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Sprint 49

25 Sep 2017

Reading time ~4 minutes

Sprint 49

Hi, I’m Colin a product manager working on beta.parliament.uk. Each sprint I’m going to keep a running update of the work we’ve done & things I’ve learned along the way.

The team’s current focus:

Make written questions and answers easy to find, easy to comprehend and a trusted source for re-use.

What we’ve done

Our firebreak between alpha and beta was wrapped up. Then we kicked off our first week of Written Questions and Answers Beta.

Written Questions and Answers Beta began! Pic of the team in action - bit blurry soz.

Day 2 of Beta with the team

What we have achieved:

  • Some great work from Naz updating stakeholders if we are hitting our measures of success:
  • Lords Members Portraits: Overall, the release of the Lord’s images has had a really positive impact, with more people visiting the site consistently and users interacting with the different images available. Users are also contacting Lord’s more than they were before.
  • Banner connecting the current site and beta: There are significantly more users and pageviews for the beta page compared to the previous 30 days. We have had an increase of 3900% for people clicking to leave feedback. We have also noticed an upturn in the amount of feedback through other mediums to the people team (e.g. Webmaster)
  • Naz continues to measure and has been working on getting the measures of success for Written Questions and Answers in a good place
  • The team did an alpha retrospective with Victor (as a stand in for Caroline) - new style. Constructive points emerged and have been put into action!
  • We lost the fantastic Jake to another team and gained the delightful Joshua. Welcome Joshua!!
  • We have been writing a report to wrap up alpha.
  • We did a beta kick off morning, which included clarifying our goals, jobs to be done to do, got a new mascot, identified target users, barriers and context we need to remember and a little team charter to live by
  • Bryony has been tackling SPARQL queries
  • Sharing with colleagues what the priorities of our data requests
  • Victor & Bryony also had a great chat with colleagues about options on what we could deliver. Colleagues quite literally rubbed their belly in glee.
  • Marttiina did two great sessions on team questions for beta and beyond & our research plan for beta
  • Discussions of headings/titles of written questions (this will be an upgrade of what we currently do but has its own challenges)
  • Chats about other research from other teams or from before our team that is relevant to our current work
  • Victor considering where our first stab at the best home for answers would be
  • Alan chatting about what content needs to be on the answers page
  • We stuck up the designs on the wall and went through them
  • Show and tell prep

Wider team work:

  • I got feedback on my sprintnotes format. Feedback is good. Change is good.
  • Bryony was a good teacher to new back-end devs. They were loving her SPARQL tutorial. She is also in charge of the retro next week. She’s been researching what would be a fun session to do.
  • Chats with the team about what’s going on with the roadmap meetings inside our own organisation
  • Victor cropping/adding more portraits.
  • BLOGS BLOGS BLOGS - I feel a flood of blogs are coming. More soon.

Random things we’ve learned or have been reading:

  • The Mozilla Manifesto has been updated. Champions an internet that is a global public resource, safe, open and accessible to all. Loving the 4 new additions.
  • Great Mark Garnier interview. Chats about the Ministerial code and article talks about if a Prime Minister should be able to ignore the code at their own discretion or abide by it.
  • Failing governments on the silver screen. Fun insight on different Government portrayals in recent movies. Often, they are entirely dysfunctional.
  • Great explainer on how laws are made!
  • Slack and mansplaining. Interesting to see what sort of insights will come out of this.
  • #deletefacebook movement not possible for some.
  • No privacy for the dead? Cases when police have used the fingerprints of the dead to unlock phones.
  • UK Parliament re-brand!. What has been done and why.
  • Better Election Data plz!. Interesting comments here too.
  • Inflating your rating on Uber as 4 stars just ain’t good enough - I’ve definitely done this.

Announcements

I handed in my notice to embark on a new adventure. I think the team are immense and will enjoy the next few weeks together doing good stuff.


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