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Weeknotes E50

04 Jun 2019

Reading time ~4 minutes

Weeknotes E50

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:

Assisting the formation of NHSX & working with mental health teams, supporting the Healthy Start private beta.

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

Image I enjoyed this week (see link to more of these below)

An image of Mae C. Jemison is an American engineer, physician and NASA astronaut. She became the first African American woman to travel in space when she went into orbit aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour on September 12, 1992. She resigned from NASA in 1993 to found a company researching the application of technology to daily life. She has appeared on television several times, including as an actress in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. She is a dancer and holds nine honorary doctorates in science, engineering, letters, and the humanities. She is the current principal of the 100 Year Starship organization

NHSX hopes and fears

I ran a hopes and fears session with PM colleague a few weeks back. This time alternative colleagues ran the show and I was solely the participant. Some parts therapeutic, some parts hopeful. The organisation sorta isn’t officially real yet and much more evolution to go. Progress this week saw the first NHSX show and tell, with the great Chris Fleming speaking, and I’m enjoying life in Elephant and Castle (great place, good cycling facilities).

Delivery Manager interviews

More interviews. All done pre-holiday. So many good candidates which bodes well.

Some positive reflections;

  • I think I really enjoy interviewing, it’s fun
  • I am very curious to know about people, what they’ve done and their work so love the chance to ask a bunch of questions (probably too many)
  • I really want people to do well and it is great when you see people be proud and confident in their achievements
  • I like being in a panel with peers that are smart and good company (similar feeling when doing service assessments)

Healthy Start involvement

Chat about how much time I can give to Healthy Start squad. There are some dependencies and it’s genuinely fascinating and exciting work. Team is doing an amazing job, delivering an entire end to end benefit service with a remote multi-disciplinary team. No conclusion on how I split my time just yet but looks like more time with mental health teams but still some time protected for Healthy Start colleagues. More to follow.

Holiday

I’ve been away for a while (hence delay in weeknotes). Saw a bit of France, bit of Northern Spain, visited Guernsey, finished a couple of books while away and celebrated two birthday’s.

Recomendación: Santander is a nice place to cycle around. 🚴 pic.twitter.com/8sNgAhyGiD

— Colin Pattinson (@ColinPattinson) 29 May 2019

Vitamins Blog Post

Blog post alert!!! Fantastic write-up (with some copy editing by me) of the Vitamins discovery.

Much credit to team!

Coffee club

I have been running the 2019 coffee club for our team. I’ve been keeping data on how its been going (because you know… why not).

Update on how its going so far;

  • spent £92.29 on coffee so far.
  • I often buy in bulk to keep the price reasonable. Average price of coffee is only £2.15 (I should splash out I know)
  • I’ve been keeping a rough score for each coffee we try. I am a harsh marker, top so far is Cafe Direct Peruvian Reserve strength 4 (227g) with 84%
  • worst is Ocado french blend roast & ground coffee with 52%
  • the median score is 66% (again… I should probably splash out)
  • we’ve tried 11 different coffee products. Next order will bring 2 new ones
  • we’ve consumed about 7217g of coffee thus far

We also drink tea but nobody is keeping track of that.

Mental Health (MH) prioritisation

Sitting with the MH supergroup we tackled some of our upcoming work while we arrange a discovery phase. There is loads of priorities so we had some beautifully constructive chats and did some prioritisation (and committed to making it ongoing and soliciting feedback that what we deem as a priority is as such to others). We kept it simple, post-its, paper, value vs urgency matrix. Had some principles in how we prioritise (e.g. don’t duplicate work, support/influence it if others already doing it).

We also ate fudge.

What I’ve been reading

  1. Beautiful STEM role model posters that are wonderful to behold
  2. Personas and testing in an accessibility empathy lab. Great idea, maybe we should get a chromebook at NHSX?
  3. 6 thoughts from reviewing 15 discoveries. Many of these align with what i’ve experienced.
  4. The plastic packaging paradox. Interesting that “your reusable bag is organic cotton, don’t feel smug - the researchers reckon they need 20,000 uses to justify themselves. That’s a shopping trip every day for over half a century.”
  5. Why budgeting cripples agile and innovation
  6. How people interpret the word “digital”. Great cafe analogy.
  7. Mr Bezos reveals moon lander! Aspiration to have people live and work in space.
  8. New NYC Amazon Go shop allows cash payments after backlash.

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