The Gambas Rojas

Another good week. A busy one with a couple of late evenings, but I’ve a good long holiday coming up.

The week started with a programme catch-up. It’s a regular get-together for the senior leadership team (SLT) and service owners across the programme, but it was team leads joining this week. We communicated progress, highlighted enablers and blockers, and identified opportunities for collaboration.

The update from us on Planning Data felt good, as we were able to talk about more local planning authorities submitting data, a healthy response to our call for participation on data standards, and kicking off a couple of collaborative projects with another team on the programme. One of the purposes of the session is to look at the programme roadmap together, and though we highlighted a need to update the programme roadmap, that hasn’t been booked into calendars yet. I’m hoping SLT do that before I go away.

Our teams also had their first sprint dependency-mapping meeting, where each team can highlight what they need from another team. This has happened organically, which is good, but there wasn’t a designated facilitator with an agenda to run though. Feeling a bit awkward about that, I jumped in and ran the session with one of our service designers. It was OK, but really I need to be in the background, only jumping in when teams can’t break ties.

Later I chatted with our senior delivery manager to ask if he’d facilitate the session in future. Though there will be priority calls to make, really the meeting is all about identifying conflicts in sprint planning. Unless a major planning issue comes up where we have to consider which quarterly OKR trumps another, the majority of issues will be delivery-shaped.

One highlight of the week was seeing the Data Management team pull together the beginnings of a data quality framework. It’s great work and they’ve got in early, proposing an initial model just 2 weeks in to the quarter. This gives plenty of time for gathering feedback, making tweaks, and then implementing an agreed framework. I can’t wait to see how they’ve progressed things when I get back from holiday.

I spent some time with our lead developer documenting the work needed downstream when a change to a data specification is made. It’s pretty neat with a fair amount of the work automated, but having a documented process will mean the teams don’t have to think much, just follow a guide. It also gave us time to think about an initiative we can start in future to have all our content living in the data model – even more simplicity!

Had a great session with my coach, Stefan, who helped me figure out how to empower the product managers while I’m away, so that my absence is an opportunity for them to grow. I shared some helpful models and let them know what I’d love to see from them when I return. Next week I need to make sure psd has what he needs.

On Wednesday I had a couple of beers with Simon, and on Thursday I caught up with Matt and James after the first Transform Gov talk. It was nice to hear what the i.AI folks had been up to (and their reflection that having product and delivery managers really, really helps skunkworks projects), and Jeni nailed it with her thoughts on the new digital centre of government.

Jeni Tennison sharing a slide that reads ‘Work in the open, think in the open, dream in the open’.

Thursday’s show & tell was cracking, lots of good work happening across all the teams. So much progress has been made since March and I feel like the teams are gelling well. What’s more, it’s working and delivering value for users. That’s what it’s all about, after all! More to do to solve the supply-side problem but we are definitely making some inroads.

Really enjoyed reading about being strategic, a piece from Lenny’s Newsletter. Deffo check it out in the bookmarks.

I wrote up a list of services people can hire me to do. If people don’t know what they need, a distinct list of things they can get seems helpful.

Eating, drinking

After receiving some good news, I went out for dinner at Barrafina on Wednesday. Chiperoñes, hake, and gambas rojas. Perfectly accompanied by Cruceiro de Ferreiros, from near Pontevedra.

The canteen at 2 Marsham St put in a good show too. They were serving up roast turkey and cranberry sauce on Thursday, a nod towards Christmas.

Yesterday we went to Gnarly Vines for their orange wine tasting. The Luminophage was my favourite, although every single one had its own character. We bought a bottle of Crémant d’Alsace – whose name I came across in some article, but I can’t remember where – and sipped it in their garden. The fine bubbles went really well with a hot pepperoni pizza from Yard Sale.

Hidde sent me a bar of Tony’s Chocolate as a thank-you for my talk at NL Design Systems Week. How did he know my favourite flavour?! Thank you, Hidde, it was delicious.

Listening

We went to see our friend play in their band, London Ambient Orchestra, at St John on Bethnal Green. It was the perfect venue for the music, and the sound engineers were on point. I really enjoyed Ibukun Sunday too, his electronic bits are excellent.

Bookmarks

· Weeknotes

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