Local - 7 to 11 September
This week’s theme has undoubtedly been devolution, and all things local.
Away day
On Tuesday my team and those in the wider Capability area met up for an away day in Manchester (yey!), in the shadow of Old Trafford (boo!). It was also the first time the current lineup of our framework team had all met in person, what a lovely bunch.
The day covered a lot:
- leadership’s view on increased devolution and what that might mean for the work of our wider Government Digital Enablement directorate - essentially, we think we’re well placed to make it happen
- changes in wider team structure - all looking very sensible, should give us clearer direction
- planning for the next quarter - checking whether our plans are practical and spotting dependencies across teams
- a talk on how LLMs might change the shape of work for different roles - can it meaningfully move past ‘faster admin’?
This felt like a really valuable and progressive day. The devolution direction feels genuinely exciting. I wonder if the next day together could be held in a local government office?
Hackathon
Continuing the local gov theme, on Wednesday I attended the Early Years Innovation Hackathon in my very own Sheffield.
My team was a great mix of backgrounds including policy, data engineering, service and product management and myself as the sole designer.
Given the range of deep expertise around me and my own unfamiliarity, I was initially keen to hang back and see what problems emerged. But once the team twigged that I ‘did words’ I ended up doing a lot of work defining stuff, like the part of the problem we were addressing, what success would look like, and potential solution concepts.
Throughout the day, I tried to help the team:
- keep the experience of families and professionals front of mind
- push the team to think wider than a digital interface (no more dashboards!)
- developing concepts into something tangible
This meant a lot of time holding the pen at the whiteboard so I’m worried I’m in an inordinate amount of photos and video from the day.
Our team focused on improving how transitions between stages and services were experienced by families. Our prototype ended up being a ‘story’, a piece of written text summarising the child’s journey across ‘early years’, weaving together data and wider context into something more readable and human.
The story (codenamed VOICE) was designed to act as an interface that could be authored and shared by all the different types of professional involved with a child, as well as the family itself. It could even be printed as a children’s story book.
It felt great to completely get out of the usual day to day work, meet a ton of new people, and see if I could apply my skills to a new area. I realised the last time I did something similar in person was 2019! Unlike 2019 though, I had to leave just before the presentations due to some urgent childcare.
Anyway, looking forward to another hack soon. Hats off to the GDS Local team for running such a smooth, if intense, day bringing together so many different types of people.
Other stuff
- On Thursday, the devolution theme continued in a long but productive workshop looking at how the wider team could work differently to grow local government’s digital capability - looking forward to contributing more to this work over the rest of the month.
- Yet more testing and design tweaks for the rebuilt site and its underlying CMS - next week should be the last stretch to get ready for switch over on the 30th.
- All set for the next X-Gov Sheffield meetup next Thursday.
Reading
Persistence of vision - Mike Gallagher
Where to start with solving information architecture (IA) problems - Ray Newman
Not without a fight - Mule Design
Writing is thinking, presenting is deciding - Russell Davies
Bland new world: is AI making us all think the same? - Matthew Hutson