Weeknotes S02 E16 — Everything Everywhere All at Once
(I’m shamelessly stealing my colleague’s favourite description of our current pattern of work for this weeknote title)
In short, there’s a lot going on; customers about to go live, The Big Project on the verge of completing, my own project kicking off, more demands on what we need to get delivered, work on defining new features for customers and scoping new projects. Plus the odd crisis thrown in here and there.
All of this is fine, and I think I’m coping OK so far. But we’ve been having team discussions this week about dropping Scrum as an approach for our day-to-day core work.
With priorities changing so rapidly and frequently, the idea of having a well-defined sprint with goal that the team are allowed to self-manage isn’t really holding up to scrutiny. Some of the ceremonies feel a bit forced, or are put off to cope with changes.
I got very excited about the move to Scrum when we made the jump a while back, but I can see that it’s not really working as it should in ideal circumstances, and as an approach it may need to be confined to projects with more specific goals to achieve.
Working patterns
In complete contrast, the week began almost serene. Not only was my choice of working the Bank Holiday an enjoyable one, it was massively productive. I got two large jobs out of the way, with no meetings to interrupt my concentration.
I can see now why people choose to work late into an evening, or do some hours at the weekend. In fact, I got a bit drawn in, working late(r) on Friday after starting some content structuring work for a customer, partly helped by my wife being out until early evening (not to mention just having fun doing content work I don’t get to do any more). I also came back to it on Saturday at 4:30am after waking far too early, which was a daft move given I had a 200-mile round trip to Oxford a few hours later.
I value my weekends and down time too much to make this a regular habit. In some ways it was easier to keep an eye on (for me and my staff) when I was on a time recording system.
Low Code Digital Waste Project
Now elections are over, and funding has been announced, I guess it’s OK to say that my own project is phase 2 of the DHLUC funded Low Code Digital Waste project, using continuity funding from Local Digital.
The project will have its own comms and blog posting, so I won’t be competing with that here, just dropping in personal thoughts. As I’ll be running solo as Product Owner on this one it will be more about charting what I learn and my own successes (and the odd failure I’m sure)
This week we had our delayed Kick-Off meeting to work through vision, goals, culture, roles etc. I’m lucky to be working with the same delivery manager used for Phase 1, and some artefacts from that phase will be useful in defining requirements for this phase.
I did a bit of impromptu research into one of the features we’re looking to develop around waste notifications. Feels like there are dozens of examples live right now, but the patterns seem to focus around an account-based sign-up or (more commonly) an email subscription off the back of a bin collection day reminder. Looking forward to the workshop to discuss this next week.
Everything Directories All at Once
It was great to catch up again with the team at Greenwich, and other partners looking at the use of Outpost and Scout, at a Community meet-up. This is a bit of a carry-over from my days at Dorset Council, but still relevant to the work I’m doing now. Also, I loved the structured conversation format they used to get ideas on what to discuss quickly, and the time-limited discussion in each. Will have to steal that one.
It does feel like things are taking shape in this area, with DfE progressing plans to create a unified Directory from local authority directory data (we had a really productive conversation with them a week or so ago) and Ofsted starting to think about APIs for their non-confidential data.
The Open Referral UK standard is taking centre stage for all this work, and it’s great to have an expert working for us in the company, not to mention making it core to how we use data for our own Community Directory product.
Blogging for Placecube
This week also saw my first official blog post for Placecube go out. I had great fun working with the marketing team on this — really admire their attention to detail and willingness to let me rabbit on about stuff we’re up to.
Sounds like I’m on the cards for writing up our experiences at the LocalGovCamp regional events, and the workshop that’s been running at each one.
Quick thoughts
- I heard that if Back to the Future was filmed today, Marty McFly would be heading to 1993. I can’t even process that
- LocalGovCamp Wales was uncannily quiet on social media. Here’s hoping that Glasgow makes a bit more noise
- Manage to end up in a twitter debate around Alastair Campbell’s appearance on Newsnight, which had ended up in a bit of a shouting match. Really didn’t manage to convince many people that calm and well put arguments are more likely to win over minds than ‘being passionate’ (i.e. interrupting and raising voices). I post below my favourite example of debate done well by the amazing Akala
Spot Of the Week
Exhausted.
