#weeknotes 10 and 11: lots (and lots) of learning
I’m combining a couple of weeks here because of two short weeks at work with Easter in the middle — it’s been a fortnight full of learning, all of which has been really valuable.
Learning more about scrum and agile
Last week I spent two days on a course with Tobias Mayer learning more about what makes a great scrum master, and revisiting the core agile principles. It was an excellent two days — made even better by having people from a wide range of sectors participating. It was valuable hearing experiences from start ups, the financial sector and commercial sector— and being able to compare them to the public sector. I came away buzzing with ideas to take back to the office and try.
Learning more about the beta phase (and GDS assessments)
I’ve been working with our submit a notification team helping them prepare and last week we had our GDS alpha assessment. I am so impressed by the team and the work they’ve done*. Now we’re planning out the beta phase in more detail so we can submit our spend control request to GDS, and then go out to procure a team to help us deliver the work.
On our digital advice service we’re (almost)halfway through the private beta and starting to tackle our next advice topic, redundancy. We think this topic will help us break the templates we’ve designed so far so that we can improve them. We know that redundancy is a more complex and emotional topic for our users so it’s going to give us really valuable feedback and insight to help us improve our content and design overall.
At our show and tell we had cake (of course) and Luka Alexander demoed our new component library that they’ve built at our sprint 3 show and tell — it’s looking great, really clear and easy for us to use.
Learning more about coding
Philippa, Cheryl and I started our Codefirstgirls course this week — and it was ace. We’ve all committed to learning how to code a static website in 8 weeks alongside other professional women from a variety of . So far we’ve learnt how the basics of HTML, CSS and Javascript and how they work together. And a brilliant but simple hack which amused us all:
Am looking forward to learning more as we go. There is homework though . . .
Learning from others
This week I read some great weeknotes from Sam Villis, Jenny Vass, Dan Barrett and Matt Jukes. 5 beta lessons from Carl Burton was really useful. I also liked this from Greg Satell on building an innovative culture.
and finally . . .
*Ace news this week for the team — we passed the alpha assessment, it’s the first GDS assessment on a transactional service for Acas, and we are super proud of ourselves! Go team!
