Octopus - 11 to 15 May

Published: 16 May 2026
Tagged: weeknote

Work

Interesting week with lots of work with groups across government.

First thing Tuesday I met with the lead of the group working on an update for the data engineer role. We checked feedback from the community fact check process - this process gives us confidence whether proposed changes to a skill description will work for different roles and in different organisational contexts. I liked doing this kind of work first thing, really set me up for the rest of the day.

Then Thursday I met with both a group of business analysts and a group of content designers. This was the first time I’d properly met with the business analysts as a former colleague had been facilitating this work. They seem a really good bunch with a clear sense of what they want to achieve so I’m looking forward to helping them finish off their updates over the summer.

The content designer group are at the other end of the process. We agreed final edits in response to highlighter testing in April, and the role description will now be updated at the end of the month.

The changes to the content designer role will mean that all 50+ role descriptions in this capability framework have been updated in some way, large or small, in the last 2 years. The team needs to find a way to celebrate this and share wider within the organisation. I may even have to do a cringe Linkedin post.

I’m continuing to support my new-ish content designer colleague in sessions with stakeholders when I can. They’re definitely now taking the lead on the content in their area, which is great to see. We’re enjoying showing the people we talk to our ‘big map of everything related to a profession capability framework’.

The map uses a narrative object modelling approach and is very scrappy by design. It’s hopefully helping everyone recognise the complexity of the area and align on shared language.

This week we’ve had early results from the independent accessibility audit of both websites our team has built and maintained. The results are mostly really positive and the auditors have commented on how many good practices they’ve seen. It’s really satisfying to have external recognition of our work in this area, especially as our sites adapt standard design system components in new ways.

More Jira wangling over the week. One success has been including a hypothesis template in our default epic/story card, though I’ve called it an ‘idea definition statement’. It sort of looks like this:

Because of (evidence of problem),
We think that changing (existing thing) to (new state)
Will lead to (improvement for our users)
We will know this works if we see (measurable change).

The thinking is that we can use this with stakeholders to refine ideas, while moving to using design hypotheses as the basis for much of the team’s work.

Finally, there has been rumbles of starting up a UCD community of practice for our directorate so I was asked how the regular drop-in for content designers I run is going.

I’ve reflected that the value in it comes from its small size (usually 3-5 people) and focus on content-related stuff. This means people are comfortable sharing work in progress and getting feedback on problems we have. It also makes it easier to build and maintain relationships, which comes in handy when our work overlaps so often.

Other things

The next X-Gov Sheffield breakfast meetup is on 2 June! Sadly I’m away for this one, but don’t let that stop you signing up if you’re in the area.

I’ve been savouring an early birthday present for myself, a big heavy book about the legendary designer, Margaret Calvert, Woman At Work.

Lovely book to have lying around and Kid A has enjoyed flicking through all the pictures of Calvert’s designs for lettering and signs. We even got inspired enough to draw our own signs. This one says ‘Warning: Octopuses’: