Hello and welcome back to my weeknotes. In the last few months things have got super busy and I’ve found it increasingly difficult to stick to the fortnightly weeknotes. So for now, moving forward, although I’ll aim for every two weeks, these might be a little more sporadic — and that’s okay! Anyway, just keeps things interesting though hey?
So, the last 4 weeks.. things have happened, projects have been moving along, I’ve been up to both exciting and stressful things, and I have an exciting (non work related) update to share.
Settling into my project
Working out where I sit, what I can keep busy with and where to add value
In my last weeknotes I talked about some of the things I struggle with about Betas, particularly picking betas up having not been involved in Alpha or Discovery. But in the last two weeks or so, I’ve started to feel more settled in my role on the project and feeling increasingly confident in the value I can add to the work.
I spent some time reflecting on why I think I was struggling with the project and knowing where it be focusing and I think it boiled down to a number of different little things, so I’ve been working through those and trying to address them one by one. A few different things have helped with this, firstly — speaking to my Delivery Lead about my worries and uncertainty about the value I was/could add and where I’m best placed. This was so valuable and reassuring! Shout out to Niall for being the best DL I’ve worked with!
I’ve also been blocking our half an hour at the end of each week to just brain dump everything I learned, seen, thought about, understood, questioned etc in that week into one big, very unstructured word doc. This has helped me to process everything that’s happened, I suppose it’s almost like saying it out loud, while also reflecting on things. As a team we’ve also switched our ways of working slightly, which gives more room for me to contribute service-level thinking and designing which is fab!
In the project right now, I’m I’m currently working on a big old process map that tells the journey of our key users and their interaction with other users at a medium to high-level granularity. It’s been nice to have a thing to work on and a space to capture the points I think are really important and integral to the design of this service (and product.)
Ahhh working together, in real life!
Oh the novelty
Earlier this week some of our project team met up in London for some in-person working, and once again — bloomin love working in person occasionally. WFH has its benefits and we get some really great work done remotely, but there is a real value added with the occasional day working together in an office.
We made so much progress in such a short amount of time, were able to unpick some of the things we’ve been stuck on recently, and also — have lunch all together🥰
Although, I did have to put up with 5 different delays on my 2 hour train into London… commuting is no fun ahha.
Resparking the joy
Trying to respark old habbits
Our DCC (Design Community Champs)team have been speaking recently about how we can respark some joy into the series of rituals we run within our design community. As a team, we’ve been super busy recently and haven’t been able to invest so much love and energy into facilitating this rituals but also (as a result, or maybe a cause?) the overall interest and attendance to these rituals across the community has dropped.
So recently we’ve had two different retros to reflect on the work we’ve done and what has and hasn’t worked. We’ve then also been thinking more directly about ways to reignite some of our rituals and respark the for the community. If anyone reading these has any experience or learns from trying to energise and bring together their communities or disciplines — I’d love to hear from you!
Exciting life update
I’m officially a mum of two
I’d like to introduce Dusty(a girl) and Ash(a boy), our 12 week old kittens.
Just over a week ago, my sister and I brought home two little kitties. My sister and I have lived together for about 18 months now, and having grown up with cats both really wanted our own. We initially intended to get just one… however, we absolutely fell in love and instead brought home two little ones. They’re either absolute chaos, or total sweethearts. Will go from zooming around the house knocking things over and causing havoc, or cuddling up next to me fast asleep and being cute as HECK (like right now).
They’re also both super helpful coworkers..
I’ll leave it there for this week, I’m running out of brain space and have a surprise 30th birthday party for my brother to get organised straight after work! So hopefully see you soon, but we shall see when I have time to check in and say hi!
