Progress on digital sustainability at the Co-op

June 13, 2023June 13, 2023Co-opLeave a comment

Over 18 months ago, we wrote about how we planned to commit to designing more responsibly at Co-op. Since that point we’ve established a small group of informal ‘sustainability champions’ including Alistair, Marianne, Rachel, Jack and Preetha. This group have been working with support from sustainability specialists like Stephen and Cathryn at Co-op, as well as external experts including Chris, Gerry, and Graeme.

Whilst the team exploring it has been designer-heavy at times, we’ve considered the wider implications for our wider data and technology teams too. That means we’re talking more about digital sustainability more the specifically designing responsibly now.

What we prioritised

Our early conversations surfaced a lot of potential opportunities, as well as things that could block us doing them and many unknowns that need more investigation. We spent a long time just figuring out where to even start.

screenshot of a Miro board with post it notes on. Sections are titled Opportunities, barriers, Co-op wide and Digital, with ideas organised across these different axes.

We did several workshops alongside sustainability experts that helped identify some distinct needs that we felt we could meet as a group. These were things that we found holding us back from working more sustainably in our teams personally, as well as what we had seen or heard other organisations doing. We decided to:

create a written artefact to act as a reference point for what we wanted to achieve
collect data to benchmark our current position
create awareness and increase literacy of digital sustainability at Co-op

Each of these aims took a slightly different approach over the last 12 months:

Creating a written thing

We initially explored creating a ‘strategy’ for digital sustainability. As we talked, and learned from others, we continually returned to our aim of seeing actual change in how teams work, and questioned whether a strategy was the right approach.

The aspiration was to create something that:

could be a point of reference for teams to use, to enable them to start making changes in their own work
made our commitment public, so we are more likely to hold ourselves accountable to it
acted as a conversation starter with people who have not considered the topic
enabled us to collect feedback about what does and doesn’t make sense to teams as they read and try to use it

Our accessibility policy is a good example of something that has achieved similar goals. It is widely adopted across Co-op design teams, acting as a minimum expectation for our work. The policy is promoted and updated by our accessibility champions, who collectively run training to raise awareness and improve practice in the design and engineering team and beyond.

Inspired by the policy format, Marianne brought her content design expertise to creating a draft document that communicated potential opportunities for change. Whilst still a working draft (that isn’t public yet), the document now covers:

Why we have a digital sustainability policy
Things we can do to increase digital sustainability and reduce energy demand
- Ways of working
- Design, engineering and development practice
- Supply chain
  - Hosting
  - Equipment
  - Data and storage
What we are already doing
Responsibility for digital sustainability
Awareness of the digital sustainability policy
Help with sustainability
How we will measure the success of the digital sustainability policy
Information and resources on digital sustainability

Benchmarking our websites

One thing that stalled progress early on was that we didn’t have any benchmark for how sustainable our current digital products or technology infrastructure was. It is still a work in progress, but we do now have a better idea of what data we do or don’t have, and who manages access to that data.

Co-op has multiple customer and colleague facing websites that total an average over 28 million hits per month, spread across a wide range of individual pages. Using Website carbon calculator we measured the carbon intensity for key pages across different businesses.

We calculated that 28 million hits on Co-op websites roughly equates to 75 tons CO2 equivalent a year.

More detailed performance data helped explain why different pages had different scores. There was a very strong correlation between standard performance metrics (page weight and speed) and the carbon intensity of each page.

At the time we collected this data:

www.coop.co.uk emitted 0.22g of CO2 equivalent every visit. The total page payload was 1.99mb, the largest Contentful paint took 1.6s

Whereas www.coop.co.uk/funeralcare emitted 0.55g of CO2 equivalent. The total page payload was 2.84mb, the largest Contentful paint took 5.5s.

In part this demonstrates the close link between sustainability and performance, as well as accessibility, usability, and cost etc. Sustainability is not just a moral obligation that works against our other priorities, done well it supports many of the other good practices we aim for.

Meme of 7 spidermen pointing at each other. They are labelled Sustainability, accessibility, cost, data governance, performance, inclusivity and usability.

Benchmarking our internal data storage and file sharing

Based on research and other advice, we knew our internal data storage and sharing tools would have a significant contribution to our digital footprint. At Co-op this mostly means Office 365. That includes SharePoint, Exchange (emails) and Onedrive. Fortunately we found that our ‘Domain Principal for Collaboration Services’ – the person who knows everything about our Office 365 usage had already deployed the Emissions Impact Dashboard for Microsoft 365.

This, combined with other data we already knew as an organisation told us the following:

We currently have over 195 terabytes of data held in Microsoft servers
The energy to run our allocation of Office 365 servers has generated over 294 kg of CO2 equivalent in the last 12 months
The manufacture and shipping of those servers has generated over 46.5 metric tons of CO2 equivalent in the last 12 month

There are already plans to reduce the data we store by reducing the amount of time we retain data that people have deleted. Because its data people think is already deleted they likely won’t even notice the change, but it will have a significant impact on our storage needs.

Whilst imperfect, the combination of these two data sets enabled us to make what had previously been abstract conversation into more tangible impact. When you’re talking in tons of carbon dioxide equivalent based on your own data, it’s harder to ignore.

We still plan to explore the following tools to build out what we know using:

Alognside this we’ve also started conversations with the providers of other tools e.g. Miro to find out what they know around the energy intensity of their tools, and the data that we as an organisation store with them.

Raising awareness

This was probably the one we were least pro-active about. Whilst there’s been a committed small group of people that we’ve tried to galvanise, its not spread much beyond that core team. We have an open slack channel on all things #sustainability and a dedicated #sustainability-champions one. We’ve held community of practice style sessions where we’ve either developed and reviewed the policy or invited external speakers to share their knowledge and work.

Trying to free up people’s time can also be a challenge and we prioritised progressing things, and seeing change happen, over boosting attendance for now. There may come a time where the opposite approach is needed to continue seeing the desired change.

Work that is already happening

Much of this work has been pulling together existing threads of change that is already happening. For example, the surge in energy costs over the past 12 months meant it became a priority for teams to identify opportunities to save energy, and more of these had a worthwhile payback because now the potential cost of energy was greater than the time it would cost us to make the changes. For example:

By the end of 2023 all Co-op self-serve tills in stores will be powered down centrally overnight and then switched back on an hour before opening time. This is projected to save over 1.5 million kwh (290 tons CO2 equivalent) and over £500,000.

Decommissioning a large SharePoint site that was no longer in use is projected to save approximately 40,000 kwh and over £15,000 annually.

The engineering team for ‘Shared Digital Services’ have explored how they can make better use of their AWS infrastructure that supports their products. Initial experiments show a saving of £23 a day, or over £5000 by December 2023, they have not calculated the expected energy saving yet.

None of these examples have directly come from the creation of the policy but serve as reference points for the opportunities that exist across our teams when we pro-actively seek out ways to be more energy efficient and use our design and development skills to make changes.

What’s next

Sharing this work with our Digital, Technology and Data leadership team generated good conversation, questions and generally showed appetite from them for more, but the real change needs to happen within teams.

We had some feedback around whether a ‘policy’ was the right way to position the document we had created, but the response was overall positive. We’re hoping to move continue developing it and ultimately publish as some form of ‘guidelines’. Watch this space.

In the meantime, the main aim is to actually see change happen, teams taking initiative to reduce the energy consumption of their ways of working and the products they design, build and manage. We suspect this will be partly driven by the policy or guidelines that are sponsored by leadership, but equally (if not more so) through individual’s personal motivation. To boost this, we delivered a session as part of our internal Digital, Technology and Data team conference in June, and have planned community of practice sessions to help spread the word.

Alistair Ruff, Principal Designer

Marianne Knowles, Principal Designer

How we improved engagement at our community of practice meet-ups

January 29, 2021January 29, 2021Co-op

In May last year, the delivery managers (DM) decided to make some changes to our community of practice meet-ups. We think the changes have been really positive for morale and engagement.

Our community of practice (COP) was created in 2016, back in the early days of Co-op Digital. The community included delivery managers working across the portfolio and we would meet once a week to support each other with challenges, to learn, and to share ideas and ways of working.

Fundamentally, this hasn’t changed but we’ve recognised that it is hard to keep up momentum and – as you’d expect – engagement has fluctuated over the years. In May we acknowledged the importance of belonging to a community – especially when remote working can be isolating. We wanted to create a more consistent level of enthusiasm for our meet-ups.

Here we are at our Christmas murder mystery party on Teams

This post is about the changes we’ve made that have worked for us. We’re sharing them in the hope it helps others in a similar position.

Sharing the responsibility

Honest communication within our community helped us figure out what we needed to change. As a result of our quick research, we realised we needed to share the responsibility of choosing topics, planning, preparing and running our community of practice meet-ups. Until recently, principals DMs or the Head of Delivery Cara B did all this.

We split into groups of 3 or 4 people and we committed to organising 4 sessions per group.

Since we started self-organising like this, we’ve had meet-ups that focus on topics like wellbeing, failure as well as empathy and inclusivity and engagement has been really good. Here’s why we think that is.

Adrenaline not pressure for organisers

Each group shares the tasks of planning and organising the sessions and are invested in their subjects, so it doesn’t feel like a chore. Together they get to choose topics and present it in a way they feel is relevant. And the facilitation is shared too meaning no one feels the pressure of running the whole thing. There’s a determination to do a good job and engage everyone (to the point of people getting a bit competitive, which is nice). Plus, DMs that don’t normally work together get a chance to get to know each other too.

2. High quality over high quantity of sessions

With more people sharing the responsibility, the quality of the sessions is higher because no single person is feeling fatigued with the pressure of filling an hour-long slot. Our sessions are more diverse in topic now too – more organisers means more points of view, a wider range of interests and also a bigger range of concerns. This can never not be a good thing.

3. Interest not indifference for attendees

Our research said that sometimes the meet-ups felt like a chore – pretty brutal. But since we started to self-organise, that hasn’t felt like the case. We’re a big community too (there are 20 of us) so sessions give us a chance to introduce ourselves over an hour, in a way that feels more natural. Each Monday afternoon, there’s always a feeling of turning up to support our friends too.

All 3 of these subheads feed into each other: interesting, relevant content means enthusiastic attendees who are inspired to make their sessions interesting and relevant when it’s their turn to organise. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle and we don’t want it to stop.

Strengthening ideas of ‘community’

Our community of practice feels stronger since we started to share responsibility for meet-ups. This of course is a very co-operative way of running things – we all own a piece of it.

Kim Morley, Sol Byambadorj and Rachael Shah

We’re recruiting

The Digital Service community: here to help you do awesome things

June 26, 2020June 29, 2020Co-op1 Comment

This post is about the Digital Service community – what we do, why we do it, and at which points it’s important for Co-op Digital teams to get in touch with us. Michaela wrote a post that aimed to do a similar thing in May 2017 but so much has happened in the last 9 months, never mind the last 3 years.

Firstly, instead of sitting within the Membership team like we used to, the 10 of us are now spread out and embedded across different product teams. We know multidisciplinary teams are higher-performing and a lot of that comes down to there being representatives from different areas of expertise present to advise at each stage. We realised that if we want teams to consider the things that our community champions, it’s better if we’re more visible throughout a product or service lifecycle.

So, our name has changed too to reflect our new set up: we used to be the Digital Service team and now we’re the Digital Service community.

When Co-op Digital teams should get in touch

Here are some of the main things we help teams with. Email gdl_digitalserviceteam@coop.co.uk

Speak to one of us:

Before your service goes into beta

The earlier you speak to us, the better. We will help you:

put the correct support in place, for example, the service might need support from our 24/7 operations team
develop a process so that everyone on the team knows what to do if something goes wrong
understand how to identify, record and mitigate risks

Before you make changes to a system

If you want to make changes to a system or you want to push something to live, get in touch so we can make sure change happens in the right way. For example, we coordinate changes across Co-op Digital to make sure your proposed changes won’t clash with another. We’ll consider risk details – but we’re here to enable change, not block it.

If there’s a major incident

If there’s a major incident, like a site going down, we will bring the right people together – often in virtual ‘war rooms’ – so we can discuss the incident and restore the service. We also send out regular communications to the relevant stakeholders to update them on progress. Our aim is to minimise disruption to our colleagues and customers.

After an incident

When we’ve dealt with the incident together, the Digital Service community will facilitate a post-incident review session with product teams. The aim is to understand what went wrong, how we can mitigate the problem in the future and where we can improve. Each incident is an opportunity to learn more and be better.

Work we’re proud of

We’ve been involved in many projects, where we’ve added value. Here are a few we’re particularly proud of.

Re-platforming the Funeralcare website

We supported the transition from Episerver to the coop.co.uk platform, whilst embedding practices such as incident, problem and change management. We ran a 3-month training plan to help our Funeralcare colleagues, to support our product in an agile way.

Moving Shifts over to ‘maintenance only’

Development on the Shifts app has ended so we worked with the Retail and product teams to change how support works. This support now comes from an operations team rather than the product team but we’ve still had to make sure unresolved issues are managed effectively by the Ecommerce product team. It’s been a success so we’re using this support model as a template for new services within Retail.

Optimising ‘one web’ coop.co.uk

We reviewed coop.co.uk and identified opportunities to make improvements. Since then we’ve built service models, defined an engagement model for how teams raise incidents, enhanced 24/7 support and created risk frameworks, impact matrixes and service catalogues.

Supporting Co-operate

Co-operate support is now live, we set out processes and best practices so product and service teams can follow a defined support model, which covers monitoring, alerting and reporting.

Saving time and money through Tech Ops

Our tech operations specialists have been working with our suppliers and third parties, to optimise our cloud costs. Providing efficiencies within infrastructure has resulted in savings.

Our culture: here to help, not hinder

The Digital Service community is here to support Co-op Digital teams to build robust services, efficiently. We’re not about blame culture or heavy-handed governance, we’re about being there – involved – from the start.

The bottom line is: we are here to enable you to do some awesome things!

Georgie Jacobs
Digital service analyst

Supporting each other through communities of practice

March 19, 2020joscho1

As with a lot of teams, coronavirus forced Co-op Digital into remote working this week and for the foreseeable future.

We’re physically disconnected from our colleagues, and many of us are understandably feeling more anxious than usual. But, despite being asked to physically isolate ourselves, we do not have to work on our own.

What a community of practice is

A community of practice brings together a group of people who share the same profession – whether that’s content writers, engineers, user researchers – to share learnings and solve problems.

Our communities of practice operate in safe spaces.

When we say ‘safe space’ we’re not referring to a physical location. We mean a group of people who have similar values. People who commit to being supportive and respectful of each other – whether that’s during a meeting or call, interacting online, or working within our teams.

We use our community of practice meet–ups to ask for help, critique each other’s work and ask questions. We admit when we don’t know, when we’re unsure and when things have gone wrong.

Our communities encourage us to listen without interruption and understand other perspectives. They are spaces for security and empathy.

They just got more important

Staying in touch and supporting each other is now more important than ever. Our communities of practice are helping us to do this. They allow us to connect with our peers, be more creative within our work and deal better with uncertainty.

During difficult times when we feel less in control, we tend to create deeper connections with others as natural instincts of empathy, kindness and cooperation intensify. Communities of practice are increasingly becoming a place for moral support and compassion too.

Apart, but not alone

This week, several teams ran communities of practice remotely. Here’s some of the feedback on them:

Content design – the content community worked around some tech issues. “‘I know it was plan C – but time-boxed Slack chats are actually pretty good!… I’ve found this really helpful, thank you.” said Rebekah Barry. And content community lead, Hannah Horton says she thinks “community is more important than ever, but we’re going to need to think more creatively about how we work together and support each other.”

Delivery – Rachael Shah “was a marvellous host” says Neil Vass.

Engineering – started with team updates before several lightning talks and moving on to remote pair programming breakout sessions.

Thanks to @jjeffries1 for running our remote @CoopDigital #MegaCop today. It worked really well! Great team updates as always and some fab lightening talks. @beckycodes flipping hilarious 😂😂 pic.twitter.com/9MI84K3War

— Rob Bowley (@robbowley) March 18, 2020

Business analysists – “The topic of conversion involved how we’ve found this week – something I’ve been experiencing in other team meetings too. It’s felt super supportive,” agile business analyst Katherine Welch says.

Here’s Chris Winkley, Katherine, Soraya Hassanzadeh, Gary Brown dialling into the call. Plus a tiny Liam Cross in the bottom right.

Service design – Principal researcher Lucy Tallon said there was “loads of energy – a good break from business as usual!”

Thanks @ThatGirlVim for culture chats at today’s first @CoopDigital remote service design community of practice… nailed it 🦾 pic.twitter.com/Mu7SFTuByP

— Aimee Tasker (@aimeeeedia) March 17, 2020

Supporting through uncertainty

Our communities encourage us to be open about our uncertainty. This can be uncomfortable and scary. We might be worried about what people think. The emotional exposure can make us feel insecure and vulnerable.

But having the courage to admit our mistakes and show our fragility, means we can deal with uncertainty better in future. It can reduce anxiety and fear when we’re dealing with new experiences, and it can help us learn how to deal with discomfort – both personally and professionally.

Becoming comfortable with discomfort can help create a culture where people are more prepared to:

work collaboratively
take risks
try new things
push the boundaries of what’s gone before

And in doing so we come up with innovative solutions. As Brene Brown, Research Professor at the University of Houston, says:

Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change… To create is to make something that has never existed before. There’s nothing more vulnerable than that.

– Brene Brown

Using courage to grow communities

By having the courage to be open and truthful about our insecurities and uncertainties, we also become more relatable. When we feel heard and understood, we tend to connect with those around us and we grow as a community.

We can do this by:

listening intently
paying attention
empathising with our colleagues
showing compassion
giving reassurance

By doing this we remind those around us that we’re all trying to achieve a shared goal – that we’re all in this together.

Here’s to everyone who’s offered comfort and shown compassion at your community of practice this week, thank you.

Joanne Schofield
Lead content designer

Getting the most out of our community of practice meetings

January 30, 2019Co-op

In the early days of Co-op Digital, our Head of delivery at the time, Jamie Arnold, brought digital people doing similar roles together by setting up communities of practice.

The communities still exist today but, 3 years on, Co-op Digital has expanded significantly: our communities are much bigger, we’re working across more projects and we’re facing different challenges. It’s important that our communities of practice change with the organisation so that we, as communities and as individuals, get the support we need in ways that suit us.

Around 6 months ago, the delivery managers shook up the way we ran our weekly community of practice meetings.

What works for us

The delivery community of practice meets weekly in a meeting room in Federation House. An hour each week feels right for us. We’ve built it into our weekly schedules and we’ve found that this is short enough for us to stay focussed (it doesn’t feel like a team social), and it’s regular enough so that problems don’t build to the stage where the whole session needs to be used to solve them.

Here are some of the things the delivery team has been doing recently in our community of practice meetings.

Setting an objective

In July 2017 we agreed on what the delivery managers’ objective should be. We decided our aim was:

Find better ways for Digital teams to work with their stakeholders, so we gain a common understanding of how we’re working and what we’re planning to deliver.

Having a clear objective that we’d reached together meant that each delivery manager was more invested in our vision than they would be if the objective had been dictated, top down, by one person.

Collaborating to get buy in isn’t a new idea, we know that.

But this is a great example of how it’s worked well: the attendance at our meetups has been consistently high, people have been enthusiastic and have wanted to be a part of a community.

Choosing inclusive topics

We don’t always have an agenda for our meetups but when we do, we make sure we choose topics that don’t exclude anyone. Nobody feels like they can’t or shouldn’t contribute.

Like with all communities in Co-op Digital, stakeholders are something every delivery manager has in common so we’ve often made them the focus of our meetings. We’ve interviewed some of them and used our time together to feed back what they’ve said. We’ve then talked about what we can do from a delivery point of view to meet stakeholder needs better, for example, how best to share what we’re working on regularly with them so they can be as involved as they need to be. We found that what works for one team and its stakeholders often doesn’t work for another.

Sharing techniques

A huge part of our roles as delivery managers is to facilitate sessions. This could be agile ceremonies such as sprint planning, retros, and show and tells but it also includes one-off workshops intended to help the team with setting direction or clarifying longer-term priorities. Because all teams and individuals are different, a technique that works superbly in one scenario may work less well in another so sharing and comparing ways to get to the same point has been really beneficial for our community.

Keeping up with current wider delivery discussions

As with all disciplines, it’s important to look outside our immediate community. It keeps us relevant and engaged. Sometimes, we talk about things we’ve read, tweets we’ve seen, arguments we’ve heard from the delivery community outside of Co-op. We’ve recently discussed Sebastian Deterding’s video on Hacking Shyness: Designing Social Interaction and Why Commitment Culture Wins by Damian Hughes.

Holding ‘open’ sessions

Every 4 to 6 weeks we hold a meet-up where there’s no agenda. Instead, everyone is given a post it note and writes either a problem, a triumph, a question or a comment on it. We dot vote on what we’d like to discuss and we talk through each topic for 5 minutes starting with whichever got the highest vote.

The benefits of belonging

For us, being part of a community of practice is more than attending a weekly hour-long meetup. It’s about having a support network of people who are best-placed to listen, understand and advise when we need it. Each delivery manager is also part of a group of 3 people who face similar challenges, for example, they’re working with more then 1 team. On a day-to-day basis, that smaller group is the first point of contact.

Superb for personal development

Since we’ve been running these meetups, I’ve been saving links, quotes, tweets, tips, guidelines and notes I’ve taken in our meetings – anything I think I’ll revisit. It’s my toolbox: it’s full of the knowledge and practical advice that’s been shared with me and I feel better-equipped to deliver products and services with it.

How to start a community of practice

You don’t have to work in a digital team to get value from a community of practice. As social learning consultants, Etienne Wenger-Trayer and Beverly Wenger-Trayer said:

Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.

If you’d like to learn more or if you’d like help setting up a community, email me victoria.mitchell@coopdigital.co.uk

Victoria Mitchell
Digital skills principal

Making better, joined-up decisions with the engineering community

March 16, 2017Co-op

This month, it’s 3 months since we set up our engineering community for software engineers, platform engineers, service managers and quality analysts at the Co-op. It’s early days but it’s already helping move Co-op engineering in the right direction.

Getting together with people who do similar jobs helps us all be more joined up which is really important, especially in a place as big as the Co-op. Without a community, we’d be working in isolation because our day jobs are within Co-op Digital, Co-op Legal Services or Funeralcare.

When we began meeting regularly, we identified the areas we need to work together to develop, including how we support training and development and coming up with development standards.

Picture of our Engineering community of practice

We’ve created infrastructure standards

I was really pleased to see that practices such as Continuous Delivery and Infrastructure as Code were already well established when I joined Co-op Digital 6 months ago. However teams were working in isolation at that point. Lots of them had similar problems and were tackling them in different ways. This meant that getting some of the services we were launching to a point where they were secure, reliable and supported was trickier than it needed to be because there was quite a bit of rework involved.

To make things simpler, we spent time during our community of practice meet-ups to create shared standards for our platform infrastructure. There’s still plenty to do and these things are never really finished of course, but we’re now in a much better shape and future projects will follow a much easier path. Most importantly, teams are more empowered to get on with stuff and do their job.

We’re also working on standards for how we’ll support cloud infrastructure across several teams. This work will sit with our Digital Operations team which is forming steadily.

Making better technology decisions

Out of that also came a clear need to provide better support around making technology decisions. We want teams to be empowered, but at the same time there’s always going to be a limit on how many different technologies we can support and maintain. Our approach has been to try and provide really great guidance so teams can make decisions in context rather than needing meetings to make decisions. It’s all still quite early days so again we’ll hopefully come back again soon and update on how it’s getting on.

We’ve been hiring

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We’ve worked with some great external companies while we’ve been adding gradually to our in-house expertise but we’re at a stage now where we’re looking to bring in a significant number of software and platform engineers. The Co-op Digital team and the wider engineering community of practice is looking forward to new talent joining us. From there, the culture of the team will grow and strengthen.

If you’re interested, take a look at our Work with us page for the roles we currently have open. We’ll be recruiting for engineers for the Funeralcare team shortly.

In the meantime, sign up to the blog and follow Co-op Digital on Twitter.

Rob Bowley
Head of Engineering

The importance of having a safe place to listen and learn

January 31, 2017January 31, 2017kimmorley222 Comments

Six months ago, after a workshop with agile coach Emily Webber, we set up a community of practice for the delivery managers here at Co-op Digital. Emily believes that communities of practice help to connect people in organisations that are scaling their agile delivery. They also support individuals and help the group avoid duplication of work.

So a group of us who work on projects including Food, Funerals, Wills and Locations Services, starting putting a couple of hours aside each week to catch up and support each other.

To kick things off, we came up with our mission and manifesto.

We talked about our goals and put everything we’d like to do on a Trello board. We thought about what we’d like to be able to tell people about being an agile delivery manager at Co-op Digital, and how we could influence groups in the wider Co-op by sharing our better practices.

Just for starters

Since then, we’ve tackled a lot of stuff on the list. We’ve:

organised digital masterclasses for new colleagues at Co-op Digital. These sessions are an introduction to agile at the Co-op and an overview of what it’s like to be part of a digital product team here
introduced a section on agile working to a training course on waterfall. Now Co-op project and portfolio managers will learn about both delivery methods
created a place to write about and share our experiences within the community when we try something new; when things go well and when they don’t go well
defined which skills a delivery manager at Co-op should have. This will help us see where we need more training and what to focus on when we recruit

Our community’s work is starting to become recognised around the wider business. That’s important because it means more people will have an understanding of what delivery managers do and how we can help teams work more efficiently. It’s good for individual teams and ultimately, it’s good for the business.

Time to reflect in a retrospective

Now we’re 6 months in, in true delivery manager style, we’ve had a retro to find out how each member of the community thought things were going. We talked about what we think has gone well and what we could do better in 2017.

We drew a timeline of the last 6 months and used green post-its to mark significant events. Then we each approached the timeline from a personal perspective and added pink post-its to mark our positives and blue post-its for personal negatives. Then we worked together to come up with actions to try and make sure the bad bits don’t happen again. After that, we each used marker pens to draw our highs and our lows. Here’s Steve in action!

Making time for meetups

Interestingly, the timeline showed that each community member felt more positive when we’d had regular meetings. So prioritising our meetups became an action. When the workload on your team is mega, it can be tricky to find the time to step away, even for an hour, but we’ve all found that getting together helps us not get bogged down.

The community of practice and me

I’ve learnt a lot from our meetups. They’ve been somewhere to stamp our feet, make new friends, bury ourselves in post-its, support each other by giving and taking advice. Sharing how you feel in a safe environment is invaluable. Especially when you’re with the people who are best-placed to support you with the tricky parts of your job.

I’d encourage everyone to come together with their community and try it. And let us know how useful you find it in the comments.

Kim Morley
Delivery manager