Short week 1/3 out of the way in May. Just in case you’re wondering I’m strongly team ‘do not reorganise Monday’s regular meetings to Tuesday when it’s a bank holiday’.

Anyway this week I:

• Finally started reading a book that I picked up at our team away day ‘bool swap’. The Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences is fairly standard stuff so far, written in an interesting way. The author says it’s intended to be read on short commutes to work, so it’s a lot of short sections, bullet points, and numbered lists. Almost like a lot of twitter threads in a book. Doing research is clearly not the author’s strong point, mostly revolving around ‘imagine you are in their shoes’ type thinking, but there’s some helpful frameworks for thinking about risk etc. I’ve not finished it yet (I don’t have a commute to read it on!)
• Offered a bit of advice to two ‘product analysts’ from the HR team on how they could start doing some user research on the products they are responsible for. It was a helpful reminder that people are keen to learn more (they’d attended a session run by some of our user researchers and realised it was what they needed!). But also a reminder that many people work within fairly limiting targets i.e. high probability they will learn lots that they can’t act on. I tried to target the advice with this in mind, it’s a pretty common challenge!
• Got pretty stressed about whether someone would buy our house or we’d lose the one we’d offered on. Summary is, we’ve got a new buyer and didn’t lose the house. Good times.
• Spent time looking at some data our Office 365 team had pulled from the Microsoft emissions dashboard (which I was excited to hear we had even looked at). I learned a lot, not least the difference between mtCO2e (metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent) and MtCO2e (Million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent). I had a few hours of wondering if what on earth I’d uncovered, before I realised I was a million times out with my maths 🤦‍♂️.
• Collected some examples of activities that saved both energy and cost related to the technology we use at the Co-op. These included decommissioning SharePoint servers, turning off our self serve tills overnight and right sizing our AWS infrastructure. These are all forming part of a session with leadership to try and find more opportunities to do similar work to reduce the energy we (and customers) use when running our technology.
• Ended the week co-hosting ‘Lean Agile University’. Which has taken off across the Co-op after being established by Neil, based on Jez Humbles videos. I attended the sessions last year as part of my aim to get a better understanding of all things software development and delivery. It’s proving a useful way of introducing different ways of working to a really wide range of different colleagues who wouldn’t normally think about software development at all!

Long read this week is taken from some of the ‘extra reading’ that Neil’s pulled together for the course: ‘The new methodology’