Week 34: 2-5 May

I had a proper bank holiday weekend which involved a Haven Holiday park, lots of beach games and too many late nights. I didn’t even get round to writing my weeknote which is a rarity.

So by Tuesday morning I wasn’t quite ready for work. It felt like one of those weeks when you’re losing one nil from the first minute and don’t really threaten the opposition goal at all in the first half. My first meeting was at 9am on Tuesday during which my internet connection kept cutting out and I didn’t regain control of my inbox, my preparation before meetings or a sense of control in my week until Thursday.

The upside, as far as it goes, was that I’d set three fairly modest goals: to communicate our link sharing capabilities to a couple of key groups, to agree the scope of the options analysis for our Wifi business case and agree the user survey and the process for getting it live. I met all three – even if largely they were met on my behalf.

We’re currently developing a repository to support teams designing, building, releasing and improving digital products. It’s one of those tasks which is never ‘done’ and some of what we’ll publish to begin with will only serve to acknowledge the things we haven’t learnt or standardised yet. But it’s an important step towards our strategic objective of being able to make small changes constantly and learn whether they’re improving outcomes.

This month’s strategy all-hands was on Thursday and I’d been a bit more thoughtful about the design of the session after the valuable feedback I got last time around. At the end of the session attendees gave 3.9/5 for ‘increasing my understanding of how my work contributes to our objectives’, which was 10% higher than the previous session. I was particularly grateful for the work Debbie and Russell had done to unpack our key results and explain the role of each team in achieving them.

Next week, we’re spending all of Tuesday with Microsoft and have two workshops dominating Wednesday. Luckily I’ve got a fair bit of spare time on my own this weekend so I’m looking forward to getting some admin out of the way so that I can start next week better. But I’ve set similarly modest goals for the four days:

  1. To complete the strategy tracker dashboard
  2. To support the Polaris team ahead of the first release to users of the document redaction tool
  3. To agree my personal objectives for the next year