Weeknotes
Starting the new project, winning another project, recruiting, Sprint 19, planting trees — and going on strike!
Project Inception
The week started with an inception workshop for the discovery on a new project. I still can’t quite say what it is until contracts catch up with delivery ;)
We got through an incredible amount in half a day, and energy levels remained high throughout. We’ve got these workshops fairly well-honed now, but I was very proud of the team’s delivery, and the willingness of our colleagues in the client team to dive in. The teams instantly gelled.
We worked on the vison for the project, the desired outcomes, the user groups and what we know about them already, and the potential risks.
As part of that project I had coffee-and-chats the next day with the lovely Dan Barrett and Giuseppe Sollazzo, who were kind enough to spare me an hour each to pick their brains on direction for the project. I’ve got more leaders in this space booked in for a chat, including Siân Thomas at DIT and Catherine Bromley at the UK Statistics Authority. The key is, before we charge into doing a discovery, to sound out people already thinking around that subject for their insight and guidance. It helps make sure we’re connecting up to wider public sector thinking, rather than working in isolation.
Throughout the rest of the week we worked on processing the outputs from the workshop and doing literature review for the project.
Events
On Tuesday evening I went along, thanks to an introduction from Giuseppe, to the Local Partnerships reception at the House of Lords. It was great to see an example of what can happen when the UK government, a national government (Wales) and local authorities collaborate well.
On Wednesday I went to drinks with Deeson, a digital agency working in the visitor attractions sector. I’ve known the founder, Tim Deeson, for years and we’ve always supported and encouraged each other (and a healthy amount of taking the piss) as we go through different stages in our businesses. And it’s always good to chat to the Deeson MD, Simon Wakeman, as we’re both geeks when it comes to how to run businesses and nurture teams. Among other things we discussed the idea of the visionary/integrator roles in the Entrepreneurial Operating System. Both of us felt there are some nuggets in EOS, but that the whole isn’t for us. It’s best to learn widely and pick great ideas, refining and combining them into your own ways of working.
We both like this split of roles in leadership though. I talk about it as instigator/integrator though, as visionary is a bit of an ego label. Instigators are the ambassadors — building relationships in the community, with clients and so on, sensing the market, scanning the horizon and bringing ideas back to the business. Integrators focus on creating a safe and satisfying work environment for everyone in the business, and with a high quality of service for clients, gradually folding in the new ideas/work/stimulus from the instigator (and others). The instigator has to deal with people management and support, admin, planning and so on. It made me reflect that at the moment I’m fulfilling both roles in Convivio, and it’s quite a headshift with a lot of rapid and significant context-switching. In my previous business which was much larger, I worked with a great integrator, and it really freed my up to focus on the instigator role. As we grow a little more we’ll need to think about how to find and bring in a great integrator.
New Project
On Wednesday we also (finally 😉) heard that we’d won a new project. I can’t say more about it until contracts are signed, but it’s for a client we’ve worked with previously and, being ethical folk, they said they tested us harder than anyone else to ensure no bias crept into their decision making. It certainly felt like that!
It’s great to be able to continue the working relationship we’d built, and have a vote of confidence from people who’ve seen us in action. I’ll write more about this once contracts are signed.
The Convivio way is that it’s important to take time to celebrate — so that afternoon we turned our teabtreak hangout into a (tired but) boozy one.
Recruitment
With the amount of work we have coming up in the next year, we’ve started recruiting some more lovely Convivio types. Our user researcher vacancy went live the other week, and now we’re able to press the button on recruiting a frontend developer, backend developer and a UI designer. Our job site is https://jobs.weareconvivio.com/
It’s so exciting to finally be growing after deliberately staying small to ensure we had a strong base before growing.
Sprint 19
I spent the whole day at the GDS Sprint 19 event on Thursday. It was a really interesting day, with lots of food for thought. I’m going to need to blog about it separately, so watch this space!
Apart from anything else though, it’s great the GDS do this. It really is important to share thinking and bring people together.
Climate Strike
On Friday we closed for the day and all went on ‘strike’ in support of the schoolchildren who were striking for the climate crisis.
Joe Baker was at GovCamp Wales, where the attendees went outside to join the protest:
Lewis Nyman was at the protest in Brighton:
And Alice and I attended the protest outside Hackney Town Hall:
Three For Trees
Because the climate crisis is about more than one day, we’ve all been thinking for months about what we could do as a team for the long term. When the report came out earlier in the year that tree-planting was the most important thing to do, Joe came up with the idea that we could support tree planting at a new forest being created in the UK. We investigated it and worked out some numbers, and this week he blogged to launch Three for Trees — our tree-planting intiative to help save the planet.
It’s an initiative that we’re all proud of. It means that we’ll be giving significant (for us) money and time to doing something positive.
Finally, I headed home to begin catching up with work after quite a few days ‘out of office’. For a while I’m going to be working on Saturdays. It’s not sustainable, but I’ve grown enough companies to know that this stage needs a short term extra push from me as the leader — combining doing projects, with recruiting, with running the business. So it’s just a short push in Sept/Oct.
But we’re very much against any out of hours working, so I will return to having full and healthy weekends as soon as possible.
Convivio helps organisations to work better for people.
We do this mainly by helping them transform their services using digital tools, but also by spreading new ways of working.
Read our blog: blog.weareconvivio.com
Follow us on twitter: @weareconvivio
Get in touch: hello@weareconvivio.com
Visit our website at weareconvivio.com
