Weeknotes E19
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
- getting experience in the world of contracts in the civil service
- retro time and planning. Mostly good and positive. Talk of a firebreak on the cards
- digging has led to HMRC contact who linked me to this doc about procuring cards for Government. Interesting. The digging continues.
- emailing CCS and hunting down DWP colleagues who know about pre-paid cards
- playing around with Google keyword planner - trying to find what are the most popular searches terms relevant to Healthy Start.
- looking at GOV.UK trending searches
- met Fred and tapped him up to present at Health Product People next week.
- planning Health Product People and knocking up a way to measure its success.
- extending my stay with Healthy Start team
- looking into more MI data. This time about reimbursement info.
Thursday
- Twitter chat about service registers. Others thinking on the same lines is reassuring.
- got an accessibility check of current Healthy Start site just to see how we are doing (using a11y). Ouch. We didn’t score well - 13/28 checkpoints failed. New service will be much better!
- analytics work. Trying to get access to can see what searches are being made from Healthy Start GOV.UK page to see if we can learn anything
- discussing with CCS over pre-paid cards
- blog post got published
- dealing with contract management with suppliers both existing and new. New thing to get my hands dirty with.
- attempted to find something a bit more complicated using GOV.UK analytics platform with comms colleague. Two minds and still failed, will keep trying.
Friday
- all models are wrong but some are useful. Getting reacquainted with Wardley Maps
- tentative progress in accessing GOV.UK analytics
- i made a map or two. Lots of lines EVERYWHERE
- doctors appointment. Does that class as user research? I didn’t see any leaflets or posters for Healthy Start. A few about healthy eating though so that’s a start
- did a spend control form for Ben. Assurance king. PHE obesity stuff. Right up my street.
- been using Patient Access. I have feedback for whomever makes it. Mostly easy to use though.
- if interested in network science then play this
Monday
- signed up for ‘The NHS Explained: How the Health System in England Really Works’ Future Learn course.
- spent day with Healthy Start crew and went through user stories identified in alpha and listed assumptions we’ll need to test and cleaned them up a bit for future team
- sorted out our agenda for Leeds trip on Friday
- Yoga lunches continue
- worked on slides for said Leeds trip
- we hunted down and emailed more PHE people
- I had identified some terms used by suppliers that may have flown over the heads of Healthy Start crew so went through one by one with colleague to explain them in the simplest way possible.
- I shared my Wardley map that I did on Friday and explained how I did it. Was fun and worthwhile. We will try do more.
Tuesday
- Product People event prep (attendee lists, reviewing slides, questions and agenda confirmation etc)
- Healthy Start check-in including Brexit chat, Healthy Start recipes once/still promoted to users & PHE 100 calorie snacks and updates from the rest of the team on NHS BSA chats and beyond
- stottie day!
- more emails to Asda
- looking into IP rights in contracts - i am not a lawyer
- working on slides for future presentations
- showing off to a colleague a future show and tell and improving it
What I’ve been reading
- What humans could look like in a 100 years. Some parts inevitable, some parts utter nonsense.
- Equality in relationships makes people happier and healthier, even in equality of sleeping.
- Renaming ‘assisted digital’ by Tom Loosemore. We should be making “One service; many paths through.”
- World Architecture Festival 2018 shortlist - lots of pictures of lovely lovely buildings.
- Got kidney stones - get on a roller coaster to solve it.
- 10 design mistakes people still make.
- Excellent slides on the importance of accessibility and some hints/tools that can help!
- Fascinating insight into Venezuela and the people migrating to Columbia. Lots on how economic downturns can have a real life affect on people and their health.
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: