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Vertigo - 9 to 13 March

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Work week

This week has felt typically busy but there has been a thread of focus threatening to creep through. Looking back, there has been a lot of positive movement.

The best thing has been getting back to grips with the work to update content of the Digital and Data framework, both moving current things forward and scheduling work for later this year. In particular, I was able to get a draft of the updated design skills out into the wider community for testing.

This is obviously close to my heart. The aim of the work is to ensure the skill descriptions can be useful for content designers, positioning us clearly as designers, and apply some lessons learned after a year of use by other design roles.

So far, I’ve mainly been working with ‘subject matter experts’ like lead content designers and heads of design across government to check and re-draft the descriptions of the skills. But almost by definition, experts cannot judge how clearly they are communicating their domain to others. So now we’re looking to test the clarity of the descriptions with some typical users, in this case content, service, interaction and graphic designers of all levels.

After some ‘testing of testing’ at a content community day last month, we’ve settled on a version of a trusty highlighter test. The results should be coming in over the next month, which we’ll use to finalise the next iteration of the skill descriptions to be published end of May.

Elsewhere we have a more realistic delivery timeline for the new profession website. This is really helpful as it means we can ensure the site is robust from launch and get in place the supporting organisational infrastructure it will need long term. This week I’ve been involved in everything from the very high level ‘where is this thing going, and why?’ discussions, to the nitty gritty of translating ‘profession brand’ into decisions and principles for customising design system components.

Stepping back, this amount of zooming in and out in one week is a little vertigo inducing. But, I dunno, I kind of enjoy it? Everything is connected, the big things affect the little things and vice versa, and I think it’s part of a designer’s job to do this connecting, translating, sense-making across different scales. Somebody has to produce coherence for both the organisation and the user’s experience… I can’t see anyone else doing it, anyway.

Another nice thing: Both the team’s community-led governance process and our (relatively) open ways of working got a big shout out at the first show and tell for our new directorate. The fact this came from another, high profile, team was particularly heart-warming. It’s nice to know what we do is noticed and has impact on how our colleagues might decide to go about their work.

Finally, we even found time for two sessions drafting team OKRs for next quarter. This isn’t (yet) an established process in our part of the organisation but we know it’s critical for us to have clear priorities, given how our core products act as common components enabling such a wide range of services and processes. I facilitated the sessions so might be biased, but feel we came out with a refreshed sense of purpose and direction. The team knows what needs doing over this next period, what’s valuable. Hopefully we can get the objectives agreed with leadership next week, and then get on with it.

Finally finally, and related to the OKRs, we squeezed in a couple of speculative discussions with other teams that hint at some exciting potential futures we could help make happen. Another dimension of enjoyable vertigo: zooming ahead, seeing a better future, then coming back to the present to make better decisions in the now.

Other things

No note last week as I spent my allotted ‘non-work’ work time over the weekend submitting a pitch for Service Design in Government. Quite fun to think about what others might find valuable about the team’s experience. Now, the waiting game…

Next Tuesday, I’m running the next X-Gov breakfast and lunch meetup for public sector people in Sheffield. We’ve had a fantastic, diverse, response once again, but still time to sign up if you’re around South Yorkshire!

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