Bridging Boundaries

A blog about people and technology.

weeknotes

Weeknotes E3 S3 (2019 Edition)

By Neil

Weeknotes S3 E3 (2019 Edition)

Happy Friday! Don’t know if you noticed, but it’s been pretty hot this week.

Stream of consciousness in 3, 2, 1…

I’ve been doing/thinking about…

  • I need a way of visually mapping systems (which I’ve already got) and the types of data held inside each one (which I got some sketchy ideas about) so that we can more readily see what’s being duplicated, where and for what purpose. I’m not sure what this visual map is called, but I can see it in my head. It’s a bit like a entity relationship diagram, but one level up to encompass multiple systems. Next week I’m going to try and draw it so at least I can point to it and ask people what it is. 🙂
  • Strongly related to the above — I’ve got a line of thought running about ways to better join up our systems and services. Next thing to do is start investigating where API’s are (or aren’t) available and think about what the plumbing might look like. The main aim is to make integrations more amenable to change (and consequently less fragile!). I saw this quote today and thought.. “UH HUH!”

“It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.” — Professor Issac Asimov

  • I’ve been working with @PollyRT on a roadmap to show the different strands of work we’re currently doing or are intending to do. I think we quickly concluded there’s a lot going on! We had some good discussions about what this type of roadmap conveys and what it does and doesn’t do for different audiences. Within the team we need quite a lot of granularity and detail, but we also need something that’s more abstract and strategic for those outside the team. Currently pondering if that just means we need things (that may or may not be roadmaps) with differing levels of abstraction to suit different needs. Actually, (as ever) user needs are a good place to start with this eh?!
  • I’ve got a half finished post about a bit of exploring options for getting going with user centred design and building capability. Plenty of examples out in the world — so really what I’m trying to do is translate what it looks like in our context. I’m going to try and publish that post over the weekend. And in telling you about it here there’s higher probability that will actually happen!
  • Trello, Slack, GSuite and email make up the bulk of my workflow at the moment. I was thinking today about the contextual nature of communication. Conversation often doesn’t happen in one place, it happens around the thing that’s being worked on. So that might be on a Trello card. Or in the notes of a Google Doc. Or in a chain of emails. Or in a specific Slack channel. So.. it’s not about a singular best medium, but more what is the appropriate medium to talk about this thing we’re doing.. but I can link to any one of those things to any of the others with relative ease. And often, because most of us occupy the same office most of the time, I have to commit conversations to some type of digital medium so that we can link to it for later reference to fit our workflow. I don’t know what any of that means, but it’s worth pondering on when thinking about a more modern approach to the workplace and what tools we might use (or promote for use).

I’ve been reading…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *