Weeknote: S1 Ep 6

Overarching feeling of the week

Digging in.

Highlights

A day with the contracts and governance team was a big highlight this week. We’re starting the process of upskilling and knowledge transfer between team members. Becoming more T shaped will round out their experience, support their development and increase capacity in the team. Their daily experience is a complex web of processes and bureaucracy. They manage significant amounts of detail and data across multiple teams and systems. They are a modest bunch leaving their egos at the door and getting stuff done without fanfare, but I think they are superheroes.

Emergent curiosity is something I’m seeing across the delivery teams. Content designers, Holly and Eleanor both hosted open sessions this week talking about their work and profession. It was great to see a cross section of people from project management, training and contracts coming along to find out more.

Lessons

Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Instinctively I have a fixed mindset, maintaining a growth mindset is something I actively work on. This timely reminder — from the treasure trove that is Helen Bevan’s Twitter feed — prompted some self-reflection. The volume of work and the newness of my role is triggering some fixed thought patterns and behaviours. Now this realisation has surfaced I can reset myself and try again.

Next week

I am over the moon that Emma Harley is joining Greenwich on Monday. She is our first delivery manager and this feels like an important milestone. This team will be growing over the coming weeks and months. Delivery managers will be embedded into product teams and will also develop close ties with our project managers and training officers.

It’s Digital Leaders Week and I’m going to try and squeeze in a few talks between existing commitments. Other than this, I’m not going to try and start anything new this week. My to-do list has a long tail that needs dealing with. Wish me luck.

What I’m reading and watching

How we conceive and talk about money is crucial to digital transformation. Finance silos reinforce (and drive) organisational silos. Could we re-image the way we manage our budgets to reflect user journeys across an organisation, rather than by business need? https://medium.com/inc./this-was-steve-jobss-most-important-observation-when-he-returned-to-apple-it-changed-everything-3bcc7bee6a6f

I tweeted about this gem from Eleanor Dean but it deserves another plug here. There’s so much to like here, but numbers 1, 4 and 8 particularly resonated with me. https://eleanorsiandean.medium.com/10-things-i-learnt-in-3-years-at-ncvo-f274e810887c

Talking about stuff that goes wrong. This incident report from GOV.UK is clear and readable. It talks about the values they lean on to manage the situation, what they did to fix it and the cause of the outage. https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2021/06/11/incident-report-gov-uk-outage-on-8-june-2021/