This weeknote has been a few days in the writing because I’m on Struggle Street. It’s a place where everything feels much harder than it should be for many varied, mostly legitimate, reasons. Nonetheless, it left me feeling downtrodden, exhausted and in the frame of mind to not say anything at all if I had nothing nice to say. It’s taken a while to get out of that and into a brighter frame of mind. This has been achieved, mostly, by putting Christmas decorations up.
There’s another new Delivery Manager. Woohoo!!!!! Greg joined the growing team at Royal Borough of Greenwich and we are delighted to have him. I’ve already been impressed by his approach and thoughtfulness when chatting to people. He’s been having much more structured conversations than I did when I joined with the aim to have a form of ‘synthesis’ in a few weeks to help us define the purpose and vision of the delivery team. I’m VERY excited about this.
In cloud migration land, we unblocked a connectivity issue which was blocking progress on the pre-requisites for our pilot migration which was a big relief. We’re now able to continue getting our active directory into the cloud and then complete planning the pilot migration. Hooray!
Mo took me through all the networking stuff we need to do which was great as I had been avoiding getting my teeth into it. I am now fully up to speed though and ready to pick that stream of work up and run with it. Thanks to Mo for being so patient as he had to explain things to me several times before I understood anything.
Also on the radar last week was the first deck (of several) which will help our app owners to understand and get excited about the work we are doing. Philippa helped me with the content and then Yu-Hsuan made it beautiful. I also managed to repurpose the slides for the digital board this week so, two birds with one stone. Bonus efficiency!
We’ve started stand ups for the project this week so a lot of my time went into building the Trello board to support those last week. It’s getting there but there’s still more to do.
Backup had some wins last week too. We agreed how we will assess vendors and how we will weight our requirements. We have gone for the tried and testes, Must, should, could and won’t (MoSCoW) categories. Jamie put together a giant spreadsheet for us to collate requirements in, categorise them and then allocate a met or not met to vendor products. The sheet makes me both very sad and very happy at the same time. Part of me is sure there is a nicer way to present the info but then the other half begrudgingly accepts that the sheet does exactly what we need it to.
Next week, we will use our catch ups to categorise the requirements (Wednesday) and then assess the vendor products against them (Friday). This should, hopefully, get us to a place where we can confidently make a choice and move forward into the mire of procurement. Wish us luck!
Non-project things were very thin on the ground last week but I did manage to get to Matt’s lunch and learn about policies. He ran through why we think we have them and his vision for what policy could be. It was a great session with some excellent reflections in it. I’m excited to see his progress on making policy a force for good.
