Weeknotes E10
Hi, I’m Colin a product manager working at the Department of Health and Social Care. Each week I’m going to keep a running update of the work I’ve done & things I’ve learned along the way.
My current priority:
Helping to procure a team capable of delivering the Healthy Start private beta.
Wednesday
- service register work. I’m trying to list all the public facing services DHSC owns. I’ve got a few but tried to trawl resources to see if I could discover any more.
- met Leeds based Healthy Start colleague in person for the first time! Everyone is super nice.
- read up a lot on Healthy Start. The discovery document has some fantastic soundbites (great work discovery team! Very helpful!).
- Talk to Frank discovery assessment. A real pleasure, team doing great work. Left impressed and feeling like they got this… I wrote about discovery assessments here.
Thursday
- Write up for the Talk to Frank team with good people to talk to, interesting things to read and generic advice
- chat with Healthy Start colleagues
- sent the draft MOU document for Healthy Start colleagues to look through and add to
- acted out a mini workshop with Dharmesh. It was basically a way to co-create prioritised hypotheses to test in an alpha phase. Great discussion on what we could do and other methods. Some cool things we both can experiment with.
- reading about Healthy Start a bit more
- Calorie Labelling alpha planning and sending advice
- performance platform chats, good discussion about measuring non-transactional services. Blogs of the topic here and here.
Friday
- chasing HR about printing a new pass.
- I asked Parliament for my p45 again. I’ve just switched banks, it was much easier than moving job.
- “From today, let this be clear: tech transformation is coming” - Matt Hancock
- Reviewing Cost Recovery alpha proposal
- a write up of thoughts before a meeting with a director on Monday
- chats about service lines and service register stuff
- quick attempt at writing out definitions of value when prioritising services we can support/maybe own one day and reasons why we might want to not get involved.
Monday
- busy day! Running up and down stairs as I spent my first day co-locating with fabulous Healthy Start colleagues
- lots was done on that front. We have a new slack channel, we have new stand-up times, we have 1 authoritative Trello board which consists of a backlog of tasks and research we need to do, we responded to more supplier questions as we procure a team, went through some of the research and thoughts I’d already compiled, got access to more docs and resources, start on prioritising tasks and assigning them to people and agreement on more co-location (every Mon & Thurs moving forward).
- conversation about Cost Recovery and Flexible working. Upon reflection could of been a bit sweeter in my delivery - something to work on when speaking to seniors. It went well and everyone left happy but one must constantly improve.
- being taught by how to be a lead assessor by Nayeema
- being a lead assessor and having a pre-assessment chat.
- agreed to be on another job panel for a service designer over at PHE
Tuesday
- Matt Hancock first speech to internal staff.
- More supplier questions for healthy start. As I sit here 18 interested in putting themselves forward to work with us. If you are amazing and want to do amazing things please apply.
- sent over the agenda for the assessment tomorrow - a smarter Geordie than me may have had a large influence on how this day will be ran
- prepped for my turn running our team retro tomorrow. Victor, if you read this I’m doing the team health retro.
- shared slack with Healthy Start team. We are rolling!
- reading about The Fleming Fund. I’m lead assessor for it tomorrow. Questions ready to roll.
- Community and Social Care Group All Staff Meeting & Summer Awards - colleagues won a well deserved award for organising digital week!
What I’ve been reading
- What will new technology mean for the NHS and its patients? Kings Fund Report.
- The world lost more than one football pitch of forest every second in 2017. Every 100 days an area the size of Scotland is lost. Sad.
- Thought-provoking post on giving consent to healthcare data and some good prototypes to muse on.
- Data Journalism 2018 awards. What was learned from all those in the running. Some amazing pieces of journalism!
- Intrigued to see how this AI experiment at a London hospital will play out. Definitely lots of concerns and challenges to overcome.
- How GDPR affects user research. Informative! More advice here.
- Story of NHS England and its first 5 years. Long read this one. Going to take it a chunk at a time but looks fascinating!
- Why we need to spend less time looking at screens and what could be next.
Shout out to others doing great stuff
Former colleagues in Parliament write updates on the work they are doing. They are fantastic and if you are interested in anything democracy related then check them out: