Adventures Of A Delivery Manager — Week Commencing 25.11.19
Hello!
(Firstly, I’m going to acknowledge that this week note may not be my best ever piece… I wrote a gem of a week note about an hour ago, went to upload a photo and the whole thing crashed and here I am starting again! I shall do my best, but it’s always hard to recreate creativity when that happens).
So to it…
At my Scrum Master Certification Training, we discussed the importance of the framework and rhythm of Scrum (and by default, Agile).
And yet, here I am sharing my week note for this particular project six weeks after my last one (where I declared that I thought it would be every other week) and I had my last show and tell four weeks ago without another one booked in.
My poor excuse for this might be that I have been ‘busy’… and to be fair, in the past few weeks, I’ve done a lot.
In fact, as far as moving from ‘Discovery’ to ‘Alpha goes, I’m really pleased with what I have started to produce in the form of a minimum viable Delivery Manager.
I’ve definitely switched from almost purely learning and and listening with flashes of possibility to delivering snippets of value regularly:
* I’ve created a barter wall in HackIT
* I’ve completed my Scrum Master Certification
* I created a set of slides showing project complexity that is popular
* I’ve delivered an e-forms discovery
* I’m flying solo on a project that is part of the HackIT experiments
* I helped an apprentice with public speaking confidence
* I delivered a presentation at Cross-Gov on behalf of Hackit
All very nice and quite shiny… but what if that’s not what anyone wants?!
In my e-forms and Joining Up Staff Data projects, it’s a no brainer that the week notes get done and the show and tell’s prepped and delivered — stakeholders get to know what’s going on and the direction of the project is clear and is healthily cross examined at regular intervals.
Whilst I instinctively feel like I am on track, the truth is that I have neglected my week notes, my show and tell is well over due and my Trello Board is a mess!
My definition of done for the Alpha phase of this project is that I pass my probation at Hackney Council… if the passing of my probation were to be judged on the governance quality of this project alone, I think I’d struggle to justify the current position.
To that end, I agreed with +David Durant (my new Product Owner following Nic’s departure), that I would get the backlog sorted and set up a proper rhythm for this project.
It seems only sensible… I sold myself at interview as being my first project and so in reality, if I don’t deliver this project — there won’t be any more to deliver!
Interestingly, the idea of a framework was further amplified this week when I gave a talk at a Cross Gov meetup of Delivery Manager.
They were looking for some speakers to fill spare speaking slots and given that “Adventures of a Delivery Manager” had been well received at Hackit, it seemed not entirely unreasonable that it might translate well to a new audience.
Interestingly though, in the process of condensing two 30 minute talks in to one 10 minute express run through, I kept getting stuck at the slide “Why This Show and Tell?” I kept stumbling over this and it consistently felt off target for an external audience. +Matthew Cain’s question returned to my mind… “How do you make this outward facing”.
Eventually, in the umpteenth run through, the idea popped out of my mouth in that this process could ultimately forma blue print or a road map for someone who wanted to come in to digital/agile but didn’t know how. This felt a whole lot more congruent.
Interestingly, the speaker before also spoke of her journey and was asked a few questions about how she felt we might encourage more non-digital folk to try digital — so I think the idea has got legs. (That said, the talk still felt a bit self-gratuitous afterwards, so I think there’s still work to do there).
Making the switch of context however has caused me to realise even more so the importance of ‘living digital’ and to properly utilise the frame works of scrum and agile.
Tobias Mayer, our facilitator at the certification course explained it via a really cool metaphor… like the frame for growing vegetables. The plants CAN grow without a frame, but they grow much better and yield greater crops when they do have a framework to help them.
I also decided that in my week note, I would give a tip (or tips) each time, that will add up to a collection of ideas and thoughts that a newbie to digital might find helpful.
TIP(s) OF THE WEEK:
* Do a week note even if I’m too busy to do a week note discussing what I am busy with and why it’s too much.
* Do a show and tell, even if I haven’t done what I said I would do and see what feed back I can get about why I didn’t get it done.
All in all it’s been a good few weeks, so perhaps this week note has been overly focused on the critical side of my mind — I mean I passed my Scrum Master Certification after all!
But it wouldn’t be such a bad idea for me to practice the frameworks I have learned across all of my projects — especially the one that underpins all of the others.
