Weeknotes s01 ep06
The badger of tardiness
These weeknotes are about the week of July 31st to August 4th. I’m late in getting them written, but the exercise in writing them is still very valuable to me. And I’ve had time to think the last fortnight over with a little bit of distance. The interlude was the end of a cycle, rather than a season.
To start with — and to be really open — I’ve struggled the past fortnight or so with confidence.
Something knocked mine, but I can’t pinpoint exactly what it was. I was present and involved at work, a place where I feel mostly capable, but not outside of it.
I didn’t want to read Twitter, or Medium articles, or text messages, or to interact with people online, or know what they were doing. I didn’t want to put myself out there with anything written, even texting friends. I felt thin-skinned. It was a feeling very close to the one I used to get every time I checked Facebook, which is why I quit using it three years ago.
It’s a feeling of being Not Good Enough and is very difficult to shake.
I’ve since caught up with everyone’s weeknotes and read lots of articles and edged my way back again.
Many people wrote that they’d been to one of Gavin Elliott’s presentations on impostor syndrome and how good it was. I recognised that’s a thing the civil service does well. It seems to have networks and support resources if people need and look for them. Or, I should say, the civil servants I see and interact with seem to be great at supporting one another and in setting up ways to be supportive of others.
I’ve noticed it in weeknotes, in the many mentions of weeknoters meeting up to help each other out. I also experienced that support myself when I did a little mewing tweet this week (which I am slightly embarrassed about, sorry 😳). However, the replies helped me get over the final block of whatever it was I was feeling. Thank you gif-huggers, small acts of kindness do count.
“Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.” Henry James
Onto the week and this one has some distinct themes, plus an animal motif AND Prince.
Themes such as:
Updating internal documentation to make repeatable processes and to reflect product changes (sing it)
And: Training, recruitment and developing people (I can’t hear you)
Not to mention: Continuing to think about how we can communicate better (take it to the bridge)
And stuff got done. Getting stuff done is good.
Monday — the octopus of truth
Monday mornings is when I morph into octopus form.
Everyone needs to get things done and those things are at the forefront of minds because it’s Monday.
Meetings to attend, emails to answer, notes to update, customers to respond to, weekends to catch up on and questions, questions, questions from every direction.
It’s not the multiple things, but how different each one is. I’m sure it’s not just me who needs more time, more arms and more brainspace for Monday mornings.
Nat was working from home so we emailed one another our to-do lists. Rowena worked remotely for a couple of months at the start of this year and we started this practice then to know where one another’s heads will be for the day.
As well as our routine meetings like support stand up and Dialogue product meeting, there was some work scheduling to do. In Andy’s absence (he was on holiday) I tried to do as well as he does at linking things together. I managed mostly to just attach things people said to me independently or that I’d read in notes, to anyone else who might need to know them.
The other work for today was finishing the Account Management Economic Model.
I KNOW. It is a riveting read.
I wrote this task in my to-do list email to Rowena and Nat and Nat, rightly, asked me what it was. Sometimes you can think you’ve shared some work you’ve been doing, when actually it’s just been sat in your brain pretending to have been said out loud.
The AM economic model looks at the time it takes to do the wide variety of tasks account managers have, based on number of account managers and numbers of accounts each and against how much time is available in a year (on a 227 working days per person, 7.5hrs a day baseline). We can see how many accounts each of us can realistically manage and this should allow us to know in advance when we next need to recruit. In theory, we should now have facts to drive recruitment rather than educated guesses.
The rest of the day was spent helping out with some questions via phone as Nat needed some advice on some interesting situations.
I also had a good chat with Alan about how we might build notifications into Dialogue, which a lot of our users have asked for.
It made me realise that even though we’ve talked about something many, many times, what customers are actually asking for may not have been clear. There are valid arguments against notifications, but I think we’ve found an option which avoids the knee-jerk reaction that notifications can provoke (hi Twitter), but meets the ‘people need to know someone has responded to their idea’ argument. It’s also a simple solution — Minimum Viable Product. We just need the milestone time to do it.
Lunch: Jerk chicken salad with Jon (my husband). We both work in Bristol, but it’s still a treat to see him at lunchtime.
Tuesday —the pigeon of communication
The day started with a very frustrating attempt at a conversation with James and Hamish.
I have to do our call driving through rural Somerset on my way into work. This is normally ok, but issues with the phone mast caused me to have no signal at all for half an hour at 8am, just when the call was due to start. I ended up having a chat with James when I eventually got signal, but by that time Hamish had to go.
It was clear that I’m right to worry about global communication. It really does need to be worked on and that made it a difficult call as I wear that responsibility heavily. At the start of the year I said to them both I wanted to make it better and I haven’t and it’s August. I am resolved to do so.
Thinking about it is fine, but doing something is better.
This was at the forefront of my mind when I got into the office. Small, actions is what I want to take. We need to try things and fail at them and then try something else until we find the right spot between under-communicating and over-communicating.
In that vein, in our support stand-up Alan and I chatted about communicating better and what we need to share with everyone this week. Following updates from James and Hamish, we confirmed the scheduling of two deployments, one for an Australian customer and another for one in New Zealand, so that these would be started earlier than our normal Wednesday deployment window. Followed by an Account Management stand up where Nat, Rowena and I also talked about global company communication. It felt good to share and they are both keen to make things better, too.
One of Natalie’s personal goals this year has been to arrange lightning talks every few weeks on a Tuesday morning. This week, Hannah talked to us about a wellbeing app she’s been working on with one of her other clients. Hannah freelances for Delib, so does lots of things outside of digital democracy
The rest of the day: chats with customers, researching flights for my Aus/NZ trip in October so I know when I’ll be off and back, plus all the admin ever.
The final part of the day was Alan giving us a run-through of what will be in our upcoming Citizen Space release.
A product update requires existing documentation to be updated, new articles to be written, a release announcement put together, and internal comms and scheduling to be done. To get it right and not screw anyone over (colleague or customer) takes planning and mindfulness, which is what this catch up was about.
Lunch: Boots salmon sandwich. It’s an exciting life.
Wednesday — the owl of awareness
Today marked the end of my first cycle of treatment, which resulted in a negative pregnancy test.
We’ve tried to be pragmatic and consider this first round as a data-gathering exercise and for understanding the process more than anything else. I’ve been surprised by my emotions before over these past couple of years, so deep down I wasn’t entirely sure how I would react on the day, but I felt as fine as I’d hoped I would. It’s quite strange to reflect on how much you know and still don’t know about yourself.
Workwise, our monitoring systems notified us at around 7am that a customer site had gone offline. We investigated and it was their DNS, so I emailed our main contact to let them know. Their sites came back again fairly quickly, so someone must have been on it their end — no doubt woken up by their own hateful monitoring system.
Our monitoring notifies us by text and email. We have a phone with the most hideous text message sound ever for a site outage and when that goes off at 3am you can be sure I’m swearing pretty inventively as I rage out of bed to investigate.
This particular pain point gets dealt with next week, because in these weeknotes I can see into the future.
Today was 1-2-1 day with Nat and Rowena. We try to run these on a 6–8 week cadence to give time to achieve goals. As these are private meetings, we go out of the office to a nice coffee shop and normally spend an hour or two reflecting as well as looking forward to the next few weeks.
I get nervous before them, which I’m not sure if Nat or Rowena can tell, but to me these are important and I care about getting them right. I worry I could damage how Nat and Rowena feel about work if I don’t come to 1-2-1s prepared and ready to listen and act on what they tell me. I have some set questions and a format which we’ve honed together over this year, and the process is open to evolution.
I read a lot of articles about how to do decent 1-2-1s and I try and use any interesting things I pick up. If it’s useful to anyone else I’ll write about how we do 1–2-1’s.
These took up a lot of the day, but around them:
- I had a lovely chat about books with Nat to start the day
- Updated James and Hamish on where we’re up to with the UK shot-in-the-dark recruitment for the Account Manager role in Canberra
- Made sure everyone is filling in the G-Cloud orders sheet so we don’t get fined. Though this really feels like something the CCS machine should be able to know already. Don’t ask me how, I just feel like it should
- Updated some Budget Simulator documentation and workflow tickets as we recently added two new versions of the tool so loads of supporting articles need tweaking.
- We planned which accounts we’ll be handing over to Katherine and set out some aspects of her training
- I had a chat with Alan about writing up a shareable document on how we meet the requirements of GDPR. Nat had raised wanting to know more about GDPR in her 1–2–1, which impressed the shit out of me
- I finished by putting together a whole of life report for a presentation the next day
Lunch — homemade tuna salad and too much coffee and cake during 1–2–1s
Thursday — the secret squirrel
A clandestine affair today due to not being able to talk much about what went on.
I’ll never make it into MI6 with my secret-keeping skills anyway, so I will say that Alan, Ben F and I met in a carpark like shady people and drove north-ish for a couple of hours to do a presentation and then drove back again.
I had to sign up to the local library at the place we visited to be able to print the report we’d done, as my printer was being a total PRINTER about it and refusing to print the night before. It was a good adventure into library computers, which was — to my surprise — mostly pain-free.
We had good chats in the car and at lunch. Turns out Alan and I share the same grumpiness about:
* process-for-process-sake
* overly-cloying requests to do something
* and (like most sane people?) we both find it borderline offensive to have time wasted by the kind of bureaucracy which serves no actual purpose.
It was a fun rant. And it was good to identify that this has largely been eliminated at Delib, but we’re going to keep being vigilant. The launchist sorting in episode 1 was a good example.
In a bit of spare time I found some reading which was relevant to things Nat and Rowena had mentioned in their 1–2–1s, about GDPR and One Team Gov, so I sent some links on.
Lunch— nachos with chilli in the pub
Friday — the donkey of documentation
A day of support, updating and creating documentation, but also NEW HAIR.
Sorry, I got momentarily distracted by Prince….
In “Things that happened which are almost entirely the opposite of what Prince would do with his day” I got our supporting articles updated about the change from .csv to .xlsx exports in Citizen Space and continued updating the articles on Budget Simulator so that these are accurate for customers.
I wrote an internal-facing article on how we do job interviews at Delib so people know how we run them and why. We have an unusual process we call ‘Standard hiring’ (yes, sounds highly unusual doesn’t it) which includes drawing and maths and investigating people’s open-mindedness via a number of tasks.
We planned in product training for Katherine, made sure it will include Shaney and Adam, and I wrote up the agenda for Katherine’s first week.
I wanted to make sure she has enough time to read and settle in, as well as having things she can do which are useful immediately.
The thing I struggled with when I first started was feeling like a useless potato for what seemed like weeks. I want Katherine to feel at home as early as possible.
The afternoon’s work was done remotely from the hairdressers. My hairdresser is used to me working from the chair so tries to keep the bits of hair she’s chopping off from getting lodged in my keyboard.
I now have short hair again — hooray.
Lunch — Pret salad with one of my very favourite people, who said I seemed a bit meh. She was right.
Reading: I finished Transform, and on a non-work front I read bits of ‘The Shark (Splendid Savage of the Sea) by Jacques-Yves Cousteau. Good alliteration, Jacques.
I love sharks. This book had a bit of a ‘let’s boast about sharks’ vibe, but it still had sharks in it, which makes it a-ok with me.
Listening to: Quite a lot of Parliament and Funkadelic because I watched some Mighty Boosh on my week off and it always makes me think of them.
