A Note on Weeknotes
Studio Notes | What We’ve Been Up To
Service Design projects can get complicated, involve lots of stakeholders, and moving parts, and in many of our projects it’s the first time a client team has experienced this process.
All these factors make it an intimidating job for project manger to take on one of these projects, but weeknotes are here to help.
What is a Weeknote?
Other studios or even designers in internal teams, often find the act of writing some notes at the end of the week gives them a sense of progress, achievement, direction, and of course an idea of what next needs to be done. Since the beginning, we’ve found this too – but we also found it’s really helpful to share these notes with our clients.
So – every project has its own, shared, “Weeknotes” document. This is just a simple online document to which each week we add a list of max five or six bullet points detailing tasks completed on the project, sometimes a key insight or a concern, and occasionally looking ahead to the following week and what’s planned.
We also email, each week, these notes to the key stakeholders on the project, but everyone knows they’re always available in the weeknotes document online.
Small but mighty!
Like most habits, starting small, builds into something that’s more powerful. Weeknotes, first and foremost, help everyone know where we’re at on the project. In an extremely collaborative process, that’s vital.
We can also link from the weeknotes into important documents and folders related to the project, so in a chronological way it’s now possible to find, for example, a report from phase 1, or a MIRO board from our research workshop a few months ago.
For project managers – well, we’ve had great feedback. If a project sponsor on the client team asks the project manger what’s been going on… it’s right there, in the weeknotes!
Another powerful feature of this good habit is that when a project comes to an end, or even months after it’s over, there is a clear and easy archive of everything that happened. This makes it really easy for us to tell the story of the project, or for clients to do so, internally, to share the rationale and process behind the work.
The first rule of Weeknotes…
… is “Always do the weeknotes!” We’re not perfect… sometimes Saturday comes around and the weeknotes have not been written or shared. It’s really important to get them done and it doesn’t matter if they go out the following Monday or Tuesday. Always get them done!
All part of the service!
This is all part of our commitment to work in an open and transparent manner with our clients. We work with team members within the service, we share our process and tools, and we want teams to continue to design and redesign a responsive service once we’re gone. Working in the open, sharing skills, and ensuring better services for everyone… weeknotes are just one part of the toolkit. Give them a try!