Weeknotes #5 - Not much time to reflect

We started these weeknotes for two purposes really. The first was to give you the reader some insight into exactly what we are doing as a company. The second is to provide some opportunities to actually reflect on this work. What has gone well, what has gone badly, what we will learn for next time, things like that.

To be honest, we haven't really had that much time to reflect in recent weeks. We have been focussing a lot on doing and thinking (we did a lot of the latter this week), but not much reflecting. That has been to our detriment. Reflection plays an important role in engagement and strategy, allowing you to critically appraise progress and to digest the lessons learned. As we work on our own strategy, we must make more time for this. Which we will do so this week.

For those of you who have been following the blog this week, we have been busy working on our strategy for most of the week. You can see the blogs from Day 1 and Day2. We are just working on the blog from Day 3 right now, as the key learning from the week was that you need to spare the time to commit to the sprint.

As a means of testing this, we attempted to fit the sprint around our existing work that we had planned for the week. But it could not be done. Our focus was lost, we struggled to pick up loose ends, and trying to concentrate on several things at the same time means that we simply did not do a good job. We also lost a day that we tried in vain to get back. An important lesson learned.

On the positive side, we are very near our first deliverable from our Policy Diagnosis Tool Discovery Project. This week, our white paper on community engagement as part of transport planning will be released. And we could not be happier with it. So keep an eye on LinkedIn on Wednesday.