#weeknotes S02 E01
This morning, whilst washing up at 6.40am, I decided that I would write one #weeknotes post every day this week. Four plates later, I had a plan for what I would write this week, with a beginning, a middle and an end, and a short detour for some poetry.
Better advice is accurate advice
What inspired me to take on this small challenge? This week I am working with sixteen brilliant colleagues: two delivery managers, seven legal experts (from our Expert Advice Team) and seven content designers (from our Customer Journey team). We are spending this week focussing on a few of our most read pages on our public site, to double check the legal accuracy of our advice. We want to make sure that our advice is up to date and clear and correct. This is a challenge for our content designers and our experts, who will all be working intensively and at pace. We will be working on seven different subject areas: welfare benefits, immigration, housing, consumer, employment, debt/ money advice and family.
Trying a new way of working
Whenever we work on the 1300+ pages that make up our public content, we always work in pairs, with one Subject Matter Expert working closely with a Content Designer, This week, we are piloting a slightly different way of working, with our content designers and subject matter experts working closely and prioritising this work together, throughout the whole week. Each pair has a short list of pages they will check for accuracy. How they work together is up to them, and we will use Trello and daily stand up meetings to check in, and to help with any issues that are blocking progress.
A ground-breaking industry-standard bonus
My role in this week is a tiny one, but it is something I am quite excited about. During the planning for this week, I spent some time looking at guidance for content design. I realised that there was very little if any guidance on how to be a legal subject matter expert, written by subject matter experts (SME’s). I suspect some of this is down to simple logistics. In our Expert Advice Team, we are all experienced practitioners who have spent many years advising, training and consulting in our own subject area. Many other subject matter experts will take on ad hoc pieces of SME work in addition to their own daily work. In our team, we also spend a significant amount of our time working with our amazing content design team, checking content for our public site, and checking the content that we publish for our advisers, across our seven expert subject areas. So, we have a uniquely privileged position that helps us to think about the discipline of being a subject matter expert across all our advice areas, and to develop industry standard guidance on how to do this (and as we are subject matter experts, with added top tips). More on this to come.
Our first afternoon
And lastly, a song
We are planning to end this week with a retrospective meeting and a futurespective meeting (this was a new kind of meeting to me, looking forward to it!). To help us celebrate. I am putting together a spotify playlist on the subject of accuracy (of course). It is surprisingly difficult to find appropriate songs, so if you have any suggestions to add in the comments, that will be very welcome.
I will be back tomorrow. At the moment I plan to write about counting the ways that I love accuracy, but that may change.
