Weeknote: S1 Ep 21

Overarching feeling of the week

Boom! Six months at Royal Borough of Greenwich.

Highlights

Planning has been a feature of the last couple of weeks. Doesn’t sound sexy, but it’s been good to start putting shape around some ideas for next year and a couple of chunky bits of work we want to kick off this side of Christmas.

The project managers have been self-organising around how they want to run their team meetings. They are testing a format for the next few weeks and we’ll have a retro before Christmas to see how they are finding things.

Alex from the contracts and governance team absolutely nailed our first ever Lunch and Learn. We co-hosted and went with a pre-agreed Q&A format to help take the edge off the presenting nerves. It worked a treat (even when I got carried away and accidentally went off script, sorry Alex). It was a good opportunity to make visible the work of the team. The ceremony of a show and tell is overkill but their work is valuable and benefits everyone.

Danny and I ran a team day for the policy, training and engagement team (the team with the longest name ever). It was the first time we had been all together “in real life” since I joined Greenwich. We worked hard to design a day that had a couple of clear outcomes, plenty of time to get to one another and a chance to get outside. We also had a real-time retro so we could improve the day as we went along. Any excuse for a trip on the Woolwich ferry! We came up with a mission statement for the team — our first one in Delivery! I love this and we can make sure our objectives and priorities contribute to our north star.

Lessons

Still working on making all the things visible and carving out space to do the things only I can do. I’m grieving my old coping mechanisms which are no longer fit for purpose and frustrated at my own slowness to get on board with new ones. The theory is not the issue, it’s the discipline to put things into practice. There’s no magic bullet to being time poor and over capacity (everyone is), there’s just a dance between what I can realistically achieve while looking after my own well-being. These two things can co-exist in a mutual ebb and flow I am sure, but at the moment it’s wildly inconsistent.

Next week

I’m looking forward to:

• Spending some time in Glasgow, showing my support for climate justice
• Meeting some of the awesome Delivery team at Citizens Advice
• Some deep learning about our procurement processes
• Indulging in some process mapping

What I am reading/watching/listening

Mostly Strictly Come Dancing, Shetland and Taskmaster.