A weeknote, starting Monday 18 Feb 2019

Thanks for the final inspiration to squeeze out a weeknote Amy Hupe 😁

I’ve read many other people’s with interest and have put this together as a way to pay a bit of that back.

Monday

Weekly catchup with my user researcher and performance analyst to check in on the week ahead. Talked through a high level performance dashboard and how it might evolve. One for me to follow up with the delivery manager.

Call with colleagues to discuss next steps for our planned agency-wide design system development and its alignment with an existing design assurance group which is focused on mobile app development. Going to be a big piece of work but it’s definitely a step in the right direction.

Accessibility discussion with people from 3 different projects. Sharing current approaches and agreed to bring a wider group of projects together to align our approaches to save time and money.

Tea@3 our weekly informal team chat.

Service blueprinting on the core journey for one of our services – Vehicle Operator Licensing. Hope to share an early draft of this with the wider team in the next week ahead of using it to help steer our monthly service management meetings.

Design workshop planning – 2 day workshop happening later this week. Checking in and supporting the team to design the exercises and maximise the impact of the work.

Tuesday

Joined colleagues on another project to review and critique the existing user journey for booking a driving theory test. Pleased to receive an invite to the session for me and my team – another example of extending our support into the wider project portfolio and sharing knowledge and expertise as well as learning some new ways of working.

Weekly delivery meeting with service/product/delivery managers for Vehicle Operator Licencing.

Shared the draft service blueprint for Vehicle Operator Licencing with the new delivery lead. We explored how we could use it (and the planned x8 blueprints for the other key journeys) to align and focus our work for the service in coming months. Looking forward to validating this one and getting the remaining journeys documented.

Brilliant catch up with our Head of Content Design John Ploughman. We’ve not caught up for a while and managed to cram discussions about step by step journeys, service blueprints, mind boggling sign up procedures, developing a user centred community at DVSA, loaning our visual impairment goggles to local government, and figuring out how to get more content designers into the agency into a hour over a coffee. There’s always so much to discuss. Chats with John are always positive and give me an energy boost.

Wednesday

Busy day, starting with a leadership team meeting and then ran over to join a workshop with the team exploring how disciplinary procedures work in the MOT world.

The team did some great work mapping out the journey, identifying pain points, creating some problem statements and deciding on the one to focus on for an idea sketching session in the morning. I love these kind of sessions – they’re hard work but the shared exploration is always an enlightening experience for people, and we’ve identified plenty of opportunities for improvement in the short and probably medium term. Looking forward to seeing a prototype next week!

Also, had the background excitement of accepting an offer on my house and having an offer accepted on the house we want. The start of a rollercoaster journey of my own I think…

Thursday

Day off to run daddy daycare with my 6 year old son as it’s half term this week. Activities involved Pass the Pigs, a countries quiz game, Minecraft top trumps and cake.

House rollercoaster started in earnest as we went for another look at the one we want, and also one other that has come back on the market. Decision made but excitement levels are being tempered by anticipation of the process from this point.

Friday

Weekly catch up with my team to check in among other things on what’s new, what we’re celebrating, what’s getting in the way, and what we’re looking forward to in the coming weeks. We’ve found a post-it exercise with those themes is a pretty engaging way to have a healthy conversation as a team.

Got my travel and hotel booked for a trip to Leeds next week for Content Design training which I’m really looking forward to along with some of my team.

(slowly) Reading: Inside the Nudge Unit by David Halpern