A weeknote, starting Monday 11 January 2021

Where the week disappeared rapidly

It’s been one of those weeks where time evaporates, and as soon as you think you’ve got space to think the next thing is upon you.

Thing’s that stood out this week:

• Kicking off a new piece of work in one of our services – an opportunity to review user needs as part of a replatforming exercise.
• Discussion around use of new technologies in another one of our services
• Supporting a complex procurement and talking to potential suppliers
• Further planning of a cross-gov design meetup with colleagues across a number of departments. The talks are coming together nicely.
• Seeing our new Performance Analyst hit the ground running and creating a simple dashboard to help us understand user feedback more easily. A stepping stone to more proactive analysis in future.
• It’s time to stop writing the date as 2020. Always takes me a couple of weeks at the start of the year…
• Seeing this colour blind man experience more vibrant colours.
• This weeknote format from Matt Edgar which I may try in future weeks
• The simplicity of this view from Nate Langley at the Co-Op which connects vision to objectives and the way they openly share works in progress
• Finished reading Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez — which reveals the profound impact of the gender data gap on women and society. So many examples of things designed without thought to women who would use them. We must do better.
• Started reading Natural Born Heroes as a non-work focused book before diving into some systems thinking which is a topic I’m keen to explore more this year.

Overall reflections — a lot going on across multiple services, a team that is now at full capacity and heading in the right direction, general wariness of the ambitious backlog of work we’ve got.

2021 4 Jan