Weeknotes 29th October 2021
A return to what we knew so well, so love and so desire.
At Buckinghamshire Council we are starting our journey back to working in the office again. We are taking our time and doing it in the right way.
We will ensure that everyone feels safe and that we take all our colleagues on this journey with empathy and understanding, but we know that many people crave the work benefits and personal contact that a shared working environment brings.
What I have been musing on though was what this would mean for the Digital Team and how we’ve missed this contact over the last eighteen months. We may never get back to being in the office full time, only time can tell and a hybrid model looks like the norm for a while.
Before the pandemic we colocated with Unboxed, Torchbox and Scroll, our partners on the path to a new single website for Buckinghamshire Council. We weren’t together all the time, but usually at least one day a week the team would be able to bounce ideas off each other, overhear some of the water cooler ideas and catch up on difficulties and problems that one part of the team might be having with another part of the project.
This hasn’t started again yet, but we have started to come together for workshops and large sessions. The joy of actually writing a post-it note and sticking it on a wall in true Agile style cannot be compared to typing something into Miro or Metro-Retro (and other Agile tools are available).
It was somehow more real even though we have all learned to love our virtual workshops and online tools, even if Teams can do some pretty strange things sometimes.
We’ve managed to make virtual standups work, we’ve done content review sessions, we’ve done ideation meetings, UAT and prioritisation all via a shared Trello board.
But we have all missed that contact, that intimacy created by a shared objective. We said goodbye to our delivery manager at the first of these sessions and it was the first time I’d actually met him.
Whilst at the end I did my usual Head of Digital speech about how we would miss him, and we did, but what I recognised I’d missed more was the chance to collaborate in person, to tease and cajole, and the realisation that I’m even less funny on Zoom than I am in real life. Oh, and that a virtual cookie is nowhere near as good as a real one.
So we go onwards looking forward to when we can all collocate safely, and when the ideas flow as freely as the discussions on Slack, and when no one has to shout ‘You’re on Mute’.
