What would you have liked to do more of?
More focus time. It felt like too much of my week was playing work Tetris. To do this I’m going to try the trick of blocking out some time in my calendar and using skypes red light.
More time on the enes project, the time I had made available for that has been usurped by more more longer term work around the business plan for the next financial year and also shorter term work about our next release. A swap that makes sense and is exciting in it’s own right, just not what I was looking forward to doing.
What did you learn?
Camille Fournier’s The Managers Path talks about onboarding and 30/60/90 day expectations, we already had something in that vein for month 1-4 but it was limited in scope and done in a hurry and therefore not that effective and I make my own bespoke lists. I feel encouraged now to reorganise and standardise more along those lines.
Only 14% of companies listed on the UK government digital marketplace (gcloud) actually win any business. This really surprised me.
What did you enjoy?
Using Wardley Mapping on the enes project, to help think about sourcing. Partly the novelty of a new tool, partly enjoyment in that it’s theory I’ve immediately applied to my work and can immediately see results.
What did you achieve
- Review inbox at maintained at zero for most of the week, a few things came in later on in Friday.
- More input into one of the project proposals
- Wrote and performed feature flag show ‘n’ tell
- Kicked off a mini project proposal
What are you looking forward to next week
- Working on my leadership course.
- Meeting with a 3rd party about a long wished for integration that we feared wouldn’t be technically feasible – it sounds like there’s a way forward.
Interesting Stuff read/consumed:
- A chunk of Camille Fournier’s The Managers Path, it was sensible and solid but not terribly useful to me at first, this changed the more I read.
- Celz Alejandro’s writing about progressive summarisation of notes – as someone who is always reading, I do worry that I read a lot and then don’t make full use of what I’ve read, perhaps this could be a way of ensuring that I do a better job of this.
- Jez Humble tweeting about code review, paraphrasing “Async reviews optimise for individual devs, sync reviews optimise for lead time”. Amongst other things, this does make me question our kind of open source approach to code review.
Dean Sas 