Blog post: Weeknotes - how we started and why we do them…
The week notes have become a useful resource for blog writing and an excellent archive of everything our team has accomplished in the past 2 years. In this blog post, Sophie and Heledd reflect on how we got started and why we write them.
Value of reading things from other teams like us
We’ve benefited from others working in the open over the years. It’s inspired and help shape what we do, how we do it and made us feel part of a bigger community.
As a team, we knew for a long time that “working in the open” was something we should do and had a few attempts before we finally found our groove!
A masterclass on agile working
Back in 2021, our team attended a workshop on 'working in the open', led by Giles Turnbull, as part of the CDPS Learn by Making lab.
It motivated us to be open about the services we build, and the techniques used to build them.
This simple concept has a powerful impact. We set about developing services for our users, while working in the open.
How it started…
Driven by the service standards and learnings from others, we began adding our own voice to the public sector digital services space, and started to write about:
- things that we were inspired by and learnt from others
- our team’s wins and experiences
- connecting with other teams experiencing similar challenges
- solutions and insights to support overcoming shared pain points
How it’s going…
Since starting our weeknotes in 2022, we have published a weekly edition for 2 years, without missing a week.
Some of the practical ways we’ve done this:
- we have a rota to make sure a designated pair writes, edits and publishes the week notes
- every member of the team contributes to weeknotes by sharing their highlights in our weekly team meeting, or by email
- we host our weeknotes on GitHub
- we don’t have a distribution list, but Heledd shares a link on LinkedIn and BlueSky, and we sometimes share by email internally
To minimise stress on our team, we:
- consulted team diaries to plan around existing annual leave
- paired people with complementary strengths as week notes partners for increased inclusion
- built reminders into the team calendar to reduce mental strain on week notes writers
Approach with Welsh language weeknotes
Weeknotes are more engaging when they capture the voice of the writer, whether that’s in English or Welsh.
In the beginning, we sent them to our translation team, who support us in making our content bilingual. But we soon recognised that the first-person style of writing that gave our week notes a sense of 'voice', meant that we were causing our translation team a lot of work trying to reflect our humour and other idiosyncrasies we often have in our weekly reflections.
Now (when we can) we pair Welsh speakers on the team to write a true Welsh edition of the content. All our blog posts are translated, but our weeknotes are different – and we’re not 100% sure who reads them! We’ll keep reflecting and learning about the best and manageable approach.
What we have learnt…
When we tried to work in the open through week notes and blogs in the past, we agonised over what to say and how to say it. But Giles encouraged us to:
- be brave, don’t be afraid to show your personality
- show the thing – collect pictures, screenshots and quotes to show others
- plan less and publish more, especially when we have something to say or show
- relax and don’t worry about sounding corporate, and to just be ourselves
Tips for getting started on your own week notes
When first starting out, Digital Service Standards for Wales recommends that you:
- remain visible within your organisation by holding regular ‘show and tells’ and blogging about the journey, and not just the end result
- celebrate successes and be open about learning from things that haven’t worked so well
- publish source code, data and other artefacts where it is safe to do so
Other things that helped us stay consistent in our weeknotes journey?
- working in teams
- being honest and reflective
- not worrying about the structure or word count
- getting positive feedback from people that told us they read our weeknotes!
Giles’ book: ‘Working in the open’ is a short, practical guide for people and teams who want to start working in the open.
We also like this guide shared by ProMoCymru: Weeknotes: what they are, how to write them.
Being recognised as part of a wider community
We now have a space to share our reflections, engage with the wider community of digital professionals and celebrate our team's victories. They have become a cathartic way to reflect on our week, and an archive documenting our day-to-day and bigger work achievements.
It’s no secret that there’s many difficult weeks and months, and at times we question whether we’re on the right track! Being open (and sometimes vulnerable), is a good way to get some feedback from other digital professionals from outside our organisation – which is a great motivator! For example, when Giles mentioned us in his guide to doing weeknotes:
“This team has been writing weeknotes since late 2022. The notes are very team-specific, but published on the open web, in the public domain. My favourite kind of weeknote.
“The notes achieved something else: they made the team’s inner workings visible enough that other people wanted to apply for jobs there, because they had read the notes. It’s not unusual for someone to apply for a job because they’ve heard verbally, on the grapevine, that a team is worth working with – but in this case there was no grapevine, the word wasn’t spread verbally. It was all down to the weeknotes.
“People were able to follow along with the team’s ups and downs via the weeknotes, and decide for themselves: yes, this is a team I want to be part of."
We are proud to play a role in cultivating an open and collaborative space within digital public services, for our teams and organisations to learn and grow from one another.
Our hope is that more teams will start to share their stories and that our experience can help and transform a rather daunting prospect into a fun and engaging way to collaborate and grow as a team.
There is always so much to learn from each other.