Weeknote 10-14 February 2020
On being caught between storms.
About agile in Cornwall Council
We are starting to adopt more agile and open ways of working. We have been experimenting internally with weeknotes and, with a little time lag, we would like to see what publishing these might achieve.
It is great living near the coast and have a constantly changing view but there are down sides. Storm Ciara has produced some spectacular waves but I am still not used to the way our little bungalow creaks, groans, clatters and shakes in a storm. Not the best few nights sleep I have had but maybe I will be more used to it by the time Dennis arrives this weekend. It will take even longer to block all the drafty holes that Ciara managed to find. One minor success is the compost bin is still in place in the garden now that we have attached concrete blocks!
Similar weather in our portfolio this week too. Many in our team are being kept awake by our Oracle and Windows 10 “storms”. They will blow over eventually but they are more enduring than Ciara and Dennis and lower priority work may have to wait while we sort things out. Many in team Falcon are caught up in this so we took the drop in capacity into account when we did our advanced planning for Sprint 8.
These “storms” are inevitable given the creative, high-risk sort of work we do but the good side is the change, variety and the nice surprises. Here are some examples from this week:
- Another council is in the process of refreshing their intranet and are happy to share prototypes and the user research they have done. I’ve set up a call for them to chat with our HR team who are planning to do something similar.
- Our fast change work for Cornwall Housing is going into test so we have updated our Services team and are creating the Service Delivery Plan together using the Wiki feature in AzureDevOps.
- Our customer services team are going to draft the business justification and business benefits for upgrading our call centre call recording.
- I’ve started working with the Custom Apps team to kick-off some agile development work for Cornwall Outdoors.
- I’ve started to learn more about the work in the Database Product Team and Operations Centre so we can see where agile ideas might help and put some of them to the test.
- Over lunch on Friday, I attended another Agile in the Ether[1] call to share ideas about applying agile in all sort of organisations and situations. Topics included: making progress visible when a project is about culture and behaviour change; estimating and long-term forecasts; how to work with small teams where everyone is part time. The event itself is an experiment in building a team or community which cannot spend much time together and are never in the same location. We might be able to adopt some of how this works for some of our teams or communities of practice[2].
A word about a good cause
Due to a family commitment I had to miss Cornwall Tech Jam[3] last weekend. From social media[4] it looked like it was another busy session with parents and kids working through a series of computing challenges from simple visual programming[5] through to building and controlling electronic devices. The event has a great atmosphere so I will make sure I get along to the next event in March and also the Open Tech Challenge. I realise I was spoilt by the range of meet ups and tech for good events when I worked in London so it is good to find a group of committed people here in Cornwall[6]. I’m now on the look out for a local hackathon in support of a good cause, rather like the regular NHS Hack Days[7] or a less regular event like HomelessHack[8]. If there isn’t one do you want to help me set one up?