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Last week Ville V. from Arcticstartup.com asked me “what kinds of benefits, if any, you have had after you started the habit [of weeknotes]. ” Here’s some sort of an answer that I skipped giving him earlier, starting from the very beginning.

Background

This all started with us having our weekly company meetings, where we discussed what everybody was doing and if there was any major problems with them. It worked really well for a year or two, but recently there was a growing feeling with everybody that it just wasn’t working anymore. Maybe it was because we got more people now, and the meeting started to take longer and longer. It was fun to know what others were doing but for example the decisions to help others in their projects were done over the week, not really just in the week meeting. So on an individual level it wasn’t quite useful anymore. Instead many were trying to hold themselves back from rushing to their computers and post-its to start working already, no matter what time the meeting was held.

One of our core values as a company is transparency, but apart from actively sharing on Twitter, we felt we weren’t really communicating this. The concept of weeknotes made a perfect sense to both of these challenges: the notes would work as information sharing within the company and also create transparency by telling other people what it is that we actually do. Especially the later point was interesting, as our projects are very restricted with what to communicate outside, and thus often cannot simply present what we do. Weeknotes provide a nice way of telling about our work, while making sure we don’t disclose any confidential project details.

To clarify a bit and spill a secret: there’s a more precise version of weeknotes we use internally. New or interesting stuff is dug from there. Any recurring patterns in peoples reports are also written about here in the public.

Readers and outcomes

From what we hear, our weeknotes seem to be read by various people, include of course our employees but also clients, friends, large companies and even our competition. Apparently our weeknotes are making positive waves in some random (as in not associated with us in a client relationship) big companies in the lines of “This is great! How do they do this? We don’t even have a blog! How could we do something like this?”. Maybe weeknotes as a concept will bring more transparency to some big companies in the long run, too?

Also some of our clients read these. Maybe they find it fun to try to find their project from the mysterious descriptions of things? When we meet them in real life they quite often comment on things they could only know from the weeknotes. And I think it’s fun. They get to know Nordkapp as a bunch of humans with human issues, instead of just hired robots. In general, weeknotes don’t seem to be hurting our relationship with our clients, on the contrary: we are getting bigger and bigger single-supplier deals all the time. And this we appreciate this very much.

What comes to our competition, we hope they get some good ideas from the weeknotes and our blog in general. We are probably dealing with very similar issues anyway and sharing is the best way to take the design profession forward.

Internally, I believe, weeknotes make people more proud of what they do. It easy to get lost in the daily work without realizing that the thing you do is often actually really meaningful to potentially thousands of employees, not to mention our client’s customers, which could be in the millions. Weeknotes help us understand that we are working in a world class design agency here, and not feeling too small and sad like a Finnish tradition would have as do. A proud designer leads to better design leads to better service leads to more satisfied customer.

All and all, everything about the weeknotes is positive. We recommend the concept to any company of any size.

Now, let’s get back to the actual weeknote.

This week

This week we all were mostly just amazed about our new office. There’s always a certain mental boost with every move, but this time it also means that finally we have enough space to simultaneously run multiple workshops and yet maintain a peaceful working environment elsewhere. Our main meeting room equals the size of a Finnish two room apartment. All of this made everybody happy and it’s been really nice to see spontaneous team work happen in our new team rooms, kitchen or lobby.

We sponsored BarCampHelsinkiV at YLE this week.

In other news, Aki and Sami finished a project with Petteri H., to a client called Rossum. The application deals with industrial task management, and client is extremely happy on what we’ve done. A case study to follow at some point. In this project the iPad proved to be an excellent demonstration tool by the way.

Fabian came up with some new ideas together with Sami regarding our visual design methodology. This cooperation could provide to be a excellent asset in the future. Internal workshops are coming. This was also his first full week at NK and he says the massive know-how of such a small group of individuals is a great personal opportunity to learn and grow for him. That’s great to hear and we are surely going to learn from him too! In fact, Sami says it’s really good feeling to work with someone coming from a different, but very competent point of view. It challenges you, and forces you to grow professionally.

Petri worked on the TV and banking projects and gave a lecture about Design Management in Helsinki Institute of Marketing and another one about Service Design in Joutsa.

Samuel’s new big task is getting into design tasks related to a web service with the largest amount of public data available in Finland. I’d call this a good and challenging task for an intern.

Panu’s been doing many things: 2 projects in hand off phase and one in concept. He re-discovered some of the not-so-new topics of persuasion, conversions, funnels, metrics etc. According to him tt’s good to get back to the basics every now and then. He also blogged about Tacit Knowledge.

Matti’s been having face-to-face sessions with our people, digging out peoples’ hopes and dreams. More of that to come. He’s also quite busy with project work and happy to see the office build up. He wants to thank Ilkka personally because our business looks so good. We join him in these thanks.

I’ve been doing IxD for two projects that go hand in hand, and also been learning Objective-C with Sauli. It’s good to keep learning new stuff, even if it seems overly complicated at first. Sauli’s also been doing quality assurance on older projects with Peetri and doing “stuff they do in real jobs” AKA building and carrying furniture.

Me and Sami should also sync our presentations for next week’s Information Design 2010 Seminar in Lahti.

OK, that’s long enough. EOF and cheers.