Weeknotes S03 E15
Weeknotes, hey? I’m not sure how useful it is to reflect at the end of the week on a Friday, at the time when I have the least energy for reflection. I might start doing these after lunch on a Friday instead. But anyway, here we go.
What happened this week?
We finished our content audit, which took a closer look at some of the (many!) pages and documents we have across Royal Greenwich’s various intranet products. I spent today turning this data into graphs and thinking about how best to tell the story of what we’ve learnt.
Time is of the essence for this as we have a big meeting coming up, probably next week, to share and collate what we’ve learnt across the research we’ve done on this project. I’ve been trying to focus on presenting things in a clear and comprehensive way for this. I need to revisit and sum up the research I did with teams across the council too, so there is a bit to do next week.
The other stand-out things from this week have been a lot of very helpful and encouraging chats with others in the product team. We’ve set up a line management community of practice (all the line managers in the product team meet once a month) and had some good conversations in the wider team about how we can improve our practice on things like prototyping, problem-framing and accessibility across our products.
The team working on Greenwich’s community directory (comprised of colleagues from Digital, Children’s Services, Adult Social Care and Public health) held their first show and tell this week. It was great — I liked how the whole team split the presenting between them, and I’m excited about the collaborative approach they’re taking on the project. One to watch for sure.
Finally, the content team held a crit to look at some work Alysia had done. We seem to have a very nice, supportive and challenging culture around crits. I think I’m meant to be documenting some of our processes for this to share with the rest of the team. I am holding that thought.
Lessons learnt
Things have felt big and difficult this week, as we approach an important milestone in the intranet project. I was grateful to Greg (newest delivery manager) for running a helpful retro for us on Monday, and to Alex (product manager) and Jenny (product designer) for some thoughtful chats during the week.
One thing that has helped with this has been a podcast I found through Upfront, called ‘We can do hard things’. It’s presented by Glennon Doyle, who I didn’t know much about before, but it really buoyed me up this week simply by existing. Every time I’ve found myself thinking, this work/situation/project is hard, my brain instantly reminds me that we (which could be me and my brain or me and my team, it works for both) can do hard things. So, it’s alright.
Upfront has also got me thinking this week about psychological safety and how teams can create a culture where everyone can do their best work no matter who they are. I think being open and sharing how you’re learning is a big part of that. Unfortunately another thing I’ve realised through Upfront is that I really shy away from sharing my work publicly. A few things to think about there.
What inspired me
Upfront continues to be brilliant, and I’m trying to make more time to get the most out of it that I can.
This week there’s been a lot of stuff about putting yourself out there and sharing things that are important and difficult. I find this stuff quite scary but it’s challenged me in a very positive way to be more outspoken.
Two things from the course inspired me the most this week, and that’s because they both made me ragingly appalled and angry. One was Kimberlé Crenshaw on the urgency of intersectionality. The other was the endometriosis episode of the Chronic podcast from Huffington Post.
Two extremely important examples of women’s voices and experiences being ignored and women stepping up to speak on it. I urge you to listen to both.
