Weeknotes E18

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

• correspondence with behavioural insights team
• plotting the future for Healthy Start comms
• digging into MI and uptake reports of Healthy Start
• updating presentations to include newly discovered MI insights
• emailing the performance platform to get the ball rolling so this can be public and we are transparent
• time wide event with fika, speed dating and updates on new Secretary of State
• great chat about comms and Healthy Start with colleague Anna

Thursday

• supplier interviews all day. Fun day and good experience. I love asking questions.
• wrote down some of the terms used in supplier interviews that rest of the team might not of understood. Will be proactive and try explain them over the week.

Friday

• sent survey to retailers
• scored suppliers from the interviews the day before.
• reverse mentoring prep, this time about prioritisation
• reverse mentoring session. Fun as always.
• explained to Healthy Start colleagues how teams making services can test if what they are building is meeting accessibility standards (automated testing, manual testing, user research, audits… all the good stuff)
• trying to email Asda and combing through Trello to keep things up to date
• investigating how to display uptake data of Healthy Start by local authority.

Monday

• planning with Healthy Start and adding tasks from great comms catch-up
• good news from the legal team about our updated name. Looks all good to proceed.
• good news with internal sign off to use GOV.UK PaaS for Healthy Start
• chasing people from HMRC and NHS BSA
• went through prioritisation methods with Healthy Start crew. Gave some suggestions
• showed off my work in progress presentation on the state of the Healthy Start service using data from the MI reports
• By doing so got my hands on more MI data
• bit of team planning
• found this blog about improving healthy eating content and fired off some emails.
• looking into companies such as Flux who can help identify what people spend their money on.

Tuesday

• reading and commenting on vision doc
• Healthy Start catch-up
• booking trains to Leeds for next week for extravaganza #2
• casting my net out extremely wide gathering as much info and help as possible in the name of Healthy Start. Lots of emails and conversations about supermarket tech, APIs, other gov departments, point of sale units, social media campaigns from local authorities. All the stuff.
• more reading and lots of commenting on the vision doc
• emailing people about data and how the current Healthy Start service is built
• 1 to 1 with Nayeema

What I’ve been reading

1. New report on phone and internet usage. Snippet: A total of 78% of all adults now own a smartphone.
2. New Apple watch with new Health features. Read the article and for some reason browsed the comments… this made me chuckle: “OK, here’s what should happen: Each time the iWatch makes a false call to emergency services, fine Apple US$1,000,000.00. Hopefully that will encourage the coders to make their algorithms reliable.” Apple already revealed through job postings that they are investing more in the world of health. So unsurprising really.
3. Experience of going where the users are to bring digital health interventions to excluded groups.
4. Fantastic efforts by the Wellcome Collection to digitise 100+ years of health data. Excited to see the results.
5. What Japan is doing to prepare for the 100 year life. Fascinating read and reality we should be embracing now.
6. Helpful individual discovers a plethora of sensitive info published on public Trello boards.
7. Really fascinating skills taxonomy. Great to see what jobs skills we are apparently “missing”. Spoiler: social care appears in demand.
8. Putting users first is the not the answer by doteveryone gang. “Designing and iterating services based on current user needs and behaviours means that they are never being designed for who isn’t there. Whose voice isn’t in the data? And how will the new institutions that are needed be created unless we focus more on collective agency and collective needs?”

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:

• The People team
• The Outputs team
• The Data and Search team
• Utilities team