Weeknotes S02 E17 — Don’t Have the Vegan Morning Roll

This week I managed to travel 1,112 miles to attend an event, get there and home again in the space of 41 hours, and not stay in a hotel. The only bad part of the experience was the ‘vegan sausage in morning roll with sweet pickle’ breakfast. It was really bad. Almost inedibly bad. The travel, however, was bliss.

As a tofu-eating, sandal-wearing member of the wokerati I’d taken a decision a while back to travel sustainably whenever I can. This is a doddle when on the continent, as they invest in public transport and make it a preferred choice for people, rather than making it a hell on earth experience that costs a fortune and hardly runs (yes, I’m looking at our local bus timetable here, Dorset Council…). Also, plane travel really sucks. You know it’s true.

Getting to Glasgow mid-week looked like it might be a challenge until I remembered that there is an excellent sleeper service between London and Scotland that I’d used before. So the journey saw me put a full day’s work on Wednesday, hop on a train to London that evening, board the sleeper at 10:45pm that night, wake up in Glasgow for the morning of the event and get there before my manager. Even though the return journey was the same day I still got to stay for the whole event, after-event drinks and a meal before (literally) crossing the road to the station and getting in my bed to journey home.

And to give credit, I was able to complete my journey home from Dorchester by taking a bus. The 2nd time in 2 1/2 years that’s actually happened.

Have to give a shout out to this guy boarding the train at Euston. I think his journey may have made for a more interesting weeknote. Dude, where’s the stovepipe hat tho?

LocalGovCamp Scotland

I’d volunteered to come to Glasgow when we were dividing up the Placecube attendance rota for the regional LocalGovCamp events, as I’d never been before but heard so many great things about it. While I was able to experience the warmth, brilliance and humour of the Scots while there, my ruthlessly efficient travel plan meant I actually saw very little of Glasgow itself, which I’m going to have to resolve at a future date.

LocalGovCamp was a treat in so many ways. Great to meet people in person; my manager again (of course) a batch of new people, and people I’d only known online previously like my predecessor at Dorset Council, Laura Hall, the lovely and brilliant speaker Anne-Marie Barlow (another Dorset escapee) and Esther Gunn-Stewart who was drop dead impressive and treated us to dinner. And of course, our excellent event organiser Nick Hill, who can tell a tale about the after effects of extra-hot curries better than any mainstream comedian can.

Some really great presentations were on offer. Stand outs for me were:

• Anne-Marie taking us through her journey into change management and how we make mistakes in presenting change to people (“it’s not Christmas”). An absolute masterclass in how to put a presentation together. What a shame we never got to work with each other at Dorset Council
• Craig Barker on focusing on creating a multi-disciplinary team to deliver transformation rather than developers and coding. How he created a team in a room of 70 people using rock-paper-scissors was amazing. Also he generated a huge amount of engagement when talking about a practical example of a low code application (VIPER) that has gone on to get Local Digital funding
• Kat Sexton (I miss her so) on creating a culture of innovation in local government and doing the hard thing of measuring you’ve achieved the goals

(side note: I’m breaking my weeknote rule of not using names here as these aren’t folk I work with on a regular basis, regrettably. I’ll maintain anonymity for the one person for who meeting in real life was a crashing disappointment and lived up to everything other people had warned me in advance)

Me ‘n the boss also dabbled in running one of the four workshops (twice, back-to-back) on developing a great council/supplier relationship, which featured the background music from the Vision On Gallery segment — reproduced here for your audible entertainment.

I have to admit, the brains behind this workshop was many miles away at the time and I would have paid good money to have her there as my confidence took a nose-dive during the morning. She’d run this workshop in Newcastle and Wales to much acclaim, and despite picking her brains beforehand everything she’d told me was forgotten in the moment. Too much focus on the travel and not enough around the purpose of being there, Mr Lawrence!

However, as it turns out I soon found my inner tart and started enjoying myself in facilitating. Our participants were brilliant, and squeezing all of the conversation that emerged into 30 mins was pretty difficult as people engaged with the topic.

I won’t go into what we discovered just yet as we still have LocalGovCamp London to run the workshop again, and then we’re planning a monster blog post (as Placecube) to bring it all together and share with the world.

Low Code Digital Waste Project

Looking back at my scant Daily Notes from this week (due to travel) it would have been easy to miss the start of sprint 1 for the project.

A key deliverable this week was getting everyone up to speed on the capabilities of Liferay Commerce, which is going to be a new feature we bring into the platform to help councils create trading platforms and sell their services more effectively.

Liferay were brilliant in getting a demo arranged at short notice and taking us through the multitude of things it can do.

We’re also a good chunk of the way through our much-delayed microsite implementation, which had been started a while ago but got moved down the backlog as more pressing priorities emerged. It’s great to see designs from Figma becoming reality — always gives me a buzz.

The UR/UX plan is coming together nicely for all the sprints. Great working with real experts on this stuff who can see the way through the clouds and focus on the things to achieve (and when).

The Project On The Side (aka ‘The Everlasting Workstopper’)

We are SO close to completing this project! But not quite there yet. Monday should see us all ready to go and lined up to deploy.

We learned a ton of things through this one, so the retro board will need to be on the side of a building. Lots of great things to flag of course; pulling together in a common aim, working the problem and moving forwards, pitching in thoughts and picking up tasks, developing tools and approaches to make the next time round an easier thing.

The challenges have been numerous, not least of which having adequate time and resource to get it done, the pressure of expectations from others and the impact on other work. We also need to find a way to move this sort of project from being a ‘their’ project into being an ‘our’ project.

We had our new Head of Engineering start this week and I’m dying to meet him to get his insight into what we can do differently (and better) next time.

Miscommunication

It’s easy to look back on the week as a wholly positive experience, but this is why I’m also doing my daily notes.

Tuesday started out with a few things that happened in quick succession which saw me descend into a rage, feeling exploited, under appreciated and even a bit betrayed. Painting yourself into a corner with emotion leaves you with few escape routes, but with the benefit of a more relaxed and rational mood I can see that none of those feelings were based on fact, and how I reacted could have been handled much better.

Talking to others about how you feel is so important. I had the benefit of my wife to debrief with, my lovely teammate who listened and spoke wise words to me, and my manager who soaked it up, found a way forward and made me feel all good by the end of the day. I thought twice about committing this to weeknotes, but the purpose of this writing thing is to properly reflect and learn from what I do, so here it all is.

I do look at others as role models for how I want to behave, and marvel in envy at how they manage to cope so much better than me. One former colleague (from decades ago) used to get berated by a senior manager on a regular basis in front of other people, and I asked her the secret of how she stayed so calm. She visualised herself watching the confrontation from the other side of the room rather than being a participant (an out-of-body meeting experience if you like) which is a trick I’ve never been able to manage, and is made a tad more difficult when working remotely. I’ll keep trying.

Quick thoughts

• who knew that expresso martinis could taste so wonderful? Thanks for that, Esther
• the design of the Apple Macbook charger is ridiculous; all the weight of the charging block pulling down in the direction that uncouples the plug part, so the tiniest tap means it falls apart. As I discovered a dozen times
• Managed to attend four online meetings on the train from London to Dorchester, but as I was in the quiet carriage did them all using chat only. I can’t type quickly or accurately enough, but enjoyed being translated for the person doing the screenshare who couldn’t see my comments (“Neil is saying….’xwht cn wee do’…ah, ‘what can we do’ ”)
• I looked back through my Google Drive archive from 2012 and found a presentation I did for a training event (on doing presentations, how meta) called ‘Train not Plane’