It was a short work week this week as I took Thursday afternoon and Friday off for a much needed break, hence shorter weeknotes.
Monday
I started my week with the team starting to plan out our MVP for beta. There were some great discussions, along with some challenges but the whole team are working really well together so it was a good session and a good outcome. We started by sharing our peaks and pits of the weekend — it was interesting that so many of the peaks involved spending time with family and friends, and reminded me how much we all have in common and why I think it’s so important to get to know people, and everything that they bring to work.
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I also went to talk to our IT colleagues about our digital roadmap and how I see us working together to support the organisation to transform. It was a good session, with lots of great questions and discussion. They’re split over three sites so are making innovative use of skype for business to get together.
Tuesday
Was a really busy day — lots of meetings but I did find time for a really useful discussion about benefits mapping with Kate, our transformation director. At the end of the day I made it to yoga @rebelstudio. I’ve written before about how yoga helps me calm down and relax — often I have a lot of different ideas/thoughts/tasks in my head at once, and I find it useful to focus on just the breathing at yoga.
Wednesday
Busier than it might have been because I was trying to clear various things so that I could take the rest of the week off. We also had our second in house yoga session — Philippa and I have organised 8 sessions as a pilot to see what happens. This week we had 9 people (pretty much the max we can fit in) which was brilliant.
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Thursday
I managed to fit a lot into Thursday morning — including a skype call with Curtis, who’s mainly based in Nottingham at the moment, and a coaching session with Sarah Gornall. She is AMAZING and has been incredibly helpful in helping me work on all sorts of challenges and areas of development since last January.
Last but not least I had a catch up with John who’s joining us on secondment from a different team in Acas to train to be a content designer. One strand of our digital capability strategy is to train existing Acas people with new skills so that we grow our own talent. We’re doing this at the same time as recruiting in some of the skills we need and using digital marketplace to bring in teams to work alongside us. So far this approach has worked really well, and I’m really proud of what we’ve achieved so far.
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What have I read this week?
Not as much as usual — but I did find an interesting blog post about meetings and how to make them better. I’m thinking about buying the book it recommends — has anyone else got a recommendation on improving meetings they can share?
I read lots of other weeknotes for inspiration for mine — thanks Dan Barrett Sam Villis and @jukesie amongst many others.
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