Adventures Of A Delivery Manager — Week Ending 29.11.19
I really should decide whether I write these week commencing or week ending… that said, given that is the critical thing running through my mind at this point on a Friday evening, it suggests I am feeling fairly relaxed and calm this week.
TIDYING UP THE PROJECT
This week, I’ve made good use of some space to tidy up “Adventures Of A Delivery Manager” following my last week note and I feel a lot more settled about it. I have a nice four weekly rhythm in the diary with all of the relevant events now lined up for the coming few months — I guess I’ve properly committed to this for the long term!
I’m also really pleased to have the support of David Durant who is taking up the mantle of being my go-to in place of Nic with regard to this project. We’ve got a session in next Friday to talk about the Sprint Goals for sprint 3. In all honesty, it’ll be more of a review and discussion about what could have been — but regardless, it serves to just get in to that mindset about it.
NETWORKING
This week has been really cool for some organic networking.
Following delivering “Adventures” as a talk at the CrossGov meetup on Monday, I was contacted for a shadowing opportunity from .Gov, so we’re going to put that together shortly.
Then on Thursday we delivered our “Delivering An Excellent Delivery Team” show and tell, where we offered the opportunity for shadowing. I’m delighted that someone reached out there too.
Beyond shadowing, I also met our Hackney 100 student who I am going to work with over the coming months.
All of this really helps me to expand. I really subscribe to the concept of “see one, do one, teach one”, so the opportunity to teach and tell is really beneficial — shadowing is SUCH a win/win activity.
TECH & CHALLENGE
David is teaching me some tech (coding).
I find this REALLY hard.
I’ve always found languages hard, but code is especially hard, because they are words and abbreviations that I understand in a different way, so they feel really hard to convert in to a new way to do new things.
One of the reasons it’s really frustrating for me is that I place a really high value on the art of communication… a single word can make all the difference. Often I wish I could learn multiple languages, but for whatever reason, mastering other languages just doesn’t come naturally to me. Coding is no different… one space or letter in the wrong place can have quite the unintended effect!
That said, there are other skills I have learned in my life that were hard, but worthwhile and so I will pursue this, especially if it helps me to do a better job and serve my colleagues and team mates more effectively.
I do have to do a couple of things however to stay healthy in this space however.
Firstly, I have to always give my teacher and fellow learners warning — that when learning something really hard, I get unintentionally grumpy. No matter how hard I try to hide it or suppress it, it happens anyway — so best to acknowledge it and manage it. Secondly, I have to choose very carefully when I do this kind of training, because it really challenges me and takes me a while to recover from it. This means I need to be sure that I’m not going to come out of the training and in to a critical workshop or detail/concentration based task… I need to decompress first.
TO DO
Next week I need to promote the Barter Wall… it’s not gaining traction and in danger of becoming wallpaper, which would be a shame.
That’s it from me this week!
