PETALS Snapshot 6 - Microsoft Forms & Google/Slack automation

It. This is the 6th Petals snapshot. It is the 20th September, 2023, and this is the last couple of weeks of what's been going on with all things Petals. Quick reminder as to what Petals is all about. It's a very simple but powerful framework that I've been creating and developing over the last year or so, generally for software engineering themes, but it translates really well. But with the teams overwhelm, all the details are on Petals team if you want to find out more. As you can tell, slightly different scenery today and I've not really had the chance to speak to anyone in the last couple of weeks either. So it is just going to be me, I'm afraid. But hey, let's change the scenery, just make it a little bit different. Let's get into the scores. Okay, productivity is four, enjoyment is four, teamwork is two, learning is four, and serenity is four. Loads of fours, again, average of 3.6, which is no changes to last time. And let's get into the details. Why? So, as the scores suggest, teamwork has dropped recently. Basically because I've not really had a chance to speak to many people beyond myself and the people I'm working closely with. I've left Brian to his own devices recently. He's got a lot of commitments on at the moment. I reached out to a few people to see if they wanted to get involved, but all are quite preoccupied right now and understandable I'm feeling brunt at the moment because we have gone back to school in the house, everyone's back out of the house. We've got a new dog thrown in the mix now. So I'm trying to rebalance my personal site project time with all the other family commitments and we're getting there, but obviously it has impacted how much I can actually get done in my spare time. That said, because it's subjective score, I still feel like I managed to get enough done as I talk about what has actually been going on. So, after last time when I fixed those Google Toolkit problems, I sent another email out on button down to the mailing list. I did notice that Google or Gmail was flagging it as potential spam. So I had a quick investigation and it looked like the DKIM configuration on the cloudflare DNS settings weren't quite right. So I made a few changes. I hope it works because I applied those changes prior to sending the email. It was all scheduled through button down anyway, so I had a bit of time to have a look at that. Hopefully it's working. Open rate still looks quite low, but that's hard to tell sometime because generally email open rates are low. Anyway, if anyone has not received the Google Toolkit fixes email, can you please just drop me a little message or let me know email webmaster at Petals T and I know then if it's coming through or not. Elsewhere, I've created a new page on the website at Slash Snapshots, which as the name suggests is just details about these snapshots that I'm creating. So at the moment it's just embedding the Spotify and YouTube feeds so they are quickly available if you're in there and there are a row of links out to the popular podcast and YouTube channels that basically allows anyone to follow along. I just wanted a simple page that kind of compiles all that content into one place. When I was speaking to my old friend Adrian Lansdown about this, I can actually have a blog area to the site as well and I can actually put the updates on there. So that's something for later down the line. It's not something I want to prioritize right now. I really want to work on the frameworks and make sure that they're in good shape. On the frameworks front. I've now started work on the Microsoft version so prior to using Google I set something up with Microsoft Forms and Excel. Now unfortunately, this is all stored in SharePoint so not everyone actually has access to SharePoint which has made put a bit of a spanner in the works as to how I'm going to implement this. I have created a basic form in Microsoft which anyone can really do, but as a template there's one out there. Now if you go to Petals Tullkit that will take you straight through to the form that you can copy for yourself and use with your own teams. The data is very raw right now though, so it's not really very pretty graphics to really use as a conversation. But you will get that raw data off the back of those form captures and you can start discussing it. What I suggest you do is you take a copy of that form, you start capturing scores, and then you use the reports that are generated from forms to show where the hotspots are. And you do get charts to kind of suggest, oh, there's a larger proportion of threes or fours or twos, and you can see the spread as well. There are free text fields in there as well to capture your highlights, challenges and lessons learned. So again, that might prompt into the conversation but I'd suggest if you are in a Microsoft Pouts, take a copy of that, take Tnxt Team Retro and see how it works. At the moment it's just data capture. What I will look at doing is creating maybe an Excel sheet that you can download and import that data to, to then create pivot tables from, as I say, work in progress. Not as straightforward as I'd like it to be, like it is in Google and this is all sort of another way of trying to capture those scores for the conversation. We are obviously building this application as well in the background, but as things are standing at the moment, I'd rather just enable teams to get on with this concept straight away. If you need any help with the Microsoft toolkit, give me a shout. You can get hold of me on the email address webmaster at pelt team or you can reach out to me on macedon androgenengineers net at PSI. I don't do X anymore, along with the Google toolkit, I've now hooked it up with if this, then that, IFTTT to my Slack workspace that I've created for Petals as well. So if you want to have a look at how this works, get in touch. I will send you an invite so you can join me in that flat workspace and start asking questions. That's what the community is going to be about though. It's about how to use Petals, how you're using Petals, get those conversations flowing a bit more and find out more about what's going on behind the scenes or maybe interact with me directly. So if you do want to get involved in that, give me a shout on the contact details I provided earlier and I'll invite you to the workspace and we can start discussing stuff there as well. What I was trying to get at though that I've created this hook so it automatically captures the scores from the Google form and pushes it straight through to a Slack channel. I wanted to do this as a very quick and simple proof of concept, because this is how I want the framework to kind of evolve in the future. For async teams that don't necessarily have the opportunity to have conversation live, but in a specific slacks workspace, you can ask that question on a periodic cadence weekly, fortnightly, monthly, whatever, and the bot actually captures those scores automatically. You can share them in your team and then you can sort of get to that point where you've got everyone's in. Let's discuss the results overall because you can start compiling that data so that PSC works quite nicely. It's very quick, very live. You get up feed straight in. Ultimately this should be a dedicated app, but we'll get there eventually. Finally, I've got another talk lined up. Now I'm working with Educative, the organization and publication that reached out to originally discuss Petals and share it with the engineering community. Now they're hosting monthly webinars now, so I offered my services after they reached out and we are working through that detail right now. This is going to be very engineer focused. A lot of the attendees are techies and engineers and individual contributors, so I want to try and engage with them directly. It's not for managers conversations specifically, it's more for self awareness. So what I want to try and do is kind of pose the problems that are introduced with other frameworks, why you want to kind of maybe measure your team health as a team, emphasis on team there, but also I want to make sure I make it more interactive as well, so that's planned for later this year. I'm hoping to plan it for December. It might be January the way things are going at the moment, but watch this space as that kind of gets confirmed and cleared up. I will put more details out there and again, that ties back to the suggestion of having like an updates or blog section to the website. So that's it for this time around. As I say, lots of chipping away at a lot of little things at the moment. The main focus right now is around the frameworks and getting them in a good shape for Pete to start playing with this stuff and using this stuff. I really want to hear back from people that are trying it out and if you are in problems, just let me know. What I'd like to have done in the past is create maybe a clinic or something so a regular drop in, maybe a monthly session to kind of join me and others to come along with your challenges and your problems, find out more. I would love to hear back from people though, and I'd like to shake up this content. We've got to six snapshots now, which is great. I'm going to keep going on a fortnightly cadence, change the scenery, try and mix up the formatting a little bit, but I really would love to get some people involved in the conversation and make this more of a community effort rather than just an individual thing as well. Reach out on the email webmaster at petals team or you can hit me on Socials managingengineer net at psy or you can go the website petals. T and follow along there until next time.