Weeknotes E32

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 and a helping hand in the Healthy Start vitamins discovery

Some interesting and shareable things that happened this week. Other more mundane things also happened…

Horizontal collaboration

One thing I’ve been proud of is the team’s efforts in collaborating not just within the bubble of our government but also further afield. I think I inherited a lot from my time in Parliament, one thing is a passion for scrutiny and working with third sector partners/interest groups. In the past few weeks we’ve been working with the Association of Convenience Stores. They have been super helpful, and we’ve managed to not only get some findings from their research out of it but also now have squeezed in some questions about Healthy Start in their 1000+ phone interview they do with those working in convenience stores. I’m also going to go speak to their board in Manchester next month which should be fun. The fun doesn’t end there. This week we also have been sorting out a playback session from our Scottish Gov colleagues. They are introducing a similar scheme to us and we’ve been trying to make sure we share our research. Event organised to hear about their research thus far scheduled for later in the month.

Fit Note

I contributed to a half day workshop about fit notes and if they are currently fit for purpose. Organised by the half-DWP/half-DHSC group. Good diversity of opinion – my group had a GP and an occupational health worker (don’t call them an occupational therapist – they don’t like that). We looked at personas and plotted user journeys. We saw logic models and questioned if they achieved their intended outcome. We also got to throw out pragmatic and bold ideas which I encourage. Was fun – in so much as I got to hear about a problem from multiple angles and give an opinion. Only negative was when I walked in they said “Hi Colin”. I’d never met them so asked how did they know my name, they told me “you look digital”. I want to be a chameleon, might have to change my wardrobe.

Seeing BBC Show

There was a BBC show I stumbled upon while making dinner that was right up my street. It was all about health, obesity, food, fruit & veg. I watched it thinking at some point is Healthy Start going to be mentioned. It’s worth a watch and lots of the stuff in hear we’ve encountered before but the end was interesting. The presenter encouraged a Twitter barrage to the Secretary of State encouraging more action with the issue. I was certain that the next morning our team would be in the spotlight… but turns out we’ve flown under the radar for now or the news cycle moved so fast we didn’t get a mention (or I missed it). It’s really good working on something that people are passionate about and consider a real, significant issue (no offence to some of the other things I’ve worked on).

Wales

We added Wales onto our uptake map! This was mostly my colleague Isaac but collectively we got feedback from users, we iterated, we choices and integrated the data, we improved the thing, tested it worked for them and left some people happier than they were before. It may be small and imperfect but we made something better. That’s a positive to me.

NICE Board

Looks like I’m going to be spending some time with NICE. Been lined up to sit on a board/working group. First meeting not till Feb so see what is shareable after that.

Objectives

We have been working on our objectives for our next quarter this week (bizarrely quarter 5?). My reflection is I’m probably signed up for too much stuff. I don’t do myself any favours as I believe in setting goals that shoot for the moon and should be overly ambitious. This leads to my name assigned to a plethora of grand schemes. I am taking steps to try delegate more tasks away and be a good boy and prioritise what is important.

Pre-mortem help

I wrote a blog post about pre-mortems a while ago. This week someone inside my department emailed out of the blue saying they read the blog, liked it and were going to follow my agenda and do a pre-mortem. They asked if I could spare a few mins to check their plans. This made me feel good. I added value to at least 1 person.

Resetting focus for 2019

I’ve known for a little myself and policy colleague should have a sit down and strategize about what we need to focus on in 2019. Amongst the mist of unknowns we need to stay one step ahead, so when we come to work on things in more detail they run smoother. Being stuck in the weeds of the present is less valuable to the team. Thus, I ripped off the Radarban idea from Eleanor. Did a little session thinking through some of the biggest decisions we are facing and when they need to be made by. Outcome is we have a list of things we think we need to be tackling in the next few months and some further down the road. We will check-in on this in a few weeks to see what progress was made.

What I’ve been reading

1. Another excellent thoughtful post from Matt Edgar about health, design, intent, collective intelligence and more.
2. Swedes accept more invasive tech. I can see this growing over the next decade.
3. Excellent practical guide/notes to run user research as a team sport.
4. Raw data does not exist.
5. Reality of maternity leave BBC article. UX recommendations for sites that use machine learning. Revelling in the art of repair and maintenance. It may not be sexy but as important as innovation.
6. A review of data visualisation tools.
7. What a good service looks like.
8. Tax more, make fruit and veg cheaper says Chief medical officer Prof Dame Sally Davies?