Weeknotes E24
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
- trying to get our team off and running writing sprint updates
- adding to user research plans and going through the DWP discussion guide for testing in November! Exciting!!
- Said hi to Matt Hancock who visited the team briefly
- promoting product people event
- saying we should change name
- doing more mid-year review work
- agreeing to run retro for tech vision next week
- digging into more MI data
- tried to download both R, GOV.UK prototyping Kit and power bi - non worked.
- long 1 to 1. Wide ranging chat and always constructive
Thursday
- sending more resources to future supplier
- creating materials for vitamins discovery chat
- seeing the inception agenda and making comments/assigning tasks
- afternoon meeting with vitamins stakeholder and pitching a discovery
- learning a ton about vitamins and connecting people together so we can kick off work
- agreeing the support needed to make vitamins happen
- learning about NHS glasses
- emailed someone to contribute to the aging society grand challenge the Prime Minister set. Changing society for the 100 year life is fascinating.
Friday
- xmas planning for team, know any good places?
- helping colleague to add to speaking notes for a future event - bigging up the article suggesting patient needs isn’t the whole picture
- call with PHE and maternity transformation work. A lot of collaboration feels on the cards
- made a quick guide to what private beta and public beta is to explain to suppliers
- been updating and compiling resources for my sessions to get suppliers up and running
- spend control discussions, still on that train encouraging people to research with the people that will actually use their intended service
- finding NHS.UK content people
- adding more stuff to presentations for new team - this time recommendations from Healthy Start report
- went to GP, he remembered me from last time and asked about my recent half marathon - excellent service
Monday
- back to the GP, person at reception said I didn’t have the necessary form I needed and was a bit gruff. Not so-excellent service
- sending images of prototype to help user researcher from DWP team
- sending out constructive advice on doing user research for a team that want to buy something in the world of dentistry
- emailing a new person that is working on Redbook. Trying to raise awareness of Healthy Start
- trying to make an uptake map happen with the fine help of colleague Isaac
- blog post editing
- blog post writing
- blog platform acquiring (spoiler: despite efforts we got denied and someone snr in GDS thought we’d give up writing weekly updates and get bored of it like more teams in their experience… I shall prove them wrong)
Tuesday
- spent the morning with PHE crew on measuring the success of public health interventions. Healthy Start team were guinea pigs going through logic models, journey maps and some other post-it note grid that nobody had a name for. Was great at highlighting that our aim is to improve the identified health outcomes. Still work to do with how teams can make that happen.
- call with lady in Cardiff who ran the mystery shopper exercise for healthy start. Excellent chat, great to share and more collaboration in the future!
- supplier (*contract pending) sent the names of new team members. Will search for every single one on Google tomorrow.
- chatting about what level of assessment the PHE work should get.
- connecting all the vitamin related chats to vitamin discovery head honcho - Sam
- Isaac and I chatting about his progress with mapping uptake stats to a map of local authorities
- digging in management info data, I spotted errors and got a cleaned up spreadsheet to continue to dig
- still trying to work out where our blog/sprint notes are going to live
- hr battles
- 1 to 1 with Nayeema
What I’ve been reading
- How pockets on jeans are unequal. Excellent use of data and visualising evidence.
- As Facebook launches a dating service another study delves into online dating (a topic I am fascinated by).
- Great set of tools to steal from the ODI to help you publish your data. Also NIHR publishing open data is wonderful.
- How to fall asleep in 120 seconds - i have not tried this.
- Excellence guidance/principles on Internet-era ways of working.
- Local gov ideas on designing services with accountability. Based on the fantastic 2016 work which is 100% worth reading.
- How to create a triple storyline - a way to visualise journey maps that are good for users, the business and the world.
- When designing internal software, don’t go wild. Re-use what we expect the public to use.
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: