Weeknote#4-Delivery, RPA,human+

Another busy couple of weeks travelling on the glorious rail network, hence another bumper edition. Here’s a short synopsis of what I’ve been up to….

One

We had a huge amount of interest in the Junior RPA developer roles we advertised a couple of weeks ago. For the past two weeks, I have been interviewing some potential new team members. I’m delighted to say we had a great turn out and that that Gessica Santoro & Balzas Roman are joining the team from next week. The team and I are really excited to be working with them.

Two

For those of you regularly following my updates, you will be aware that I spend 60% of time on client delivery for one of our partners. We have been busy over the last period particularly as we are due to move into testing for our second process.

The main areas of focus have been as follows:

1. Preparation for User Acceptance Testing (UAT), in particular outlining the approach and agreeing UAT entry and exit
2. Adopting a more agile delivery approach. We had our first Show & Tell last week, on the whole it went well but we need to think about how we bridge the gap between the backend technical processing the outputs the business are interested in.

Three

The team and I spent some time iterating our delivery approach. It’s really important to us that we focus on delivering a consistent level of service across all our customers and our hope is that by spending the time to map this in detail now will help when on-boarding new customers and employees alike.. This isn’t a one time activity and we will continue to iterate our approach in response to customer feedback.

Four

We had one of our first team meetings where most team members were able to meet face to face (this is always difficult when everyone is out delivering projects for customers). We did some work around the vision and purpose of human+ and our goals for the next 12 months. We also spent quite a bit of time talking about our core values and will be running a workshop on this soon as it’s too important not to get right.

Five

We have recently implemented some new operational tools to help keep us all honest. We are now using CharlieHR, you got it our new HR system :-) The experience of using this so far has been great. Really easy to navigate, ability to request annual leave, store employee contracts, appraisals etc. I’m really keen to start using the review feature to track objectives and one 2 ones as it allows both the employee and manager to collaborate on feedback. We have a meeting planned next week with our Head of People to map our review process.

The other tool we have implemented is harvest Forecast to help with planning and resourcing of customer projects. We use harvest to track time worked and expenses and the idea is that you can integrate the two and get a real time view of how you are performing on a project against forecast.