{"id":3980,"date":"2018-02-17T08:07:09","date_gmt":"2018-02-17T08:07:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/andrewdoran.uk\/blog\/?p=3980"},"modified":"2018-02-17T08:07:09","modified_gmt":"2018-02-17T08:07:09","slug":"weeknote-5-winning-and-collaborating","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/andrewdoran.uk\/blog\/2018\/02\/17\/weeknote-5-winning-and-collaborating\/","title":{"rendered":"Weeknote #5 \u2014 Winning and collaborating"},"content":{"rendered":"
I\u2019d better start the weeknote by acknowledging the achievement of this marvellous young man:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Last weekend he ran his final race of the season in the Chiltern Cross Country League, won it<\/a>, and became the overall winner for his age group<\/a>. Well done fella, it was a fantastic effort and we\u2019re all very proud of you. (Love that boy.)<\/p>\n

We actually managed to spend quite a bit of last weekend together as a family, which was fab. After a life-refocusing chat with a friend the week before I made a conscious effort to spend time with everyone. Mrs D and I watched Lion<\/em> on Saturday night<\/a> which almost destroyed me, and we followed it up with a Sunday night family viewing of Empire of the Sun<\/a><\/em> which finished me off completely. Being emotionally drained as I went to bed led into me being woken by the Monday morning alarm, promptly falling asleep again and waking for a second time in a panic half an hour later. Rushing around in order to make it to my first meeting of the day was not a great start to the week.<\/p>\n

Work<\/h2>\n

Once it got going, the week turned out to be a very good one. We\u2019ve moved forward on a significant number of issues on our programme, resolving some technical problems (typically to discover that there are more lurking further down the line, but it was ever thus) and I am starting to see a path towards how we can finally get our software rollout going again. One of our particular issues looked more specific and complex than it was, but somehow it revealed itself to me from a different angle and I realised that it exists today, on its own, whether we carry on with our programme or not. (A case of being too close to the detail.) We\u2019ve re-framed it and presented it back to the wider team; it does<\/em> need dealing with but hopefully not as part of the work we\u2019ve set out to do.<\/p>\n

One of our key team members was on holiday for half term this week and we missed him more and more as the week went on. There are still just too many little items we need to solve before I can sit back and be confident the rollout team can fly in (literally) and hit the ground running with our users.<\/p>\n

It was a week where I wished I had my favourite poster<\/a> to hand to put up in the office. With people being out I\u2019ve had to get into the detail of some of the problems and I was again humbled by the depth of IT infrastructure and what I don\u2019t know. ADMX files<\/a> were the final new discovery of the week.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve been learning a lot from the issues we\u2019ve found. The problems have been framing our thinking about how we need to set ourselves up for the future as we make changes.<\/p>\n

I had a minor wobble one evening this week when I started pondering my personal workflow again. I managed to pull myself back from it before I got too deep as after all these years I know there isn\u2019t much to be gained from tinkering. As I mentioned some weeks back I still have tasks and to-dos in too many places and I was thinking about how I can improve. I\u2019ve recently switched from Workflowy<\/a> to Dynalist<\/a> as they have taken the simple outline concept and run with it. The outline is a great way to be able to \u2018see all of the things\u2019 and zoom in but I haven\u2019t quite committed to it yet as the be-all and end-all; I still have too many date-based reminders in Remember The Milk<\/a> which I don\u2019t want to mess with right now.<\/p>\n

On the WB40<\/a> WhatsApp channel Matt Ballantine triggered a good discussion from his post on \u2018decomposing collaboration\u2019<\/a>, looking at the types of tools people use. On the podcast he also noted people really want \u2018bring your own software\u2019 and not just \u2018bring your own device\u2019 \u2014 they want to use the tools they are comfortable with and proficient at. I see a specific case of this problem when working across different teams; we can focus around a kanban board, or project plan, or list of things to do, but I then need to take the things I<\/em> need to do from those places and work them into my own tools, alongside all of the other tasks from other aspects of my life. As soon as you have to update the status of something in more than one place, it\u2019s too much of an overhead.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday night I attended a dinner with a cross-section of staff from my client\u2019s office, hosted by a couple of the senior managers. The food was amazing and the format was very good, with everyone giving a lengthy introduction to their background and experience followed by an informal discussion amongst all of the dozen or so attendees. It was a great way to break down the barriers between the strangers that sit together in a crowded room every day and I can already see the impact. This was followed by an \u2018all-hands\u2019 breakfast with the Group CEO the next morning. They management team are really putting in great effort to foster a friendly, collaborative atmosphere in the company. The events and conversations got me thinking about how the barriers can be further broken down. It\u2019s a long road to move to \u2018working out loud<\/a>\u2019 as part of the culture \u2014 people need to get comfortable with not having a fully-baked message before they put it out there \u2014 and the work I am doing has a big part to play in providing the technology to enable it.<\/p>\n

Next week we\u2019ll be putting an internal-facing blog live and I\u2019m looking forward to the team using it for all sorts of posts. Hopefully after many years of trying internal blogging in different roles this one will gain some traction and we can lead by example in a small way.<\/p>\n

Other stuff<\/h2>\n

Taking my 8-year-old to football training on freezing cold, wet Saturday mornings is made much less of a bind by the chats I have with another one of the dads there. He\u2019s an anaesthetist and I\u2019m fascinated by the work he does and his take on things, so much of which seems to have similarities to the stuff I have picked up elsewhere. We end up covering so many topics in the course of the hour and my mind is buzzing for the rest of the day. This week we tackled:<\/p>\n