Wondering on WeekNotes

I had never come across the practice of WeekNotes before joining CONNECTED by DATA and with a desire to always do things “right” I’ve been looking around at what other people are doing - to help me find my own voice. I’ve started following some Mastodon accounts that share their WeekNotes regularly and I’ve been interested to read articles on the practice particularly those that try to articulate the distinction between blogging (a space I’m comfortable, though very irregular, in) and WeekNotes.

In CONNECTED by DATA there is, due to the nature of the work, a lot of sharing reading and reflections on those. There’s also a lot of sharing the work that has been going on, events attended, and propositions of what is next. I found that I told myself that my reflections as Head of Delivery and Operations could be less meaningful as they weren’t about the core business of why we’re here…but over the last week or so I’ve been thinking about how if more Operations leaders did reflect and share, what a wealth of knowledge we’d have. Having an effective organisation, and working hard to build one, is also recognised as a key enabler to achieve our strategic goals (as articulated in our strategic roadmap 2023-24). Plus if most people in Delivery and Operations (and beyond) are like me then just the simple insight to how other people practically approach their work is interesting. I love knowing what browsers people use, how many screens, what project management tools, what chat tools, do they have multiple tabs open or focus on one thing. So I’m going to embrace sharing more about the transactional elements of my week and my reflections on those.

Last week I was working on payroll - the first time in my career I’ve been directly responsible for the pay, HMRC and pension elements of that and processing all the reports etc associated. I was relieved to see money in my bank at the end of the week and no one has been shouting at me this morning so that feels like a success!

I was also spending some time with our refreshed Trello Board. We’ve got a lot of projects and sub-projects going on and I’m using Trello in my Head of Delivery bit of my role to oversee those - to track how things are going and try and catch some of the blockages before they happen. It’s not about micro-managing at all, but there is also an advantage in a small organisation such as ours for people to be tracking progress in a collaborative space - just in case someone else has to step in due to unexpected loss of capacity (euphemism for member of staff not being at work for whatever reason).

Around those more focused tasks last week I was catching up on processing bills, spending some time with team mates, keeping an eye on how the draft annual report is coming together and confirming details for my induction this week onto a Bookkeeping and Controls course.