What I did this week
Completed 2 quarterly appraisals and a 12-month review – they’re now all done! Phew. These come around fast!
Completed my own appraisal.
On Tuesday I ran a content clinic in the content community. This was great, and I was proud of Claire for sharing her work and getting such good feedback and advice. I’d love to see more real content in practice coming to the community. I summarised the session for an email to the community. But it also felt like a good blog post, so I shared that with Comms.
I spoke to Stuart Ball at Sight Life to plan a bit more on the community session next month. I’m very excited about this but also feeling pressure now that other communities are joining in. I hope we all get something out of it! This has been hard work to build the relationship with Sight Life but has rewarding so far. I also planned some of what needs to happen next and passed on some of the practical tasks now to the capable hands of Mike and Josh.
I briefly reviewed the job description for the new junior roles in UCD
I planned the activity for our designers’ catch-up next week. We decided to run 6-weekly (ish) time for us to build on our design ops work. I also met with Vic to discuss this and enjoyed having our chat – it has been too long since we caught up.
On Monday I spoke to James Gibbons and the Lime squad about their work on the capabilities for a content designer. It was great to see their work and contribute. It looks very promising and I enjoyed going back to basics – thinking about explaining the concept of content design skills to a beginner.
Spent time with the Yellow squad on Tuesday to pan their next steps. This looks great and the team seem confident and on the right track.
Caught up with Poppy – it was lovely to catch-up about work and life and have chit-chat. Also to ponder St David’s Day plans (look out!)
I’ve had lots of emails to answer this week. Including giving advice to some external community members and requests from colleagues in Welsh Government who updated their pair writing guidance to include trio writing.
I also spent 2 mornings working remotely in between taxi-ing my son to visit the new nursery he’s starting in February. Also, on Tuesday, he decided not to wake up until 10am which meant another morning of taxi-ing him to his nursery late!
What I’m thinking about
The quarterly appraisal asked what I’m most proud of in the last quarter. I needed some time to ponder, as the last quarter was a very people-focused, supporting the team through a busy period. I didn’t feel i had an output I could point to in a sense. But I realised that I’m proud that the content designers and translators seem happier, more confident and resilient. That’s not all down to me, but I’m proud of them and my part in it.
Maintaining content
When emailing a colleague in Welsh Government about the trio writing guidance, we were contemplating how much work it is to keep things up to date, and they said:
Maintaining guidance takes some time
This sounds reductive but is really important. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of not maintaining content or not deleting content that is duplicated or no longer helps users.
It’s tempting to keep publishing new content but imagine it like painting a new room: you finish painting but you don’t wash the rollers, fold the dust sheets and put the brushes and paint pots back in the shed. You leave them all out on the floor. You then tell your visitors to admire your newly painted walls whilst warning them to look where they’re going so that they don’t stand in that paint pot you left out. Chaos!
Anyway, I know we have guidance that we really need to review on the CDPS website so that things are current, joined-up and consistent. At the moment, this isn’t the case. It highlights how we need to consider these things before planning, writing and publishing content. For another analogy – don’t install a swimming pool in your garden unless you know you’ll have the time to clean it (or pay someone to do it for you)