04-11-25 - Round Two

Last week, I had a lot of enthusiasm to write, I guess it was the excitement of starting something new, but now this week is slightly harder… but the show must go on!

I had writen a few paragraphs about my weekend to start but they didn’t feel right next to my weeknote. Maybe I will spin them out and have a separate week(end) note. We shall see…

I started the week with a lot of anticipation, as I was due to start titration for ADHD medication again. While I have been without medication for the past 6 months, I have definitely noticed and struggled with my ADHD symptoms daily and trying to push thought with masking symptoms uses up a lot of energy, that often leaves me tired in my free time. Hopeful over the next month or so this will improve, and I can go back to being my regular self

## Highs

• All 180 (+10) spots have been registered for the next DeliverCon in May, and my excitement for the event is now bubbling, it is always the highlight of my year. But with a month and a bit to go, we are in the weird phase where everything feel calm and everything is mostly sorted. After a few years of organising the event, it feels like as an organiser’s team we have got the running of the event down to a science.

• A few weeks ago, an SCS reached out to me, wanting to talk AI and Delivery, due to annual leave, deadlines etc, the time for us to talk has moved around a bit, but this week we were finally able to talk. It was great to talk about AI, Delivery and how teams can do their best work. What really stood out to me in the conversation, they listened. They were engaged and listened to what I was saying and repeated back the key takeaways. Although simple, it was quite strange to experience, it is not often you feel you have the undivided attention of a senior leader. It has stuck with me, not only as it was good conversation, but because I came away feeling respected. Going forward I am going to try and model the same quality, when talking to people give them your full attention and ignoring slack and emails.

• This week has had me spend a lot of time of getting to talk to people, collaborate more, and just getting to talk about interesting things. It is a nice difference to a week full of meeting where there is an objective/deadline to achieve at the end. 

• I have been rehearsing a dance number for my rugby club’s fundraiser. In my own time is a nice time to relax and let my brain calm down a little. Then, when we came together as a group to practice, it is nice to see us together in sync and working together to improve our performance.

Lows

• I am met a few new people thought-out the course of this week, and as part of my introductions I have introduced myself as an “AI Delivery Lead” but that I spend much more time in the policy, strategy and finance space at the moment. This has made me miss being part of actively building and delivery services. Despite this feeling, it has been interesting working in these spaces as they are the enabler and start for many services, but I feel like I could be doing more in communicating across that ‘The strategy is delivery’. I think a reread of ‘Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery’ is in order 

• I have been stuck to my desk this week and I think due to a mixture of things I have not been about to get out and exercise as much.

Small wins 

• Updated our Slack’s Workspace Logo to reflect the Tudor Crown, it’s something that annoyed me for a while, so I just spent 10 minutes to create and update the logo.

• I feel like a broken record sometimes with the amount of times I say ‘open source’ or ‘working in the open’, but it’s starting to pay off and hopefully, we will be publishing something in the open that does not typically get published widely. Watch this space.

• Enabling focus mode on Viva Engage, it automatically blocks out 2 hours daily as ‘Focus Time’. This has helped me push back on the meetings that coming in during the day and preserve time to get my head down and do some valuable work

Reading

• I have been reading thought ‘Delivering economic growth and nature recovery: an independent review of Defra’s regulatory landscape’. I am not all the way thought, but my favourite line has been “Giving more discretion to regulators to focus on delivering an outcome, not a specific output, would have great advantages.” feels like an altered agile principle, of trusting and enabling a team to solve a problem rather than giving them a set process and plan to follow

PS - Thanks to all that sent feedback on my last week note, it was nice to know that: A.it was read by people, B.people found it interesting. My highlight was James posting about it on Bluesky. He posts about so many great article’s and week notes, so it felt like an honour to be part of JamCat feed of fame.

I'm reading, "04-04-25 - Hello and Welcome" hoskin.xyz/2025-04-04-h... by @hoskin.xyz published 4 April 2025. Welcome to the #weeknotes club Sam 🙂

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— James Arthur Cattell (@jacattell.bsky.social) April 9, 2025 at 5:22 PM

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