The Mind Breathes All Over the Place
There was a lot of information poured into my brain this week. By Friday morning it was spilling over, like strawberry milkshake dribbling over the lip of the glass. Brain-freeze.
Synapses fired but the brain failed. The brain needed a rest. So I took Friday afternoon off.
If the week was a big breath in, this weeknote is my mind breathing out.
Enough of that. What did I do this week?
- Took on some tasks from our operations owner, Emma, who was going on holiday
- Joined a couple of planning sessions and stand-ups to get a feel for what folks are working on
- Joined a research findings playback
- Heard draft Q1 OKRs from all our team leads in a cross-platform playback
- Joined a couple of quick information-sharing meetings (which could have been asynchronous, in Slack or docs)
- Presented our approach to the rest of the programme (in week 2!) with psd and Kate, one of our delivery managers
- Met with a product manager to talk about shaping work for planning data consumers
- Got feedback on a workshop I want to run with all the teams
- Met our business analysts, MJ and Kieran
- Joined the weekly lean coffee for team leads, to align on things
- Helped kick off and catalyse the Value & Performance team with Petrea, product manager, and Louis, performance analyst
- Refined draft OKRs with the team leads
- Gave input on a workshop looking at how we might handle unplanned work, expertly run by MJ
- Caught up with Rachael, product manager, on her team’s prioritised work for the quarter
- Raced across town from Westminster to Whitechapel, so I could squat in the GDS lobby all day
- Met with Rich, who seems to know everything there is to know about the programme!
- Joined my first check-in with the senior leadership team
- Joined a cross-programme call to share what we’re working on, raise issues and spot dependencies
- Drafted ways of working for the Value & Performance team
- Reviewed a draft model for research and design with Alex, design lead
- Learned about our infrastructure and architecture from Owen and Chris, tech lead and tech architect
Now that I’ve written it down, yeah, that really was a lot. No wonder I had to take that afternoon off.
So what have I been thinking about?
The framework of OKRs and initiatives I mentioned last week is only part of the decision stack. It’s an operating system more than anything, but we also need
- to break down our broad mission into milestones
- a set of strategic principles as guardrails
- a list of prioritised initiatives, and
- to instrument a set of metrics that we use to measure progress.
Much of this either exists and needs to be agreed across the platform or is being put together now. So I’m feeling good about that. It feels like we’ll have a roadmap ready by the end of the quarter (Q4), all I need to do is run a workshop with folks and craft a prioritisation framework.
The bit that’s playing on my mind is instrumentation. I don’t know what we’re able to measure now and what we’ll need to build to make more possible. But our performance analyst is validating that over the next couple of weeks.
There’s a lot of holiday over the next two weeks which means I’ll have fewer plates to spin, but fewer people who can answer my questions. Eek.
On the positive side – the hugely positive side – I learned a lot this week that gives me confidence. I had felt as though I would need to do a chunk of generative activity, a range of analyses and research, getting key features written up for backlogs, but I won’t. That stuff already exists either in a team or across the programme, it’s just a case of surfacing it and using it.
Onwards!
Life stuff
My parents came to stay this weekend which was nice. I was so tired when they got here on Friday evening that we decided to have a curry at home rather than get the bus into Croydon for some drinks and dinner. More restful.
On Saturday we had lunch at 10 Greek Street, which was delicious. Good European fare. Then, in the evening, I went to watch Les Misérables with Mum and Dad. More their thing than mine; all I could about was how funny it would be if Matt Berry was the lead character.
Instead of going to the Museum of London Docklands on Sunday, we drove out to a bathroom warehouse in Orpington. We’ve narrowed down the style we want, it’s just a case of picking parts and mocking up a visualisation. Dad and I will fit it together. Looking forward to learning new skills.
Running
An OK week. Got most of my training done…if you ignore the long run of the week. I missed an easy run on Friday, which isn’t too bad, but made up for it with an interval session on Saturday morning at Zone 5 pace – sprinting!
Missed the weekly long run today, which means I’ll have to do it tomorrow, on Monday, before work. Out the door for 6 a.m. so I’m back home around 8/8.30 a.m. Not massively looking forward to it but oh well.