Weeknotes: week 32

Talking, not shouting

The Terrible Awful

The week started badly with a growing sense of frustration and panic about where we were with the CMS migration, which culminated in some wholly unprofessional behaviour from me. There were shouty outbursts, dropping out of meetings and walks around the garden to cool down. Not proud.

If I had to justify it (which, let’s be honest, I can’t) it’s probably bubbled up after several weeks of frustration in waiting for things to make themselves right. I’ve learned to use my team as a barometer of overall confidence in progress, and their confidence was pretty low too. How had we gotten to this when so much work was ongoing and new features being delivered?

I took a decision to push back our pre-launch content freeze until we could get back that confidence, which focused around a summary of outstanding issues that needed to be prioritised that I’d put together. Work on addressing that started the same day, and by the end of the week a new delta migration and code push had been done to get back on top of it. Talk about turning things around.

Talking through it with the ever-wise Lisa Trickey helped me (as always) make some sense of it all; what we’re doing isn’t routine — it’s new and risky, so things will go wrong.

We’re learning, on both sides of the partnership, that we’re not perfect and we don’t walk in the others’ shoes often enough. I know I need to be more mindful that developers are working stupidly hard and flat out to deliver this project, and that they care.

Next week will see us review the latest progress for a Go/No Go decision on a 2-week content freeze. Watch this space!

Team of dreams

I go on a bit about how much I love working with my team. I make no apologies. Every week I learn something new from them, watch them support each other and see the great work they do.

Our CMS Planning session was a chance to catch up on progress with all the workstreams, particularly with the user testing Claire and Susie undertook for baselining our current website. Lots of fascinating learning — we absolutely have to do more of this. We also need to come up with a playbook on user testing to make sure we do it consistently.

This week’s group challenge of ensuring the council’s new address is changed on every relevant page was analysed, sized up and the work distributed in 15 mins, leaving me a (challenging) 15 mins to go through the concepts of Sociocracy and how we might use it for our team.

It seemed to resonate with them, as I hoped it would, as we’ve been informally using a delegated approach for workstreams in the migration project. Before long the ideas on what to include in our first Design Group Circle were coming out (first up is destroying the tyranny of carousels on the site), so now we need to work out the structure of how we approach and document these decisions. When Claire suggested we publish this openly so others can see out thinking and reasoning it was like I heard a choir…

LocalGov Drupal reprised

I’d had an invite from Will Callaghan a few weeks back to get involved again in the LocalGov Drupal project as it dives into its Beta phase. This coincided nicely with me trying get my product manager game on and learn from others.

Attending the Product Group meeting on Thursday was like stepping into a house after it had been renovated; the walls were the same but everything else looked and felt different, new and exciting (and I just LOVE those curtains!). There is so much activity in progress and so many people involved now, and it was excellent to see some familiar faces still there.

The conversation and updates dripped of product thinking; which new features are needed, who will lead on them, the development of personas for CMS users…it was pretty relentless. Finn is keeping a blog of sprint notes over at Agile Collective HQ which shows the level of ambition for the project.

Working in the open takes on a whole new meaning, the strongest example of which is Mark Conroy from Annertech who has been live streaming his front end development work on the project.

I also got to see Sociocracy in action from a working group report back to the Group, which gave me some great ideas about defining purpose and how to document decisions.

If LocalGov Drupal sounds interesting, why not help them out by completing this survey on your council’s website?

Talking, not migrating

I’ve realised that lately I’ve spent too much time in the CMS migration bunker, so it was great to connect with people on Friday in a run of conversations:

• Martin Dainton at Devon on digital structures, accessibility monitoring and analytics. We’re going to set this up as a monthly thing, as two neighbouring South West councils should be talking more anyway
• Andy Sandford from We Are Lean and Agile on chatbots, CMS and generally getting confused in elaborate virtual conference rooms. A lot of shooting the breeze and evil plans about adapting Slackbots
• Will Callaghan, Oliver Hannah and LingJing on more product discussions. If you want a great read then I’d recommend Oliver’s post about his journey into product management. If you want to know why content designers are the greatest thing on earth then spend 30 mins in Will’s company (he’s right, y’know)

I stepped away from this weeks ups and downs realising how much I need this sort of external stimulus to get really excited and engaged about the work I do, but also to get out of my own head (a dangerous place to spend too much time) and to ‘earth’ myself a bit. With in-person conferences and meet-ups still something for the future I can see I need more, not less, distraction to sharpen my focus.