I’ve spent time this week connecting people to other people, who are working on similar things. It’s felt really satisfying, and as though I’m beginning to find my way around the organisation.
5 (great) things that happened this week
- A small internal project team got together to work on a shared problem, and gracefully allowed me to work with them to plan it out as an agile project*. They took a bit of a leap of faith with me, that by doing it this way we could deliver something of value quickly. I really enjoyed it — and it’s working.
- Swim(s) 6 and 6.1 of 8. Yes that’s right, I went twice. **
- I met colleagues in our legal department to talk about how we can help them use user journey mapping to better understand a problem. The workshop is next week and I’m looking forward to seeing the outcomes.
- I worked on developing our apprenticeship programme — meeting Andrew and Alex from Employment Pathways, thinking about the first few networking events we’ve set up, and I also met Jack Graham who gave me insight into the work Year Here are doing, and intros into local orgs who are working on inspiring women into tech roles.
- I asked for help with analysing and visualising our ICT survey data later this month — and several colleagues immediately got in touch offering to show me how to do things I wouldn’t know how to do otherwise.
https://media.giphy.com/media/SKab6E8Qeg7sY/giphy.gif
Also — coming up
Richard, our lead user researcher has organised for the next cross govt user research meet up to be at Hackney, the first at a local authority. The theme is ‘Making user research safe for participants and researchers’.
What I read this week:
Finally finished Tobias Mayer’s book of blogs/essays The People’s Scrum. Thoughtful and thought provoking essays.
I particularly liked the essay called ‘Don’t have meetings’ . . .
Scrum is centered on people, and people have conversations. There are conversations to plan, conversations to align, and conversations to reflect. We have these conversations at the appropriate times, and for the approrpiate durations to inform our work. If we don’t have these conversations, we won’t know what we are doing (planning), we won’t know where we are going (alignment) and we’ll keep repeating the same mistakes (reflection).
Rahma Mohamed ‘s weeknotes on the work she’s doing on two of our key projects.
And Gavin Beckett’s reflections on his One Team Gov , which reminded me that I haven’t written mine, yet.
*3 sprints of a week each, on a visible wall. I used my BIG post its, a gift from Rebecca Kemp (she knew they’d come in useful in my new job).
**But after some discussion it has been decided that it doesn’t count as number 7.
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