Week notes — w/c 17 July 2023

This week can be summed up as ‘more of the same’. It doesn’t feel like I have definitively completed many tasks this week — lots of things have been progressed, but not to the point that I could close them off. This has exacerbated by the fact that Monday was a privilege holiday in Glasgow, which meant that a lot of my colleagues were off, enjoying the Glasgow Fair.

Web Estate Transformation

A lot of this week has been spent getting folks who have been off on their holidays caught up, which has been much easier now we have:

• a slide-deck introducing the programme and the outcomes we are aiming at
• a plan-on-a-page for the pre-phase 1 work
• a VMOST (Vision, Mission, Objectives, Strategies and Tactics) document for this financial year
• a project board where every card in flight is ready, assigned and regularly updated!

So a lot of the standard ‘programme initiation’ work — but we’re seeing the value already.

I have also been working on the terms of reference for the steering group who will advise the team from now at least until the end of phase 1, and considering who might be a good fit to sit on that board. This isn’t finished yet — one of the casualties of picking up work in odd hours in between meetings.

Working in the open and agile communications

This week also saw me create the deck and exercise for a show and tell I’m doing in August on the working in the open training that I went on in June. Giles, who ran that training, is a massive proponent of weeknotes as part of communicating throughout an agile project, and a big part of the reason that I’ve been writing these notes! I was asked to present some of the lessons from that training at a Directorate event — so that’s scheduled for 15 August. I plan to forget about it now until the evening before and using my rough notes and slides to show that show and tells don’t need to be shiny, polished things!

This week in numbers

• Tickets in the done column: 6
• Days in the office: 1 (Tuesday)
• Directorate-level SMT attendances: 1
• Monthly 1–2–1s: 2
• Team objectives I still haven’t signed off: 3!