good Days and Bad Days..

I’m quite open about the fact I have moments of self doubt and challenging internal conversations, I think it’s all part and parcel of being in an environment where you’re able to challenge yourself.

I’ll be honest, until recently I always found it really easy to be open about when I’ve had a rough day, where I feel stretched or out of my depth and need to call on help — but don’t acknowledge or celebrate the good days, which I think is equally important to do for yourself and as a leader, to encourage and do for others whether that be in teams or individuals.

I used to hide away from calling out when I feel like I’ve done a good job or feel like I’ve achieved something for fear of it coming across as boasting or being cocky.

But in a world where we’re all so harsh on ourselves I think it’s a POSITIVE thing to write here that I had one of those days, where at the end of the day when I closed my laptop instead of an exhale and a sense of relief my reflection was “F#@k me I’m good at this” this week.

So cheers to telling everyone anyone that’ll listen (or read) that you’re good at and love what you do, let’s do it more often. (expletives optional).

All around me are familiar faces ♪

In addition to making some really good progress it was really lovely to see some familiar faces.

I worked across our advice content teams for a long time before joining my current team — and in the world of remote work where if I bumped into a colleague in the kitchen my first question would be “how do you know where I live?” With the second being “how did you get in here?” I’d lost nearly all connection with people that I’d seen everyday for as long as my (fading rapidly with age) memory can adequately remember.

I make no secret of the fact hat I’m very happy to work at home and in fact, prefer it (and not just because of the sub-30 second, 100% reliable commute) but seeing people for the first time in months that I’d have still bumped into here and there was something that made me miss that environment.

I guess my reflection is that when working remotely, moving teams was actually a much bigger change than it would’ve been in an office environment.

Non work life

I mean, there’s really only ONE thing to talk about this week….

Atomic Kitten have only gone and got the band back together again.

I wonder what could’ve caused that?

I mean, just look at all them Atomic Kitten super fans, having the time of their lives, they couldn’t be happier.