Week commencing Monday 28 October 2019.
Monday
Back to the daily grind after a week away meant the usual scan through of emails, deleting all of the junk so I could focus on actual work emails! Then there were several Slack teams and Trello boards to review for updates and I read a few blog posts.
Following all of that, I wrote my weeknotes covering the week before I went on holiday. In the afternoon we had a team meeting, which was pretty great timing for me as it gave me updates on what I’d missed!
Tuesday
I finished off a blog post about our Immunisation Consent project, that I’d started pre-holiday and sent it through to project sponsors and team management for approval. I feel it’s really important to share what you are doing, both with the internal teams and externally. I’ve learned so much from blog posts other teams have written about their work.
I popped over to the office of the School Nursing team to retrieve the master journey map for the Immunisation Consent project. It had been displayed on a communal wall for a couple of weeks, so the team could give some feedback and check for errors. There were lots of post-it notes stuck to it, which is excellent, as it shows a good level of interest and engagement.
Wednesday
Wednesday was mostly working with the FutureGov prototyping team. We had some team time in the morning to catch up and find out what FutureGov had been doing with the leadership team. They had played back what we’ve learned so far from testing the prototype principles with service areas and developed some ideas.
The afternoon was the show and tell, which was the opportunity for each of the prototyping teams to talk about and show what we’ve been doing. We also had Retrospective and Sprint planning sessions. It was really great to see how the people with no previous experience of “Service Design” had jumped straight into some of the techniques and obviously got on really well with it, seeing the benefits of this way of working and making progress.
It was interesting for me to observe the way people were talking about the work they had been doing and what they would do next, especially talking about Data & Insights. Hearing that they recognised that they need the story behind the data to make the right decisions, was really encouraging. I’m hoping this translates to a wider acceptance of User Research as a discipline in the organisation.
One thing I think I’ve noticed about FutureGov’s approach this time, and I don’t know if it’s intentional but I don’t feel like the way of working is being labelled as much as it was before. The team I’m in is the Service Design team, because we’ve adopted Service Design methods and techniques and we have some experience and skills acquired through practice. It’s great for us and the organisation to have that, but perhaps the problem with it is that others feel excluded or find it difficult to see where they fit into what we’re doing.
It reminds me of the GDS Product Manager course I went on this year, specifically a note I wrote myself:
“Do we need to label it? You can still work in this way without scaring people off”
Sadly I didn’t write anything else for context in my notes so I can’t give credit to anyone else for raising the topic, but maybe I’m seeing the positive affects of teaching/practicing Service Design without labelling it as such?
I was asked to look at blogging options for the Prototyping Teams, so we can open up the work we’re doing to engage with a wider audience than those who can attend the Show & Tells. Hopefully there will be something soon.
Thursday
Thursday is my usual work from home day, which I always look forward to because it saves me a bit of money from commuting costs and allows me to pick my kids up from school. I really value being able to be there to pick them up 2 days per week.
I made a start on some of my actions from the org design Sprint planning and had another look at the work we did before I went on holiday on writing Problem Statements for the Immunisation Consent project. It was a good session, but I think they still need a bit more work.
Friday
I had a meeting in the morning to update the Data Controller registration form with our Information Governance lead, the Web Team and our Lead Developer. Not the most thrilling of meetings (Sorry Paul!), but a very necessary part of running online services that collect personal data.
I worked from home for the afternoon so I could do school run number 2. I finished a little earlier than normal, as my first week back had hit me hard. I think I need another holiday!
