Hi Everyone,
I hope you’re doing ok.
This writing lark actually takes some discipline. I know this because I’m writing this a week late. The thing about writing a week late is that I forget loads of detail about the week. Maybe that’s a good thing but I can’t say for sure. I get some perspective but I’d like to be able to have conscious perspective. I want to remember more of the detail of the week and decide for myself. Oh well. No choice this time. I nearly stopped writing this week. I decided that writing weekly to the end of the year would be the easier thing to do over challenging my compulsion by finishing in an unplanned way. So I’m taking the easy option (?).
I didn’t take the photo above. I couldn’t take the photo if I wanted to because the car doesn’t exist yet. It’s due in December, or it was due in December. The delivery date has been pushed back to January. I’m hoping to get it in the spring. I’ve never bought a new car before but the deal on this made it more affordable than a second hand one. I’m a little dissappointed about the delay but not much and I’m not even annoyed. I’m still looking forward to getting it and I can to drive our current car for longer which is great (we love it, it’s just a bit impractical). It’s interesting that the new car is a Toyota for all sorts of Lean/Agile reasons. I’ll just say that. I don’t feel like it’s a failure of lean manfacturing. There have to be trade-offs and I’m sure Toyota will be looking out how they can mitigate for things like Brexit and Covid in future. This has got me thinking about risk management in agile again. What would a lean mitigation for a pandemic or Brexit actually be? What trade-offs do you make at work to deliver your products in an efficient way? How do you work with your users when you deliver later than expected? How do you define late?
A few of us in our Mental Health Advacacy network got together to produce a bunch of FAQs for our site. This turned into a conversation about user experience and content. The argument was that if you get the content right you don’t need FAQs. So we’ve set up a session with our user centred design team.
I got together with my peers and manager in Product Delivery for a day at the office. As expected it was great to get together. Obviously we followed all the Covid safety precautions but seeing people in real life boosted my mental health and others said the same. We even went out for lunch! The Stag Cafe in Cardiff is a firm favourite of mine having been there twice in the last few months. I cycled to work that day so on the mental wellbeing front I scored multiple times.
I got feedback on my last two assignments for my Advanced Certified Scrum Master (Reflecting on a coaching experience and Recognising conflict). Essentially not good enough. So I knuckled down and put more into them. Fingers crossed for a good result.
No prizes for guessing what I did on Friday afternoon but I treasure the flexibility that CH allows that let’s me do it.
Be excellent to yourselves and each other,
Si
