ROLL UP YOUR SLEEVES NOW!

WEEK 1 — Chiltern Music Therapy Digital Platform

Well, we knew from previous similar programmes (EXPLORE was our digital “baptism of fire” so to speak) how fast things move once you get started… but oh my, the amount of work and progress achieved in the first week only has been nothing short of amazing.

Yalla Coop’s team lead us fantastically through the several sessions we run this week, from initial Ways of Working overview, to Problem Development Part I and II, and Users Discovery. Some of the content previously drafted by our team was very helpful for this work, enabling us to go deeper into these items and presenting our newly appointed digital partner with a thorough overview of our project, problem, users and journey so far.

In the first day we covered essentials like:

• Working processes and timelines
• Communication channels
• User Manuals: absolutely loved this way of introducing ourselves to the rest of the team and getting to know each other in a friendly and efficient way!
• Roles, involvement and availability
• Existing resources
• Introduction to GitHub, our selected hub for all things related to this project.
• Jargon: Yalla Coopwrote a very helpful list of tech development jargon that is easy to find pretty much everywhere and that after a week of extensive communication we have started to use ourselves!
• Design thinking and sessions that we will go through in the next weeks, including personas, user journeys, crazy 8’s and many more.
• Definition of done agreement, such an important element to tackle on the very first meeting.

On the following days we went deep into items including:

• Project planning
• Introduction to landscaping
• User testing planning
• Users discovery
• Among other things.

Lots of ideas and question marks seem to light up in every conversation, and it’s exciting to see it happening. We know already from EXPLORE experience that at the start of such a journey things can feel a bit confusing and overwhelming. We certainly recognize that feeling again… it’s time to wind the bobbin up and untangle the yarn.

See you next week!

Irene