Weeknotes E46
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, assisting the formation of NHSX & working with mental health teams
Some interesting and shareable things that happened. Other more mundane things also happened…
Annual leave
I’ve been away so this is a sort of disjointed weeknote (17th April to 30th of May). Two tweets from the break…
Back in Somerset (2nd time in the past few weeks). I can report it is still rather nice here. pic.twitter.com/iZ2BUAs9VV
— Colin Pattinson (@ColinPattinson) April 20, 2019
Love @ExploreWellcome. Smoke and mirrors exhibit is fab. Won't spoil just go see: https://t.co/P4wYJxYuGu
— Colin Pattinson (@ColinPattinson) April 24, 2019
Mental Health study
Early embedding with colleagues working in mental health. It’s extremely stimulating to get immersed in the world of others. There were chats, there were emails, there was reading and sharing of materials, there were invites, potential blog posts and phone calls. We now have a kanban board setup on Trello, things in the backlog, things prioritised, doing has begun.
This is going to ramp up.
End of year admin
It’s that time of year. Doing end of year forms. Not sure if they are done but something is written.
Side note: sometimes I drift off and think of one day working in HR and trying to radically reshape how it is done. I wonder what could be done, maybe it’s a gauntlet of pain and its terrifyingly complex. Or perhaps you could become a beloved cog in the organisation.
Procurement chats
Quite a few chats in the world of procurement. Stitching co-operation across orgs and learning about new procurement regs which are interesting (ok not to everyone but I like learning new things).
We are making progress. Progress is good. Building a service is not done in a day.
Card trial
While i’ve been away the card trial with 12 participants has been ticking over. We’ve learned a ton about how cards work and about how our users use cards. It’s been invaluable for us knowing what we need, I’m glad we put effort into getting this sorted.
As I write this the card trial is coming to a close and interviews are upcoming. We also had some extra UR sessions in Southend. Far surpassing “2 hours every 6 weeks”. We’ve been all over the country, multiple personas, it’s all happening.
Vitamins: What next
Many weeknotes ago I wrote about trying to hustle together a Vitamins discovery. They did one, it was brilliant and this week we did it justice by gathering key policy colleagues and coming to a collective decision on what to pursue next.
I nominated myself the facilitator a few weeks back. Added challenge was this had to be remote and peoples calendar meant our time went from 2hrs to 1hr on the day. Agenda was:
- Intro: making sure people knew there was no wrong answers/thoughts, questions and discussion promoted, we make decisions on what we know now, things aren’t set in stone - if we learn more can change course, etc
- Recap: of what we did in the discovery and why
- Recap: of the recommendations the team had come up with and also insights from the team’s trip to Bristol and outcomes from a how might we/crazy 8’s hybrid session that i’ve done a few times now.
- Discussion time
- Vote #1: I defined ‘value’ then got the team to vote anonymously. Dot voted (8 votes each). Used Loomio for the first time (always try and sneak in using something new if I can).
- Discussion on top results
- Vote #2: around resource (as every option requires someone’s time and effort). Raised if there is any extra budget, who would we prefer to do this work.
- Discussion
- Then next steps…
Conclusion… great! We have a direction that we collectively agreed. It was all done remote. Everyone seemed accepting of the outcome and had a chance to contribute (yes, that includes the discovery team members). Only issue really was around Loomio stuttering on vote #2 so improvised, just went old school and noted down results on a pen and paper.
Reminder: Keep bugging vitamins discovery team to get some blog posts out there. Transparency and sharing is good.
What I’ve been reading
- Remote working starter kit. Round-up of some tools and processes to help remote teams work. Loomio on here!
- Fantastic article on engineering biology. Some great quotes in there “It is absolutely true that we’re very much in the process of discovering biology, still untangling the “technical debt” of evolution.”
- Medicine has always been open source and knowledge must be shared. Unethical to keep it locked away. Forceps example is very interesting.
- How to design a mission patch with your team.
- Pricing collusion by algorithms. Unsurprising and not an unlikely scenario for the future.
- I’ve been really interested in ageing for a year or so. I like that colleagues are thinking about this as I think it’s one of the most important health and care issues we are facing in our society. Learned something new too; “it is not age per se, but time-to-death, particularly the final year of life, that is a stronger driver of healthcare expenditures.”
- I love this piece about technical intuition. This is what we do at DHSC with colleagues. We try to build their technical intuition so they can make responsible decisions.
- Interesting post about the public media stack. Love to be involved in the ethical layer.