#weeknotes 7: meetings, inspiration, cakes and balance
This is my penultimate go at the question format — after next week I think I’m going to go back to the Mon-Fri format, which still feels more natural to me. And feedback I’ve had is that reading about my week in that way feels more engaging for people who work alongside me but in other teams.
So, what inspired me this week?
We had our first sprint review on our digital advice beta project— I was hugely inspired by how much the team had achieved in the first sprint, and how well everyone has worked together to do this. Sprint 1’s goal was to get the foundations right — and that’s what we’ve done.
I was part of an excellent workshop led by our transformation director katenowicki. She and her team worked with senior leaders to lay out our change roadmap — it was inspiring to see the range of things we want to do, and are already doing, and to see it brought to life on the wall for everyone to see.
What did I learn this week?
I think we all take capability building seriously in our team — and are role modelling an open and curious mindset. This week I learnt A LOT about technical user stories - we worked with our technical architect James to group and prioritise (hopefully) everything we’ll need to think about during private beta. We did this in collaboration with our IT colleagues so that we’ve got a shared understanding of the decisions we need to make, how we’ll do that, and who will be responsible for managing each one.
Charlotte is shadowing each member of the Digi2al team as we go through the project — this sprint it was our UX designer Anton. Charlotte’s feedback in retro was that having tasks to own herself has made a big difference in being able apply to her learning and contribute to the success of the sprint.
Lastly it was a very cake heavy week this week (not a bad thing in any way in my book). On Monday we had brownies (a birthday), Wednesday carrot cakes (sprint 2 planning) and Friday was banana and coconut (saying goodbye to Jess). I’ve been adapting recipes to meet the needs of the team (egg free, gluten free). It was a challenge that was worth the effort though, and they were all very tasty. If you’d like the recipes let me know.
What did I read this week?
An interesting blog from Bracknell Forest Digital Services about EasyRead, which I liked both because I didn’t know about EasyRead and because it’s a work in progress for them, which they’re writing about. I really like that they’re working in the open — and talking about things they haven’t quite got right yet.
And this post by Richard McLean about user manuals reminded me that I started some thinking on this for myself but haven’t progressed it. It inspired me to go back to it, so watch this space.
