Weeknotes — 26 July 2024

Reasons to be cheerful.

This week I’m being grateful

I had a skim through last week’s weeknotes, where I reflected on my first 6 months at the Scottish Government.

And I realised in thinking about what I’d learned or observed, I’d forgotten to write down the positives and things I could celebrate.

So I’ve decided to follow that up with some things I’m grateful for:

• I’ve got a great line manager. I’ve felt really well supported since day 1. I felt that she’s been invested in what I’m doing and working on, and someone who is always prepared to advocate for me.
• I’ve got great colleagues who I’m learning from all the time. I’m in a big team of content designers, all of whom bring different experience and skills. I got some peer review comments back from a colleague this morning who explained quite articulately why a sentence I’d written wasn’t really a sentence — it was missing a noun and a verb. I love that feedback, as it’s something I probably often do and hadn’t realised why it wasn’t right. There’s expertise and different writing experience that is helping me learn and is making me a better content designer.
• I’ve been working closely with a colleague for several months, who I’m just gonnae call Andy because that’s his name. I’ve learned loads from working with him. Some of the ideas or thoughts I record here come from our conversations or work we’ve been doing on our discovery, and now our delivery planning. I feel lucky that I work with him on so many things and and can bounce other ideas off him.
• Yesterday, Andy and I critted a draft content plan that we expect to use to deliver a lot of different content delivery. We got such useful feedback from colleagues. I didn’t know if we’d manage to fill an hour on process documentation, but we did, and it wasn’t a talking shop either. It was useful insight into delivering a standardised form for lots of different content work, and showed us where we need to be more flexible.
• I feel empowered and enabled to drive change in my team, despite not being a team lead. I recently wrote an internal team blog about how we need to improve how we maintain content. As a result, me and a team lead are gathering feedback from the rest of the team, so we can workshop and trial a new way of working that might make things better for us and the stakeholders we work with. It can take time to turn things around, but I can see it happening.
• This week a colleague hosted a lean coffee at a team meeting. It was my first experience of a lean coffee, and it was great. It put the team’s priorities front and centre. It broke down the barrier between what we individually want to prioritise, and got us talking about things we’re aligned on. It gave us future topics for discussion that the team raised but we didn’t get time to address. The thing I suggested in a sticky note — and felt was important — wasn’t discussed because the team had other priorities. Maybe we’ll get to it another time, but if not, it might be something I need to take forward myself and that’s useful to know!

This week I’m listening to

The self-titled album by Sam Wilkes, Craig Weinrib, and Dylan Day. Outdoors, loose, summery. An absolute delight.