Weeknotes E27

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:

Supporting the Healthy Start private beta.

27 is my lucky number. So i’m going to change things around this week. Most interesting and shareable things that happened this week. Other more mundane things also happened…

Retailer Survey

Earlier in the week I was reminded about a survey I set up to contact retailers and hear about their experience of Healthy Start. For weeks, I’d check and see if anyone had responded and be disappointed to see zero. Especially, as later in the week I was compiling data for new team and worked out that we currently have 22,557 retailers signed up the scheme.

Well time passes and obviously it must of been forwarded to the right people because as of right now we’ve got a chunk of respondents. I don’t claim this to be rigorous but it’s important to make a start on learning the issues of retailers (as we are starting with very little prior research). We also saw a response from retailers to the Scottish scheme that will also use pre-paid cards which alluded to some issues we hadn’t considered. Learning is progress.

I wrote a blog already as I went through the results. Taking the advice from a writing for GOV.UK content class years back - “write drunk, edit sober” (I wasn’t actually drunk). I still need to do the editing part.

Carbon footprint of digital services and products

We had a show and tell from a colleague about the environmental impact of digital services and products which was great that someone in the NHS land is thinking of this. I’ve had some thoughts rummaging around in my head ever since I saw that someone asked about the carbon footprint of a service in a service assessment.

Team has already been thinking and discussing with other colleagues on how to make our service more environmentally-friendly (e.g. the use of charcoal cards instead of plastic). I’ve also been reading a book about economics in my spare time and it had a section in about the environmental impact of packaging of food.

Extremely relevant to our work and its main argument was that food waste is extremely bad for the environment (rotting food = methane, methane = bad for environment). Packaging for all its ills does make food last longer, which in theory means more chance for people to buy it and then to consume it. So the environmental cost of using plastic in packaging is not obvious. Either way it’s a good thing to remind ourselves that we should be fighting food waste.

I’ve signed up to a session next year to be on a mini-working group, helped connect different people together and might have more to say in the new year.

Pre-paid card supplier day

New healthy start service is looking to replace easily lost/damaged paper vouchers with a pre-paid card. We need to find a supplier. We’ve been working with a great colleague in Crown Commercial Service for months to help us.

This week we have invited suppliers to come to the office and will present to them what healthy start does and what the new service needs to do. It’s great as i’ve never really had to sell a service to suppliers before and organising the day has been interesting. We’ve been getting feedback on what would be good and I think we’ve got a good rough idea. I’ve booked all the rooms and emailed all the people. Just need to get a few things finalised then we are good to go!

Recruitment for a delivery manager

I’m on another panel. Which is fun. I always try to contribute and add new questions or re-word things. I got some great advice (obvs) from Nayeema about her strategy for recruitment and always trying to get at least 1-2 people from outside the organisation to be interviewed. I like this suggestion, I want to make sure the best person gets hired and that means listening to diverse voices.

Also, shout out to Yvonne. An absolute superstar of a colleague. A DHSC legend who continually gets the job done with a personality that uplifts all her colleagues.

Away day & Awards

We went on a little directorate trip to Leeds and had a little awards ceremony this week. I’ve said this in my weeknotes before but our gang is a fabulous group. It’s remarkably upbeat and enthusiastic about what we do and a joy to work with smart people who you know you can learn from. Many people from team rightfully rewarded for hard work at awards ceremony.

Note: I didn’t get a single nomination, thankfully lots of excellent people got zero nominations so I’m going to assume i’m doing fine.

Other news from away day. I played dobble with gang on the train. I love games.

What I’ve been reading

1. The pains and reasons for moving an Arctic City.
2. Why China’s bike-sharing companies are withering and pulling out of 3. Europe and the US Long-read on the impact of Tripadvisor. Bits and bobs about free-speech and the reputation economy.
3. The band who faked a fanbase and still went on tour to play near-empty rooms. An endearing story.
4. The digital government atlas, list of the world’s tools and resources from governments
5. Europe’s Copyright Directive and what it all means.
6. Overconfidence of the playpump and how teams can mitigate their assumptions when making things.
7. Super relevant to Healthy Start - baby banks and poverty of young families. One stat: “In London, 37% of children live in poverty.” The work we are doing is important.

Shout out to others doing 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 Data and Search team
• Gemma at CQC