A weeknote, starting 13 March 2023
Which began with a rollercoaster and a reflection
Having referenced a good article on operating at different levels of zoom in last week’s note I realised how tiring context switching between levels and different projects and stakeholder groups can be in reality.
It was only the end of Monday and I wondered what had hit me. Then I sat down and looked at my diary to check and found I’d…
- Checked in with a team writing a business case
- Walked someone through uploading interview scores for the first time
- Worked through a change assessment with people on a work stream of a key project
- Had a 1:1 with one of my team
- Had a leadership team meeting
- Joined a session as our performance analyst walked stakeholders through some dashboards for one of our major projects
- Joined our biweekly departmental all hands
- Talked about measurement strategy in one service with colleagues looking at strategic plans and measurement at the agency level
- Discussed the future of the chair position of our accessibility working group
Being involved in such a variety of activities is great and means I can have influence and provide support in different ways with different people. But there’s a high switching cost that I’m paying one way or another either in the moment or after the fact. Now that I’ve spotted it I can be a bit more mindful of when I need to look after myself. I suspect it won’t be easy to shift some of my ways of working but hopefully I can experiment and find things that help.
I enjoyed watching Eve Andersson share the story of her journey with accessibility at Google as part of the Deque Conference. The story of developing accessibility in organisations seems to be consistent in many places – motivated people having big ambitions and succeeding by starting small and growing influence over time. Helpful as we explore the next steps for our accessibility working group.
I found this tool which helps you estimate how many people using your website might be disabled which I picked up when looking at the excellent Department for Education design resources. This type of thing can be so helpful when trying to engage people in the need for accessible and inclusive design.
Digesting the Digital transformation in government: addressing the barriers to efficiency report by the National Audit Office. Various elements are very close to home for me — working with a service that is an early adopter of the One Login for government service; working on ways to fill our skills gap for digital skills; striving for more joined up insight and data around end to end services. Really interesting to see a broader perspective on all of these topics and more.
Other interesting reading:
- Always great writing from Vicky Teinaki — this time on user centred design and agile in a government context
- What we can learn from the history of the service standard by Matt Knight
- Brainstorm Questions Not Ideas — by Erika Hall
Currently on my bookshelf:
Learning:
Exploring Service Design – Collections of books to inspire thinking and action in how services are designed and run
