Tales from my week. 26th November — 2nd December
Overarching feeling of the week
Is it Friday already? I’ve been ‘in the zone’ most of this week. Early workshops on data principles and storytelling helped me see how my contributions fit within the bigger picture of our discovery, and that helped me focus in on the most valuable next steps.
I had two opportunities to share my work and both were well received, which was a welcome confidence booster as we head into the final few weeks of the year.
Forged some great partnerships this week, particularly with our user researcher and product manager, and it feels like things are coming together.
Overall, it was a great week.
Monday
- I participated in a workshop on data principles. We started with a list of five principles which we swiftly reduced to four. We discussed what ‘good’ looks like, covering topics as diverse as security, transparency, ethics, automation, usefulness and accessibility.
- Our service owner invited me to a catch up with our strategy team to understand their current thinking. It was reassuring to hear that we have similar findings and questions from our respective research, although we’re yet to make any concrete decisions.
- Our musical director brought out the Christmas music at band practice, including the theme from E.T. This isn’t traditionally festive music but having played it every December since I joined the band it now doesn’t feel like Christmas without it.
Tuesday
- Our service designer lead a productive planning session for a workshop we’re running next week with policy teams. We discussed our objectives, structure for the session, and how we get the right people in the room who will be interested in the topic and have a range of perspectives.
- We had a team synthesis workshop bringing together our key insights during discovery so far into themes, then ordering those themes into a storyboard which will form the skeleton of our discovery report. It was a positive and creative session which got me thinking in a different way, and I will copy this format in future as it worked well.
- I travelled to Oxford with my parents to see my younger sibling sing in their college chapel carol service.
Wednesday
- Continued our data principles discussions, using examples of where we have performed well and poorly against the draft principles to further refine and test our understanding. Our content designer joined us for this session as they’re helping us shape the principles into pithy and memorable statements.
- I had a wonderful, energising chat with someone who’s interested in moving into digital. We discussed the variety and overlap in each role, diversity of pathways into digital, and recommended reading. This was one of the highlights of my week, as it was such a positive conversation and reminder that I’m lucky to have found this sector and this team.
- I cleared a couple of hours in my diary for independent work, tuned into Lizzo on Spotify and powered through a bunch of quantitative analysis I’ve gathered over the last few weeks. I made a set of frames in Mural with key insights and supporting evidence, focussing on the themes we’d aligned on in Tuesday’s narrative workshop. I tried to make it as visual as possible, using a mix of screenshots, graphs and charts, process maps and approximate scale diagrams, and kept notes of all the sources in case I need updated figures later.
Thursday
- For the final module of our facilitation training we were put into pairs to prepare a 22-minute mini workshop, to practice what we’ve learned in a safe space. I had a call with my facilitation partner to finalise our purpose and agenda, set up our digital tools, and decide who would lead each section.
- I took notes for a user research session with an operational colleague from another government department who we work with closely on the Ukraine programme. I didn’t realise quite how many different elements they are responsible for, so it was good to have the opportunity to tease out the details on a call. When my schedule allows I enjoy joining user research ‘live’, as I retain a lot more from hearing stories directly from participants than from reading notes after the fact.
- Closed the day with an informal playback session, taking the team through the quant analysis I refined on Wednesday. I was a bit nervous beforehand (it’s natural to feel vulnerable when sharing unfinished work), but it was a really positive session. The team asked lots of thought-provoking questions which gave me ideas for where I can add more detail or make the story of the numbers (the ‘so what?’) clearer.
Friday
- I spent the morning in the fourth and final session of facilitation training. We were the participants for each others mini workshops, and at the conclusion of each the facilitators were asked to reflect what they thought went well and what they could improve before we all shared our feedback. It was a supportive and engaging environment, and we each came away with things we can work on to improve our practice.
- I met with our user researcher to synthesise our findings from this week’s research calls. We individually wrote down our key insights before grouping them into clusters.
- Our delivery manager hosted our weekly team retrospective. We reflected that we’ve made enormous progress this week, and are starting to see common threads running through all of our work, which we can shape into recommendations for alpha. We were also able to discuss some difficult things that happened this week in an open and honest way, which is the sign of a maturing team.
Phew. I to restrict myself to three points a day for weeknotes, and it’s still a lot. No wonder I’m tired.
Next week
- Our penultimate week of discovery: workshop facilitation, developing quant analysis based on questions from Thursday playback, show and tell, further synthesising and finessing our research findings for the final report
- My colleagues are running a series of ‘intro to digital’ sessions for the wider Homes for Ukraine programme (including intros to content design, service design, systems thinking, agile, prioritisation). I’m going to try to go at least two of these to support and learn.
- Team Christmas lunch
- Christmas gigs — 2 x performances of ‘The Snowman’ with live music with Wantage Band, and a charity fundraiser for Maggie’s cancer care with Flowers
