We had a productive week in cloud migration land. There are no technical issues that prevent us from moving forward with our pilot migration so we’re forging ahead with understanding timescales and making sure they are business compatible. I will also be working with our application owner to write a test script*. I will commit to making UAT and test script writing accessible at Greenwich because we have 119 more apps to go once the pilot is done so it’s a conversation I’ll need to have a lot…
On the topic of things I’ll do a lot…I’ve been thinking about how we scale the engagement with app owners up quickly and inclusively. There is no way I can do app owner engagement and keep the wheels on the project cart all by myself. After a great discussion at the weekly People Allocation session we have, the cavalry will come in the shape of a business analyst (or 2? ❤) from Lingjing’s team (thank you Lingjing!!!).
We need to make everything we do right for Greenwich. We must do this at real pace and with tonnes of empathy and compassion. We’ll need to iterate our approaches and processes to ensure we bring people on this journey of change with us rather than inflicting change upon them**. It’s going to be tough but rewarding. I can’t wait for the new team members to start and get themselves stuck in.
The technical heads also made a start at understanding what our active directory (AD) will need to look like in AWS and how we might move toward that last week, too. It’s definitely a tangled ball of wool that we need to pay attention to soon but, for now, pilot migration remains our number 1 priority.
Away from the technical stuff for the cloud migration, I have been thinking really hard about the communication we will do with the organisation and how it needs to be tailored for the different audiences we have. So far, we’ve got a ‘catch all’ approach and an app owner specific approach. Those are the two most important things right now (hence why they’ve been the first out of the gate) but it’s not an exhaustive list of who we need to engage with for this project to be a success. We also agreed we will track work for this on Trello from a Greenwich perspective and that daily stand ups are a good idea. I’ll be taking these 2 things forward in the next few weeks.
Backup had some wins too. Elliot & Jamie had the chance to interrogate vendors about the capabilities of their M365 offer against the requirements they created last week. The meets went well and they both feel empowered to write up a pros and cons style assessment now.
We introduced twice weekly catch ups and a Trello board for this work, too. It’s at the stage where it’s starting to feel really tangible and it’s important we start tracking work in progress and what’s upcoming in a visible way.
I had a great conversation with procurement colleagues William and Andy (under the watchful eye of Paul) about which routes we can take and the requirements for those. I started the paperwork and kicked that off.
I’m looking forward to being able to start fleshing out the Trello cards and visualising our progress over the next few weeks.
My non project stuff this week has been less than usual due to the aforementioned inability to remember things.
We introduced a monthly Digital team get together last month and Monday was the second instalment. We heard from different colleagues about their roles in digital and Sam talked us through some of his data ambitions. I absolutely adore these sessions. They foster a real sense of getting to know each other and our varied disciplines.
We also started an ‘All Things Gaming’ Teams chat which has got some great traction. I’ve really enjoyed discussing games and the many forms they come in with colleagues I have never met. We’ve even agreed to have a ‘Very Gaming Christmas’ where we’ll bring some switches into the office and try to obliterate one another at Mario Party/Mario Kart and whatever other games we have between us.
I didn’t make it to Gov DMs in the Ether because of blerg and it made me sad. I haven’t managed to get to the last 2 of them and I miss seeing my peers from other places. I will absolutely not miss the next one.
*I wish I’d made a copy of the ‘Why UAT’ deck (where I explained UAT and test scripts to colleagues via the medium of LEGO) I created at Hackney to repurpose. I recall writing a ‘ranty’ blog about why UAT is so important too but bit might have been the victim of the event that shall not be named which is a shame.
** This is really important to get right and we’re committed to it. Not including people in change leaves them feeling unimportant which erodes trust. This in turn makes any further changes really difficult to do well. It’s not a place we want to get to and we’re taking all possible steps away from this path.
