Caveat: lots of amazing people continue to work hard and do amazing things. Like any normal human they are in my thoughts as I wrote this.
Delivering in a pandemic
I’m one of the many people who have worked or are working on coronavirus related services. This post is about our work on the Emergency Volunteering Scheme which is in the Coronavirus Act.
Like many others, the timescales we were dealing with were supercharged. We were given 10 days to deliver a MVP service from scratch. This included finding and rallying a team to actually deliver the thing.
I tried to be part of a team that was working at pace rather than haste. To have a hand in creating something responsibly and in the spirit of the service standard.
This is a ramshackle post about outlining which principles helped me the most while delivering in a pandemic, some tips and snapshot reflections from that period.
Useful principles
With such short delivery timescales meant accepting we had to make calls left, right and centre without all the evidence, deliberation and thought one would typically love to have. That doesn’t mean we needed to throw all our principles out the window. Some I found insanely useful to cling to no matter the pressure the team was under. Here are the ones that helped most;
Shared understanding
I’ve banged on about this before but I’m a big believer in creating ‘shared understanding’ within teams (see Will M blog post that inspired me many moons ago). I’m definitely not the only one with such a fervent passion for shared understanding. A tweet I saw the other day…
If I’ve learned one thing I’m sure of in the whole of my career, it’s that the most valuable thing you can do in almost any situation is to create shared understanding.
— Amy Hupe (@Amy_Hupe) April 8, 2020
So many inefficiencies in our work stem from wrongfully assuming we’re on the same page.
What did that mean in practice during our pandemic induced sprint? I made a conscious effort to;
Articulate what the service was intended to do as plainly as I could
I’ve been using product/design briefs for a few years now but on day 1 it’s one of the first things I did. To wrap my head around the service I begun to write up;
- what outcome did the service wish to achieve
- who is it for
- constraints
- what factors are critical to success
- potential measures of success
- timeframes
- relevant other services
I did this after talking to colleagues, sharing with all of them what I was doing, asking for feedback & iterating on what I had. Ultimately I knew if I couldn’t articulate the purpose of the service it’d be a challenge doing that to a team.
In the same document I also thought about some of our potential design principles unique to our service. It felt important to clarify that to make the service a success hinged on a;
- journey which could be completed without the need for physical face to face contact (to help prevent spread of coronavirus)
- we didn’t burden those working in health and care (already burdened with taking care of people we didn’t want to add extra admin to their life)
- the process must be quick
They had emerged from conversations about the intended outcome of the service and provided a useful frame when it came to later discussions and decisions.
Encourage and meaningfully listen to the teams and stakeholders views, opinions and suggestions
This could mean;
- swarming on particular niggles in our design multiple times a day, with a handful of the team, to hash out what would be the best next step
- a google doc for all the team to add questions to policy stakeholders as they emerged
- asking for advice from the team before making decisions blindly, ideally reaching some consensus before action
- when running prioritisation giving people an equal say in what is done next to improve the service, with time to deliberate
Tediously share
From day 1 I was sharing everything I could like a man possessed. I dread to think how much I shared on slack. That’s not to say I wanted to create a wall of noise for colleagues or the team but I wanted to make sure that my “observations and intentions” were painfully clear for anyone who needed to know. Any time I’d get some useful feedback or get a question answered that was relevant to our work I’d make sure it was shared and not trapped in my noggin.
It also meant lots of drawings and maps - many disposed of and much better one’s emerging over time. At such a fast pace things that are shared in the morning are outdated by the afternoon but they have their place in orientating what the team was thinking at the time.
Tied to this is communicating with clarity. I’m not sure I can judge if I’m successful at this, that’s for others to decide, but I certainly try to avoid leaving any conversation with a baggage of confusion left behind. I always try to remain authentic and communicate as such, but with an intent to be clear, specific and to the point.
Understand context & needs
We’re not designing for a screen, we’re designing for people. We need to think hard about the context in which they’re using our services. GOV.UK design principles
Proudly I can say we did manage to conduct user research within the 10 day time frame and think about making sure it was setup for success moving forward. We’d also scrap and explore any data we could get our hands on to build a picture of who would be using our service & the context they’d be using it in.
Likewise, a brutal reality is, that we had to move forward acknowledging we had assumptions. Some more risky than others (fortunately understanding your riskiest assumptions is powerful in itself).
Thankfully we lucked out with many smart, curious, tirelessly hard working people in the team who always put thought into how our service would work or in some cases falter. Many had a ton of experience delivering stuff within the landscape of health and care so we were not entirely in the dark. When we were and didn’t know the answer it is also good to be honest and these can go on a list to explore, unpick and hopefully will result in a better service.
Good services
Lou Downe’s ever helpful list of principles are good to stay true to. I always find it important to keep in mind but the top 3 that really appealed this time around were;
- Enable a user to complete the outcome they set out to do
- Require the minimum possible steps to complete
- Be consistent throughout
I think to some extent I’ve internalised a lot of these fine suggestions already but the list is always a good reminder as a way to see if your service is on course. There is no way we could hit on all the principles for the MVP but knowing what is missing/not as good as we’d prefer helps us focus on what needs to prioritised moving forward.
Lou Downe also published ‘10 principles for design in a crisis’ - worth checking out.
Writing well for the web
Lots of effort from extremely skilled colleagues went into trying to make sure the content of the service/wider guidance was understandable. In essence making sure we lived up to content design principles.
Over one weekend we also had a handful of us trying our best to write as plainly as possible. Without sticking to known principles it increases the chances of long sloppy inintelligible content that is not helpful to anyone.
Show the thing
Maybe one of the more powerful principles we relied upon. By the end of the day 1 I believe a prototype existed. This couldn’t be done without the GOV.UK prototyping kit and design system (in addition being to reuse/repurpose parts of services was incredibly incredibly important) .
Tangent: I really enjoyed James’s tweet which expands this point, within NHS context, with far more aplomb than I ever could…
I asked https://t.co/qYZZCQqDF1 colleagues what's changed in the last 2-3 years that's helping us respond to the coronavirus situation in the way we are now.
— James Higgott (@jiggott) March 27, 2020
Or, to put it another way, which old bits of tech/design/process would only hold us back if they were still in place. 1/n
Embrace scrutiny and act on it
Having a prototype helped us get feedback early and often. We’d share it liberally with stakeholders, potential users, policy colleagues, colleagues in devolved administrations. Talking about it rather than letting people play with it would have been a far more painfully slow exercise.
Daily show and tells
Each afternoon we had a show and tell. A rallying point for the team.
We’d go around the team and hear updates of how the service was coming together, with all professions represented. By all professions I also include policy makers. A few days into creating the MVP we extended the invite to policy colleagues who’d share updates from their side, listen, probe and discuss the service as a whole in amongst the rest of us. I believe it was insanely useful (I love shared understanding remember). It provided the collective a way to get quick answers to emerging questions, raising of issues and visibility of progress.
The show and tells also had assurance colleagues from GDS who’d monitor work and provide a bit of outside scrutiny as well as helping us work on blockers.
Last minute shout outs…
Here are some extra reflections and tips that I think were useful…
Consequence Scanning
Reminder all that @doteveryone 's consequence scanning workshop is ace. @NHSX & @NHSBSA cross-org team used it on a coronavirus-related service and now actions from session prioritised in next sprint 💪 https://t.co/S4qpBa83A9
— Colin Pattinson (@ColinPattinson) April 3, 2020
One thing I helped instigate was the team participating in a consequence scanning workshop. It’s fab but crucially it worked even in the tightest of time frames. It allowed a mix of professionals to unpick the consequences of our service. It left us with a handful of actions that went in the backlog.
Tools…
All of this using…
- Lots of Slack - who helpfully upgraded our workspace for free
- Lots of G-suite (google docs, sheets, hangouts, etc)
- Lots of mapping on Miro
- Paper, pens & scribbles
A fantastic team
One thing that got us through was camaraderie & hustle. Everyone was skilled, passionate, good natured and rose to the challenge. It was insanely motivating to watch people be great and collaborate intensely. This is obviously incredibly fortunate to have but it’s important.
We were blessed by having a cross-organisation team that always kept a high spirit despite all the demands. They are still working hard and continuing to the make the service better.