A whirlwind week of workshops, meetings, breakout rooms, icebreakers and notes. Lots and lots of notes.
I was only briefly involved in our Discovery phase but now found myself fully immersed in the Definition phase after a change of tact (see our previous blog posts) and a better focus (hopefully!) on exactly what we were looking to achieve from this project.
Tuesday
The first port of call was a workshop on "Working in the Open" (which sounds like it would be much too cold to do in a frost-tinged February) but covered ways of sharing our work throughout this project. One form of sharing our workings and process was to post to a blog, so if you're reading this now it's a proven method!
Tuesday afternoon moved to the first session with We Are Open for the Kickoff workshop and a chance to meet the other organisations in our cohort. More icebreakers and introductions, a short break and then into getting something down on paper (or on screen), Stakeholder Mapping.
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| Stakeholder Maps by Visual Thinkery is licenced under CC-BY-ND |
Plotting various stakeholders along two axes (one for "interested" they are in a project, and one for how "involved" they are) helps show how these various groups should be dealt with through the project's life.
Adding a few extra stakeholders that fit into our project I was able to fairly quickly create a map thanks to the techniques used in the session. The first bit of "homework" done!
Wednesday
No sessions today, but I realised we needed to think more about our project, especially with us changing focus relatively late on. Our Discovery phase was still important, but with moving away from looking at video advice and onto redeveloping our CABmoney website, I felt we needed to re-Discover.
Fortunately, we had a staff meeting planned for the afternoon, so I was able to secure a spot to talk to people about the project. Still formulating what it is we need, I explained why we were doing this and that I'd like to get a group together to do a consultation on what people want CABmoney to actually be. One positive response from a colleague before the end of the day, made it seem all worthwhile!
Thursday
The afternoon session covered "Audience Analysis". Well presented, but having worked with our websites for some years I was already familiar with Google Analytics and I just discovered Google Data Studio a month ago. We don't have a "Data Model" though... hmm, one more for the list!
Session over and if nothing else, I learnt how difficult it is to come up with a three word "how are you feeling" at short notice!
I spent the remainder of the afternoon starting this blog and going back through our client consultation data now that we had a few extra month's worth to pore over. A few extra thoughts on how and where we can gather data for CABmoney, but that can wait until Friday.
Friday
Using our Google Analytics stats plus information from the CABmoney database, I was able to put together some more data and post up in the blog about what CABmoney is, and the first steps into looking at what we need to do with it.
To get further data, I added a Google Form survey to CABmoney and posted about it on our social media channels. Hopefully, we get enough engagement to discover some more about user experience with the website that will help us get a clearer course of action.
Week one is over, and in some ways it feels like starting over from scratch but at least we have a plan!
