A weeknote, starting Monday 4 January 2021

The one where new people join the team and sharing work in progress leads to interesting places

It’s been a while since I weeknoted, so this is dipping my toe back in the water. We’ll see whether I can sustain it beyond an 8 week streak. Maybe that’s my limit, we’ll see.

We’re at a really interesting point as a team, we’re now up to full capacity as we hired a new Performance Analyst and a User Researcher in the last few weeks. I’m really looking forward to working with them, and having them on board means we can start to do a little more strategic work in both fields.

I think we’re starting the year with some real energy.

Sharing work in progress always leads somewhere

I’m working on what I’m currently calling a service map for one of our services — basically a high level view of core user journeys and also an even higher level view of how that service fits into a broader portfolio of services which we deliver. Something I think plays a small part in helping us meet parts 1 and 2 of the UK Government Service Standard (Understand users and their needs; Solve a whole problem for users). (I’m deliberately not sharing here as they are very much work in progress and not suitable for external eyes at the moment).

It’s intended to provide a frame for conversation to enable us, for example, to locate where current and planned work will happen in the service and talk about the implications of that and ultimately make decisions where necessary. The plan is to connect this work with our more detailed service blueprints and architectural views of the service in a way aligned to the work that Tero Väänänen is doing with service taxonomy work at NHS Digital.

There’s big value in co-creating these views of services and so this week I shared it with a couple of people and it led in interesting directions. One chat was with the owner of another service who could see the benefit of this view and highlighted an opportunity to share with a broader group of service owners — so there’s some potential to develop an interesting line of conversation with senior stakeholders. The other chat led in the direction of sharing with a wider group of stakeholders in the project space which could help generate some interesting overlays like the one I described above of current and future projects.

It’s going to be interesting to see how it develops but as always showing a work in progress generates as much if not more value than showing a finished thing.

Other interesting things:

• Made a positive connection with another government agency working in a similar space, and identified some interesting opportunities to deepen our working relationships
• Prepping for a GDS live assessment — at the end of January we’ll be taking one of our key services through an assessment. We’re in good shape with a positive story to tell about what’s happened since beta.