Latenotes this week.
I hadn’t planned on writing any necessarily, but after 2ish weeks of working on my first client work I’ve had one of those weekends where I’ve spent about as much time picking up the notebook next to my bed as I have actually sleeping. Apart from Saturday morning when my very generous wife allowed me a lie in. Can’t remember the last time I got out of bed after 9am tbh.
Starting outside of work:
- After 4ish weeks of having cast on her arm, my daughter finally got it off yesterday and everyone had their first uninterrupted nights sleep for a while too. Probably related. So far she’s cautiously optimistic about being able to use and move it again.
- We no longer have any builders or plasterers in the house, which means not moving the contents of the kitchen upstairs every night. We have about 30% of our old kitchen left, the new one arrives 12th December.
- I discovered that my Dad had left an architectural drawing he’d done as a student in Cardiff at our house. As a student he lived around the corner from where we live now and the local cemetery was a good source of interesting things to draw. This Catholic chapel no longer exists, a little piece of Cardiff history (even if its not a great photo…trying to hold the drawing far enough away with one hand etc).
- On a work front its been full steam ahead on stakeholder interviews, and the list has been growing by the day. I’ve never worked with an org with so many horizontals, or verticals…there’s a lot of people involved in everything!
- Can’t speak too much to the detail of the project but some more general reflections on doing digital in big legacy orgs, especially those with established departments whose role historically has been to make decisions about what customers want and need. There is inevitable friction when ‘digital’ teams start having opinions about this too…
- A few other general musings:
- A big frustration for those grappling with attempts at ‘digital transformation’ seems to be the expectation that ‘We (or you) should be able to accurately predict what our products and services need to be, before we start building them, we’re the experts after all’.
- Digital teams often find themselves delivering a set of features agreed 3 months ago, to a budget agreed 9 months ago, that is hung off a strategic priority agreed 12 months ago. The disconnect is real.
- There are many people for whom ‘100% of the wrong thing delivered on time and on budget’, counts as success because they believe the only other option is ‘100% of the right thing over time and budget’. There is real scepticism over doing ‘80% of the right thing to time and budget’.
- A related thought on how its much easier to call for ‘accountability’ from doers, rather those making the strategic decisions…or lack thereof.
Given everyone seems to be sharing it (in my new work circles at least) maybe you’d also like to read Doteveryone’s ‘definition of done‘.
alistairuff 
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