The Civic Centre

Going to rattle through these weeknotes rather fast as I’d quite like to get back to Sunday. (I’m going to cut down on social media too.)

Roadmapping

On Tuesday I brought together the team leads to talk about their OKRs for Q3 plus map dependencies between teams.

It was pretty simple: each team went over their OKRs and other teams got to ask questions; after that, each team mentioned any dependencies they might have on another team, whether that’s asking questions, collecting information, collaborating on initiatives, or asking them to prepare or build something.

This forces people to think about the discovery-type activities or alignment needed upfront. I’ve always found that when you frontload an initiative with asking questions, gathering facts, planning collaborative work or mapping things out, it always pays off somewhere down the line. A couple of teams haven’t thought hard enough about this before, sliding from sprint to sprint, and I want people to use quarterly planning effectively.

Plans do and will change, but you must plan. Flying by the seat of your pants rarely works well, and especially not on a platform that’s so integral to real change in our economy.

The roadmap should be updated once this PR is merged.

Open day

I travelled up to Newcastle for Open Digital Planning’s open day. It was a cracking event, I got to meet loads of people from local planning authorities whom I’d only met over video chat – and had lots of catch-ups with people on the programme.

Spent a lot of time talking to Will after doorstepping him at breakfast in the hotel! It wasn’t only productive work-wise, it was fun too. I feel pretty lucky to work alongside someone with his experience but with whom I also see eye-to-eye on things.

Loads of good stuff happened: Bradford showed off their innovative mapping work, Barnet chatted to me about issues with vendors, folks from our team gave live data support, and we all got to admire the beautiful civic centre in Newcastle.

It’s an incredible building: think mid-century, and ‘60s Soviet.

Matt and Will ran a session on the future model for Open Digital Planning, which raised lots of questions amongst the attendees. The aim was to create some principles that might go in a manifesto, so I suggested an alternate version of the workshop. Stuffed myself up there, then they asked me to run it! People seemed to vibe with it, and we got plenty of material that could help shape a manifesto – or feed wider discussions.

Stakeholders

The week ended well. I found out that a recent meeting with the Chief Planner went well and they’d like to speak to us more. That’s a big relief. Still lots of unknowns due to Spend Review but I’m glad we haven’t been forgotten.

New product course

In case you missed it, there is a new introductory course to product management.

Japan

We booked our hotel for Tokyo, so it’s starting to feel very real. Need to buy a rail pass too, plus plan the trip around Shikoku. We might freestyle the rest of it. We’ve got a plan of where we want to go but won’t book anything too far in advance. It’d be nice to play it by ear, take each day as it comes.

That may be wildly impractical. We’ll find out!

Music

Really getting back into listening to music.

Continuing to listen to lots of Sam Wilkes and Sam Gendel, but also enjoying Nala Sinephro’s latest. Picked up a compilation of tunes from blues dances and house parties which made the washing up enjoyable today. Then I listened to Blake Mills, Kiefer Trio and Makaya McCraven while making a ragù and a pumpkin pie.

Bookmarks

· Weeknotes

0 replies, 1 reposts, 4 likes