Taking a break, planes, trains and going live
weeknote #37 (17th September 21)
Having taken a break from writing weeknotes and THEN taking a full on proper holiday abroad, yes abroad via a plane (half empty mind you!) I’m attempting to get back on the weeknote train. The past 18 months have been tough on everyone and it’s easy to think I’m lucky to have a job, security, a partner, some really good friends; I’m resilient; I’m fine! But it’s still really important to look after your mental health as well as the physical to ensure that layer of reslience gets replenished and renewed. My coping mechanismn is usually to keep on; keep active; keep cycling — but there’s a limit.
Crete, apart from being a last minute switch from Scotland (there’s a story there!), was absolutely a much needed luxury. 11 days lying in the sun reading and not much else. Never done that before can thoroughly recommend! Pure heaven. Mike says I’m solar charged! Really glad I decided to buy 2 extra books at the airport; they were the ones I read and fell totally immersed.. Bali is a little gem of a place, very understated, unpretentious, totally stunning and hot! Totally forgot about work for the duration.
What’s your coping mechanism, how do you look after yourself?
Back to work for me was Tuesday, I’d planned to be kind to myself and ease back in to Teams’ meetings gradually. I had felt bad leaving Alex with all the work we have on in Regulatory Services (Milestones fast approaching) but hey my leave was booked ages ago… Was great to see familar faces at our team catch up on Wednesday, hear what had been going on and what was being planned for ‘Festival of the Future’.
Had to quickly try and put a few slides together for our show and share planned for Thursday, even that was an effort, analysing activity log results after a holiday and keep it brief — eek! Not least because I was juggling Councillor Register of Interests go-live at the same time. The go-live date (as you know!) has been moved back several times and things were looking dodgy right up until the last minute.
There have been more technical problems to resolve this week but our developer has worked tirelessly dealing with new platform issues as he’s gone. Today’s challenges arose with moving the process from test to live, now all sorted! It’s not ideal going live without proper testing with a ‘Beta Public’ version but that’s in effect what we’ve had to do.
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At least we had done some testing on a younger version of the form, (feedback used and process iterated) All the comments this morning were positive, just some dual hatted functionality to ‘tweak’. We will continue to gather feedback on the new process which will help us identify where improvements, if any, can be made for a future iteration.
We recently also had to add in some security which wasn’t raised at the last user testing session (we had a good workaround) and also a whole brand new section; ‘Other Registrable Interests’ the content came as statements so to keep the same user journey throughout the form managed to change into easy to understand questions. New guidance had to be written for this and the CEO of DAPTC came up trumps and offered to write it for us (in the absence of our legal/democratic services expert who was on leave). He’s done a great job and we’ll be reviewing and linking that into the built-in pop-up guidance notes to keep the process as seamless as possible, reducing failure demand and enabling councillors to be accountable and responsible for their RoI; a timely release with their new Code of Conduct and complaints procedure. No Jackie Weavers here!
The demo we presented this morning went really well despite some technical issues due to poor wifi but we quickly managed to continue with me presenting a form I’d pretty much only just seen and I knew wasn’t as polished as I’d liked it to have been. It’s been a case of priorities. Content can be sorted next week and Dorset Councillors (including ‘Dual Hatters’) will start completing their register of interests from Monday. Town and Parish Councillors the end of the week. This is some achievement as not many councils have tackled this yet and still use inaccessible PDF’s heavy on resource.
I feel proud, relieved, even rather elated! There have been several moments where I felt the project was slipping away, despondancy lapping at our feet; there were other much more important things going on, such as really big things like local plans, website migrations (oh and a pandemic!) but fortunately for us the Monitoring Officer has special powers when it comes to resourcing statutory requirements. For this I was truly grateful! This is definitely one of those weeks I love my job and feel proud to be part of the Digital and Change team.
Regulatory services continues to travel at pace, stand-ups, (show and share was well attended/received, we even had a guest speaker from Housing; sprint retro next week) with lots of meetings booked in for process mapping sessions and a few for shadowing. I’m finding this is still difficult as many staff are choosing work to continue to work from home, so it’s harder to catch people going in to the office. Jumping in to teams’ meetings to shadow virtually hasn’t happened yet — my challenge for next week is to make it happen and feedback to the team. It’s great people feel they can continue to work from home and we will adapt accordingly.
What’s your challenge for next week? Make sure you do something for you and remember to be kind to yourself as well as others.
Have a great weekend and I hope we all get to enjoy some more sunshine!
My ‘good read’ recommends; ‘A Slow Fire Burning’ ~ Paula Hawkin’s new thriller (author of ‘The Girl on the Train’)
‘Songbirds’ ~ Christie Lefteri (author of The Beekeeper of Aleppo)
