A weeknote, starting Monday 3 July 2023
One thing on my mind this week is how teams maintain clear memory of decisions made. The fact people in a team change over the life of running a service creates a need for the current people in the team to understand ‘how we got to here’. I’ve seen examples recently where teams have had to walk quite a long way backwards and revisit decisions previously made and realign themselves with a renewed shared understanding so that they could move forward.
I did a bit of google-exploring around decision logs which generally just seem to be a very functional “write down the key decisions made, who made them and when” approach. Of course that’s sound advice and I’m not quite sure why I can’t put my finger on what seems to be missing — is it just building the habit to do that thing, or is there something else that’s important? Maybe it’s a degree of storytelling.
With this in mind it was interesting to see Giles Turnbull post on How Teams Remember and his direction towards writing a book on the topic. I think it’s definitely an interesting area that’s often hidden from view.
We’ve had good examples of this in the past like Designing at pace at the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency and the Design Histories work at the Department for Education which is excellent. I’d be interested in hearing from anyone with more examples in this space.
It also connects to this piece from Rachel Kobetz — Unraveling Organizational Complexity: A Design Leader’s Toolkit — understanding ‘how we got to here’ can help us manage some of the complexity that exists in organisations.
Coco Chan’s post about Questions to ask when creating a service map resonated after a conversation with one of my team about creating what I termed the ‘simplest useful view’ (noting the connection to my job at the Driver and Vehicles Standards Agency as this abbreviates to SUV…). As Coco says, there are often so many degrees of ambiguity it feels like the pragmatic approach is to create something simple and iterate to more detail. Remembering that the map is not the territory is important — we create maps and related artefacts to enable conversations to move forward and decisions to be made.
I spent a lot of time this week in various service review meetings of different types. I was really pleased to be invited to join our monthly quarterly business review and spend time hearing the discussion with the Chief Executive of the Central Digital and Data Office and other stakeholders. We walked through our recently published vision and talked about progress we’re making in the context of the six cross-government missions in the 2022–2025 roadmap for digital and data. I also joined a call with service owners across government with responsibility for services in the top 75 list which is activity related to Mission One. I was able to join in with service reviews and improvement discussions on two of our key services at DVSA as well.
I also spent some valuable focused time with my Lead User Researcher and Lead Service Designer where we explored some of the many things which need to evolve as we bring in lots of new people over the next couple of months. So great to have these conversation as we’re starting to see opportunities to deliver on things we’ve discussed in the past but not had capacity or real impetus to drive them forward.
Other great weeknotes:
- The Data Standards team at DHULC weeknote — interesting to see them user story and value stream mapping, and the lines of communication diagram is a good prompt for thinking about what needs to work differently as new people start joining as we scale our team and move from 7 people to 17…
- Felt exhausted just reading about all the trains in Vicky Teinaki’s weeknote. Highlighted some interesting parts on the concept of information needs, and also the student experience which could be relevant to some current work on apprenticeships
- Matt Edgar reflections on some of the challenges wrapped up in big organisational mergers
On the watchlist:
- Reflecting on the evolution of Service Design — Patrick Quattlebaum, Service Design Show
On the reading list:
Full weeknote archive — All the notes in one list.
Exploring Service Design — Collections of books to inspire thinking and action in how services are designed and run (affiliate link)
