Last week we had our first quarterly planning day of 2024. This is our quarterly team meeting where the whole team gather in-person to celebrate our achievements of the past quarter and set and share goals for the upcoming quarter, enabling everyone to understand and feel ownership of our shorter-term roadmap to help us achieve the University’s 2030 Digital Strategy. You can read about our last October away day here.
Networking
We wanted to make this team day a bit different to the usual, adding more time for the team to get to know one another better and to mix up and mingle throughout the day, getting people out of their comfort zone and feeling confident in sharing ideas with new people.
To start the day we invited the team to get to know one another better, spending 30 minutes tasked with finding one thing in common with every member of Digital. This was a fun way to get everyone mixing with each other and up on their feet, energised and ready for the day.
Celebrating success
Following feedback from our October quarterly team day, we dedicated more time to celebrating success. Lead by the Digital Culture Club, we looked back at what the team had achieved over the past quarter and all spent time in groups sharing what each of us achieved personally and within our Squads, as well as reflecting on new skills we had each learned over the quarter. This enables us to celebrate one another and feel motivated to collectively set and achieve our goals.
A twist on product presentations
Every quarter we have presentations from each of our Product Owners (PO’s) sharing the progress on their products over the past quarter and goals for the upcoming quarter. This time, we tasked our PO’s with presenting their plans to the team without using PowerPoint. We wanted to encourage creativity and doing things differently while ensuring the team are engaged throughout all the presentations. We saw great presentations using MS Sway, video recordings, and even a poem generated by AI! Take a look at our current products and services on our website.
Digital team work flow
Over the last month we’ve been formalising our teams’ work process, it’s not anything new as we already work this way most of the time, but it is the first time we’ve formally written it down. The draft process we have is our prototype, and we wanted to test our prototype with it’s users (the Digital team), so we did just that!
We split everyone into eight teams and gave each team a scenario. The scenarios were based on our real life experiences over the last year or so, and were created to give our teams different entry points into the process, some at the start, some in the middle and some nearer the end.
The teams then had to identify which stage of the process their scenario needed to start at. They then identified what inputs they would need in order to move forward in the process and measure that against the inputs in their scenario. If they didn’t have the inputs they needed, then they had to identify where in the process they needed to go back to in order to get those inputs, and then move through the process to the end.
The result was that cross functional teams worked together to drill into the process in detail, thinking about the types of activities and outputs, learning what everyone does in detail at each stage of the process. It really brought the process to life and gave us some great feedback to help improve the process as we move forward. It turned the process from an abstract set of boxes with names, to a useful toolkit to solve problems and make stuff.
Overall is was a hugely successful day filled with networking, fun, and goal setting, ensuring we are all aligned on how we will deliver the digital strategy over the upcoming quarter. You can read more about the University’s digital strategy in this blog post.
– Written by Scarlett Yeo, Communications Advisor for Digital and Joe Holland, Design Chapter Lead