Hello! Happy Friday!! We made it!!!! đ
You may remember me from Medium publications such as âWeekly Braindumpâ.
During the course of writing the Braindump I became aware of a community of people doing #weeknotes. Through osmosis (and just good olâ stealing great ideas) the braindump gradually became a weeknote of sorts.
As someone who recognises the value in open, resusable standards, it seems daft to keep doing the same thing by another name.. so behold! Here are my weeknotes!
This will be a slightly different format though. No list of links. I may still keep that going in the form of a Braindump because some people said it was useful.
In the spirit of stealing great ideas and repurposing them for your own needs, I spotted that Ben Proctor was using The SatoriLabâs reflective questions as the basis for writing a weeknote.
I thought this was a great idea for 1) focusing on extracting the learning from the week and 2) trying to curtail my rambling posts (already failing on that count).
What did I learn?
I have learned about Office 365. We have been looking at it primarily as a way of replacing our aging email server. However, I have started having some reservations that once we start down the route of Office 365 for email there will be pressure to utilise the rest of the office suite to make the monthly subscription cost look like value for money.
Whilst it seems to make technical sense as itâs a natural progression for what weâve already got, I suspect that it doesnât really map to user needs. Especially in the context that weâve got a fair number of staff who value using distinct separate tools that work well (Evernote, Trello, 7Geese).. I include myself in this. I took to Twitter to gauge opinion and got some useful threads to follow up on. Yay Twitter!
What surprised me?
How hot trains get. Most of this week Iâve been lucky enough to leave work in time to miss the peak 5pm commute. But even with a moderate number of people on the ride home the internal temperature of the train cabin has been impressive(ly bad).
What happened that gave me a glimpse of the future?
This week we rebooted our transformation efforts. Weâre going to be officially using user centred design and customer journey mapping to best understand how to improve and modernise services.
This is in recognition that before we start hurling technology at things, we really need to understand what people are trying to do and where humans & automation actually add value.
This culminated in a really useful discussion with colleagues and they quickly identified some regular concerns like âShould this really be called âdigitalâ transformation? Is it a bit techie?â and âDoes trying to identify different groups of users ultimately just become stereotypes?â. This is great! And hopefully these sort of regular discussion will help accelerate our collective understanding. đ
LOADS of work to do and lots of things to learn, but this feels like the right direction of travel for the future.
What will I do tomorrow?
Rest! In my long and lengthy break from writing these things, I have found renewed joy for doing entirely unproductive things in my downtime. I dedicate quite a lot of time thinking about how I can extract the most value from the week, so I need to give myself permission to do nothing occasionally to balance it out and avoid burnout.