Weeknotes E22
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
- met up with new fast-streamer Sam. He’s keen on doing a discovery for vitamins. Wooooooooooo the gang gets bigger
- mega-email to DWP user researcher who is about to embark on Healthy Start awareness work. Connects with universal credit work. X-Gov collaboration. We got this.
- suggesting people to speak to the super smart Sir Nigel Shadbolt (shout out to Web Science PhD days!)
- chasing room bookings
- signed up to be a user researcher participant
- calendar fun times - moving events
- great chat with NHSBSA colleagues about coordinating how private beta will work and getting healthy start on help with health costs site
- answering procurement questions on defining private beta, public beta and live.
Thursday
- great day out to East London to visit Sustain who are doing really great stuff that is all interlinked with Healthy Start
- working in Parliament has instilled a strong passion and belief in working with third sector and making their lives easier and embracing their partnership and scrutiny. We all want the same thing after all.
- all very open, honest and frank. Felt like they got a lot out of it and they’ve already been very kind and helped us out already. Partnership shall continue
- adding to consultation questions, a first. Basically feels like it’s a big non-binding survey. Not sure charities should focus heavily on contributing to these. Working with delivery teams seems a far better avenue if you want to make real change.
- in the afternoon I went through insights from a recent survey to local authorities with help from Sustain crew and City Hall
- ran 2 more How Might We sessions with gang
- attending a leaving do, bye to the extremely talented Suzy. Good luck!
- chat with team about team structure stuff.
Friday
- confirming that we have the canteen at DHSC for our next Product People event
- doing a draft eventbrite invite and emailing speakers of updates
- emailing a bunch of people, most interesting is NHSBSA people about helping us to procure pre-paid cards utilising their experience of using cards in health services and someone who works in comms and wants to improve the healthy start application form
- would love to go to Responsible Tech 2019
- went to the GPs and saw a lovely nurse. Shout out to all the nurses out there. She said I had the longest English name she had ever seen and enjoyed it. I accept any compliments.
- emails paying off, now might have someone content critiquing current healthy start materials and game to help do a little social media experiment to see if that helps raise awareness!
- helping PHE colleagues, namely going through some discovery and alpha advice docs and making constructive feedback
- contract questions
- wrote up how might we sessions from yesterday
Monday
- news that a technical hitch brought down supermarkets accepting vouchers, yikes. Need to find out what happened and learn from it
- did a spend control about dental referrals. Comments and questions sent back to them
- Created an eventbrite for the next product people event.
- yoga
- added health product people write up into the blog planner and got the eventbrite link on the intranet events page + adding a new member to the product people community
- wrote Q4 objectives - healthy start, service registers and setting up a vitamins discovery for me
- helped colleague on the tech vision document with some survey question suggestions
- list of things the healthy start team has done and yet to do for supplier chat tomorrow. We’ve reassuringly been busy. Progress.
- article on ‘Food Deserts’ which is something we need to look further into.
Tuesday
- spent the morning going through the objectives I set myself a few months ago for my “mid-year” review… although I’m actually only 22 weeks in.
- evidence written down. Chat scheduled for Friday.
- cycle over to Skipton House to have full day ‘inception’ planning with future suppliers for Healthy Start (*contract pending)
- we were in a very very hot room but powered through lots of conversations about what stuff we’ve done and what we still need to do. I think the future supplier (*contract pending) left knowing a lot more about what we are about to embark on. Which is good
- lots of super interesting things to work out but vibe is still extremely high and momentum feeling great.
What I’ve been reading
- Great piece on fake news and how humans have always been liars. Yuval Noah is a great writer. Nice quote: “As a species, humans prefer power to truth. We spend far more time and effort on trying to control the world than on trying to understand it – and even when we try to understand it, we usually do so in the hope that understanding the world will make it easier to control it.”
- Admittedly this is only amazingly interesting to me because I’m working on something to do with retail/shopping but this piece on point of sales units and messy technology is brilliant.
- Nice post on myths and realities of people accessing digital healthcare services. “As health and care services increasingly look to digital routes to provide information and services, it is likely that a combination of strategies will be needed to ensure these groups are not further disadvantaged. While initiatives to improve digital skills have been effective, there are significant difficulties in getting and keeping patients engaged in digital services. Non-digital methods of access are likely to be needed for the foreseeable future, otherwise those at greatest risk will be excluded.”
- Hoovering up data and using it to inflate your health insurance. Nothing we didn’t already expect but good read, especially worrying that it will further disadvantage those who are already vulnerable.
- A toolkit to help start-up builds things that won’t wreck society in the near future. The scenario about neurotech and smart toilets are fun. I’ve been reading quite a bit about ‘hearables’ becoming a thing. I see the advantages. This article gets recommended mostly because it squeezed in the pun “The future is ear”.
- Some governments deciding to tax internet usage.
- Advice how to design better forms!
- Article about hypocognition. I didn’t know what it was, by not knowing I experienced it. Nice piece about people being unable to understand the world around us and why others can.
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: