Week commencing Monday 9 September 2019.
This is my first attempt at weeknotes. I’ve wanted to do it for a while, but was too scared! Will I have enough I can talk about each week? Can I tread the fine line between saying enough to be interesting and saying too much and getting in trouble?!
I probably won’t be able to keep it up every week, but if I don’t start it will never happen. My hope is that even if nobody reads it, it will at least be a record of what happened, when it happened and why it happened. I have a terrible memory, so it will at least help with that!
Monday
We are coming to the last couple of sprints in our Immunisation Consent discovery, so I spent most of Monday pulling research together for the 4th show and tell. Our last couple of show and tells have sadly had to be virtual (by which I mean sent out by email as a slide deck!). Busy schedules for everybody and the impact of school summer holidays meant we just couldn’t find suitable times.
As much as we would like to stick to “proper Agile”, we have to be realistic and make compromises sometimes. The holidays also seriously restricted the user research we could do with schools and parents, so our discovery is probably a little longer than normal.
Tuesday
The morning was spent delivering the show and tell with Mo. Mo has stepped up really well and done a great job with user research on this project.
It was great to get back in the room with people from the service. We had some good, honest discussions too. Much better than a “virtual” show and tell! We went through all of the research we’d done and were able to get feedback from members of the service. We also did a little exercise to create the first draft of the project vision.
I’m trying to apply some of the things I learned at the GDS Working Level for Product Managers training course I did back in June. Having a coherent shared vision that can help keep us focused is something I wanted to try. We managed to come up with something between us and hopefully we can get some feedback from other members of the service team at the next show and tell.
The afternoon was partly taken up with some line manager responsibilities. This is the first role I’ve had where I’ve had this responsibility, so it’s been a learning curve for me.
Wednesday
The day started with some car trouble for me, which is always a challenge with a 30 mile commute. It got me there though!
I had a 1:1 with my line manager and did some admin related to my secondment. Dave is always great at listening to my ruminations and worries. Unfortunately I am a worrier by nature, so tend to overthink things, especially when the future shape of the team is still uncertain. Such is life in Local Government!
The afternoon was the retrospective for the technical team. Part of my job is leading the technical team within the Service Design programme, so I arrange and facilitate the retrospectives. We also use the time to do some sprint planning and demo anything new to each other and anyone from the programme management team that can attend. I always try to be as open and honest as possible about how I feel things are going. I hope this encourages others to be open too, so we get that maximum benefit of our time.
Thursday
This is usually my work from home day but I wanted to support Mo with the first user research session with school staff. Two sets of ears are better than one. It went really well and the research participant was excellent, giving us a really good understanding of the process and their role in it.
They also offered to help us recruit some parents/guardians for user research too. I’m looking forward to finding out about their experience too.
I went to work from home in the afternoon, where I listened to the audio recording of our research session, made some notes and put together a basic user journey. It will be interesting to see how the journey varies between different schools.
Friday
I worked from home with car trouble persisting, so had to dial in to the only meeting I had planned.
It was a meeting to discuss one of our early Service Design exemplar projects, where the service are wanting to make some changes. The solution we designed and implemented has been live for over a year and handed over to IT to maintain. It’s tricky because we want iterations to the service to be based on further research, but we also don’t have capacity to be continually involved. We are also not a permanent team, so have to be pragmatic about what work we can take on.
I left early to take the car to a mechanic. We think we know what the problem is. Now I have to wait for the dreaded quote!
