Bounce - 15 to 19 June
Week 3 of our 4-week cycle, so things should be taking shape…
What was good
On Monday the team successfully show and tell-ed to the whole of our side of the organisation. Think we did a pretty good job giving a peek behind the scenes of the Capability Framework. Next time I think we can go into more detail on a specific bit of work.
This week we completed our short series of co-design sessions with the business relationship manager group, and their draft is ready for testing with the community. Seeing a cross-government group move through discovering messiness to the defined draft within 2 weeks has been cool, there’s clearly value in this way of working.
I used the opportunity to demo the project page we’d mocked up for the work and got a really positive response from the group. I think it must be very validating to see your work represented on something that looks like an Official GOV.UK Page™. We’ll be publishing an experimental page next week so we can test it for real and get feedback from other user groups.
With my fellow content designer, I’ve been using this work to try out using markdown files for templates and documentation. This is essentially to avoid wrangling Word, and perhaps the first steps towards a refreshed content system now we’ve migrated from Google world to MS365. This approach is looking viable and it’s genuinely great to have a designer colleague close by to test things and bounce ideas off, we make progress so fast.
On that theme I managed to drop in to a content community session this week. Really cool to hear snippets about content work across different parts of the organisation. We also had some in depth chat about pair-writing with policy and the value of guidance outside of a service for dealing with changing user behaviours. I also got to be honest about some challenges this week, which helped a lot. Overall, I’m very thankful to have these community of practice spaces available.
The team is also planning a firebreak week after this sprint, so we had fun coming up with loads of ideas of what we could do. I’m looking forward to either getting experimental or ticking off some long standing itches on our content backlog.
What was challenging
Went to a ‘heads of’ meetup to talk about the future of a skills family. Lots of discussion and discovery across the group about how skill descriptions get used, or not used, in practice by different organisations, and the struggles caused by some internal applications, especially for pay allowances (I wrote down halfway through ‘the framework(s) context(s) of use(s) is insane’).
I left a bit disheartened. It’s hard (but important) to hear about issues caused by systems that your work plays a part in. You want to fix them all with what you can control. Realistically some big issues are really gravity problems relative to my work.
But I’m optimistic. People are keen to dig in and are starting by mapping the different approaches across their organisations. So hopefully this can help us 1) make issues more visible to those who can do something about it and 2) determine how to evolve the skills to make things a bit better. I’m also hopeful we can work in the open more to help bring people along, and mitigate some of the change management issues.
To do
- Continue jotting down ideas for SDinGov session. The latest one: Choose your own ‘propose a change request’ adventure!
- Try to get more World Cup-y - It’s a shame the timezone means Kid A can’t really get into it. Time for a wall chart?
Reading and listening
Taking the power back, one Sheffield street at a time - Sam Waltby
Operating Patterns for a more dynamic NHS - James Plunkett and Richard Pope
This is content systems design - Joe Phillips
Launching a new Co-design Toolkit for Early Years Services - Policy Lab blog