The Normal Service Resumes

Oi oi. Aer bin ya aer kid? First week back wor it?

Sure felt like it too. Plenty of people saying they spent the week shifting into gear. Nice to have the routine back though, the chats, the catch-ups, the distractions from eating another round of cheese and biscuits.

All in all it was a decent first week back at work. Hoping it sets the course for the rest of the quarter. Amongst other things, I

  • caught up with psd, our deputy director and a bunch of people on our teams
  • filled out my to-do list for the week (an important task from my last weeknote)
  • remembered I was going to Manchester for a team workshop on Wednesday, so booked (expensive) train tickets
  • formed a plan for Wednesday with Gordon, our senior delivery manager
  • prepared the workshops for Wednesday
  • established an online version of our service handbook
  • facilitated a roadmapping workshop and future-spective with the team leads in Manchester
  • wrote up and shared the outputs of the workshops, including the next steps for improving our ways of working
  • presented our Q4 OKRs to the rest of the programme
  • finished off a discovery brief
  • drafted our value stream, and
  • drafted a new organisation design, redefining our teams and their boundaries.

Tracking tasks and focus time

I jumped back in to tracking my work in Notion. It has been helpful and given me licence to get my head down, but there’s a few jobs I outlined in December that need doing to create more focus time.

  • Re-introduce weekly, daily and monthly planning and reviews, to keep myself accountable to myself
  • Increase my focus time to 3 hours every morning
  • Set up rules for focus time: no emails, no Slack, only work that requires deep cognitive effort (like doing analyses, shaping strategies, writing docs, forming plans, etc.)
  • Establish an interruption protocol: how to get hold of me urgently, and expectation-setting on not always giving immediate answers otherwise
  • Track low-impact task: I’ve never really looked at these, but see which of these I can delegate or postpone until the last responsible moment

It was a handy coincidence that psd mentioned he also wanted to create more focus time and was going to move some one-to-ones around to create room. I’ll try and keep him accountable to that, as it gave me permission to find more focus time.

Service handbook

One of my big reckons is that when you’re in the beta stage, you need to be establishing a playbook or handbook for your product or service. It’s the instruction manual your team needs to operate and iterate the service. It’s the manual you’ll edit and add to as you extend and expand your capabilities.

You see, most people want to know what they work on, what’s their role, and what they should do. Few people want to turn up to work and embark on self-discovery to learn what they’ve signed up for. But once you lay out the basic information, they’re dead good at building on top of that, taking things a step further and making stuff better. That’s why we hire them.

I’ve been in two teams now where a handbook has helped us do more, do better, for users. And that’s something we’ve needed on the planning data platform recently too.

Though we do already have a service handbook, it’s in a drive somewhere and not updated as often as it could be. As a mixed team, it’s not always easy for contractors or civil servants to get access in their first few days. And we’re having to move providers soon anyway. So it’s better to have our handbook on the public internet – especially since we’re blessed with having few sensitive processes that need to remain private.

There’s also a contract change coming up, where there may be new people joining the team, so this quarter is a documentation quarter. Get it all written down so that the knowledge isn’t lost if people leave the team.

I got the first version of our service handbook online and added a few draft sections. Next week I need to review our existing handbook and move content to the new place, and work out which of our existing microsites could make it into the handbook.

And that’s my main job for this quarter. Make sure everyone on the team knows who we are, what we do, and how we work.

Roadmapping

This is a fairly lightweight workshop I’ve run for a couple of quarters now. To be more accurate, it’s a dependency mapping workshop but I ask the teams to run some quarterly checkpoint workshops which feed in. It helps them look at their objectives, what they’ve not finished, consider what they’re going to do to meet their new objectives, and form a roadmap for the quarter after considering their capacity.

The dependency mapping workshop helps teams spot, ahead of time, where they need input from another team. It encourages them to organise meetings and refinement sessions, meaning their plans should run much more smoothly.

If I’m honest, it’s not quite delivering what we need from it. The teams were good in the workshop, they acknowledged where they hadn’t been collaborating or creating alignment enough last quarter. But it would help to bring more accountability into the workshop. One delivery manager asked whose job it was to put in meetings to start resolving dependencies, which meant we could be explicit about it. I’ll work that into the agenda for next time.

Future-spective

If a retrospective helps a team look back at how they might improve their ways of working, this future-spective helped us look at how we can improve our ways of working as a team of teams.

Instead of backcasting from a point in the future, like I’ve done before, Gordon suggested we look at strengths, challenges, opportunities and risks. Instead of helping us form a specific plan, it’d make us to think about qualities and capabilities. Always good to have a working partner to share ideas and experience. Thanks, Gordon.

When running the workshop on Wednesday, I posited a point six months in the future that we want to reach, a vision for how we’ll be operating and the outcomes we’ll create for our users. Then I asked the team to highlight some strengths that would carry us there and challenges we might encounter along the way. After that we highlighted opportunities for improving our ways of working – to address the challenges – and risks we want to plan for addressing later.

The outputs were really good. The team identified opportunities to improve how we communicate, how we share knowledge and nuance, and how we make it safe to fail.

I was also chuffed to hear people say they want to make better use of weeknotes, to start writing more detailed notes regularly rather than sending 5 bullet points about our achievements to No. 10 every Thursday. I WAS BUZZING! Yes, come on!

I wrote up the notes on the train back like a proper consultant.

Anyway, it’s on me to carry this through and make sure we make those improvements. So I shared some next steps with the team and we’ll organise some follow-up activities.

Insta hotspot

There’s an Instagram hot spot on my way to work. It’s the phone booth next to Whitehall with a view of Big Ben and the Palace of Westminster in the background. Most days – even before 8 a.m. – there’s a queue of people hoping to get a shot of themselves next to the phone booth. But it was dead on Monday, the first time I’ve ever not seen anyone queued up there.

I wonder when its least busy days are. That’s an momentarily interesting dataset. A load of effort for not much. Anyway, if you want to know when it’s free for pics, now you know.

The Wager

Last week I started reading Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act. I felt like reading something else alongside it, so picked up David Grann’s The Wager which my brother bought me. It’s a non-fiction book about a shipwreck with all the qualities of a good novel, and its eminently readable. Really bloody loving it.

What’s also nice is that Grann calls out the colonialism happening, and he calls out the atrocities that happen to indigenous people. He calls out the othering language. It made me want to read the book again but written from an indigenous perspective. I’ll have a look to see if those exist.

New habits

Self-pat on the back here but I’ve been good at following my “resolutions”. More on those next week because ten days isn’t enough to call it a success.

Events

Oh yeah, I’ve signed up to a heap of events. Lemme know if you’re going to any of these:

Bookmarks

Apologies in advance, this list covers everything I read over the festive break. It’s long.

Here’s the best three bookmarks:

  • Things we learned out about LLMs in 2024, 32 mins. Simon Willison gives an excellent digest of everything that happened last year, including how everything changed massively in the week before Christmas. Merry Moore’s Law.

  • Study Finds Consumers Are Actively Turned Off by Products That Use AI, 2 mins. Who’d have thunk it. A new study shows that mentioning ‘artificial intelligence’ in product descriptions decreases consumer trust and lowers the likelihood of purchases. Share that with your leaders who are lapping up the hype.

  • Sport England, 9 mins. I’m coming to this late but the way FF Studio has collaborated with Sport England to transform their services is inspiring – especially for a little outfit like mine.

Other bookmarks

· Weeknotes

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