Weeknotes: week 10
By: Neil Lawrence
Tags: User Research, CMS, Flooding, Agile, Weeknotes

Weeknotes: week 10

I’ve had communication on my mind this week.

When we ran the Tools for Change training programme at Oxford the excellent Alex Shiell came down to run an Agile introduction session for staff. His key message from that (frankly brilliant) session was in every project you need to communicate, communicate and communicate. And when you think you’ve communicated too much, communicate some more.

I’ve been realising lately that it’s not just about how much you communicate, but also how well you do it. One of my weaknesses is consistently expecting everyone to think and act like me (which just ain’t so) and that extends to communication. So a team session this week really brought that home to me.

Amanda had been trying out a stress control board with us, where you pick three things that are stressing you, and then have to determine where on the board they sit; at the centre means you have complete control, but at the outer edge means you have no control — the idea being you realise you have to let these go as worries since there’s nothing you can do to affect them.

This revealed a shared stress about the timeline for our CMS migration, which we had a quick discussion about. It’s clear that we need to be really honest about this with each other and colleagues and find a way to make it work.

But the real surprise of the session was from one colleague that was brave enough to share with us just how stressed she was with the volume and varied formats of messages flying around the organisation while trying to work. While I’ve been happily posting to multiple channels and scouring MS Teams for anything new to keep up to speed, which suits my way of working, this approach was causing enormous upset for my colleague which she had been suffering with in silence until now. We really need to think how we address this as a team so we’ll be picking this apart in the new year.

This was also echoed to a degree by another colleague in a separate meeting, talking about how despite the volume of information flying around about the customer platform project it was hard to ascertain what our current situation was.

Working in the open

After missing the last Research and Design Group meetup from Simon Wilson and Annie Heath I was pleased to join 62 other people on this week’s session, and be part of the Dorset Massive turnout (represent!!).

After a great overview of the User Research Library pioneered by Hackney, a twist of fate (or Google Meet being vindictive) found me not put into a breakout room along with two other Dorset strandees and a few other abandoned souls. Despite this we ended up having a good discussion about working in the open and the barriers/concerns about doing this. Surprise surprise most turn out to be cultural or perceived, and much like weeknoting taking that first step may just take the mystery or danger out of it.

I’m really hoping that, like weeknoting, my Dorset colleagues feel empowered to share more about the brilliant work they’re doing.

Building a FORT in Dorset

Talking of brilliant work (and a failure of communication on my part) I found myself in a discussion of what I thought was going to be about using .gov.uk domain names, but was actually far more interesting and exciting.

It turns out that in a secret underground lair, beavering away for eons, the really impressive Dorset GIS team have been developing the Flood Online Reporting Tool (or FORT as it’s been forced to name itself) which a chunk of the south west of the country is collectively using. Fully supported by the Environment Agency its on the brink of being a service that could be taken up nationally, so our discussion morphed into what we could do to promote that.

Much like Hackney developing its research library initially for themselves but making it available for wider adoption, the service is at a crossroads. Does it hand over to GDS and let them start almost from scratch again, does it look to work with more localgov colleagues across the country (any thoughts MHCLG colleagues?) to make it sustainable? Or does it just rebrand itself under the LocalGov Digital branding to make it less local?

One to revisit in the new year.

Show and Share

This week was my first show and share at Dorset Council, covering the discovery for the CMS migration onto our Placecube platform. My lovely colleague Vicky Mears had given me some tips from her experience, and I’d had the benefit of seeing one of hers and another Service Designer’s before I had to bite the bullet. Let’s just say they both made me up my game a bit.

Show and shares at Dorset seem to get really large audiences which says a lot about how seriously they are taken and how much colleagues want to know what is going on.

As this was my first I wanted to be sure I encapsulated what we had found, but also articulate what makes this a challenging project. After one of the Content Designers had mentioned “we’ve never actually got to business as usual” with our website I thought it important to represent this through a quick history of the changes Dorset has been through. And actually this helped set the tone for the current good state of content, the level of complexity of the site (it isn’t just a publishing platform) and some of the early decisions made.

One more change and we win a set of steak knives

I got some very nice feedback from colleagues and friends about it, which was great, but the real value came from having to spend time assembling my thoughts and exploring what we had really learned so far, and what was needed next.

And finally….moving (and actually, finally moving)

Rachel sealing the cat away safely

Like a long-awaited (and dreaded) exam, we finally moved out of our little Oxford home, with the contents of our house going off into storage over the weekend before their final leg of the journey to Dorset next Tuesday.

It was a weird feeling to suddenly see the house for what it is when empty. It looked so small, and I wondered how everything had fitted in there before.

When I left my last job I got unexpectedly emotional on the last day, so I’d half expected the same thing to happen once the last box had left and just the shell remained. But nothing.

I’ll be taking a break from weeknotes next week as we’ll be in the thick of moving in to our new house. Have a safe xmas all.