Raising The Platform | 2020 weeknote number 2

A day in the life

My challenges for January/February

Last week I outlined my 3 personal challenges for January/February and explained that I would be feeding back on how I get on. They are:

• Write a weeknote every week!
• Be less grumpy
• Read something from my reading list then write and tweet about it

This is my second weeknote, produced one week after the first, so that is challenge 1 met so far. I have also bought “Accelerate” a book about building high performing tech organisations, recommended to me by @madebycatem, which arrived yesterday, so some progress on that too.

There is much more to say about the grumpiness challenge. For most of last week I was feeling very good about the world (positively giddy) and was thinking that not being grumpy would be a cakewalk. Yesterday was different though. I know that I sometimes struggle when:

• I am unable to focus upon the key things that I need to do
• challenges at home coincide with lots of intensity at work
• things I think are done do not land as well as I hoped, resulting in more work or re-work

When all these things happen at the same time there is a high likelihood of grumpy behaviour. So this week I am going to give you a day note, so I can take you through what happened in detail.

What was tricky about yesterday

• We had our first major incident for many months, losing telephony services in our customer contact centre because of malfunctioning network equipment
• My eldest daughter decided we were bad parents for booking a family holiday in Morocco (why can’t you get WiFi in the Sahara? The Atlas mountains are too tall! Why didn’t we know that the friend she met for the first time last week was having a party during our holiday week when we booked the holiday last month?)
• Some work I had done with the team to review the HackIT manifesto didn’t meet the needs of all my colleagues on DMT

So by about 5pm, I was very tempted indeed to be grumpy. Instead, I used the following tactics:

• I accepted that I had got less work done than planned, but recognised that these major incidents happen far less frequently than a year or two ago. The incident was very well managed by the team and we got some very good feedback from our customer services colleagues about how we had supported them. We also know about the issues with the technology in question and are about to implement a better designed and streamlined network solution which will not suffer from the same vulnerabilities
• I remained calm when talking to my daughter but promised to discuss the holiday with her when I got home. By the time I did she had calmed down and volunteered to make pasta for us all. This is the same as an abject apology from someone who is not a teenager, so that was a major victory
• I reflected on the feedback from my colleague while cycling home, rather than responding immediately. At the beginning of the journey I felt that his comments were beyond the pale, framed insensitively and his arguments flawed! By the end of the journey I felt that he had made some good points and that if I incorporated some of his ideas that would produce better results. Obviously, I didn’t agree with everything he said (pretty much everything actually, but I’m not sure I want to admit that to him!)
• I also reflected on what went well during the day, which really helped and then I got an early night.

As a result I wasn’t grumpy. David mentioned I was looking a bit serious, but that’s OK.

So what went well

I met up with the Financial Systems team for a coffee at the Hackney Empire. The team is moving across to work with us formally in March/April so this was an opportunity to get to know people better and answer any questions or concerns the team has about the move.

I learned that:

• They are all lovely
• They were pleased to have the opportunity to meet
• That we should do this sort of thing more often

I also had lunch with Liz, who is always entertaining and good at coming up with creative solutions to problems. We normally meet in the pub but tried lunch instead as we are both doing dry January. It was an hour well spent just because it provided a change of pace for an hour. We might do lunch again, but won’t completely abandon the nights out in the pub.

Next week I am looking forward to

• Meeting the Mayor to update him on our progress in delivering better connectivity in Hackney.
• Meeting with people from Kensington and Chelsea to talk about how we have implemented more agile ways of working cross platform services