What was hard?
A lot of my colleagues are experiencing the combined effects of the third national lockdown, home-schooling, pressure to deliver, and the freezing cold weather. Sometimes we need to have some hard conversations about priorities and team behaviours, and doing these remotely doesn’t make it easy to read how people are feeling.
What did you enjoy?
Seeing the practice leads for the Digital Services Delivery profession that I lead, all together on Teams for the first time in ages. …
What was hard?
I struggled with procrastination a few times this week, perhaps accentuated by prospect of continued home working stretching out ahead of me. There are some things on my to-do list that I meant to get done in the working time between Christmas and New Year, didn’t quite get to them, and now other stuff keeps popping in ahead of them in my priorities. I should stop and think why I have a block against these particular tasks. Or just get them out of the way anyway.
What did you enjoy?
There was a team stand-up where everything clicked and I saw the team working…
What did you experiment with?
- A new weeknote format for 2021
What did you enjoy?
- Working with NHSX colleagues and some of my other favourite people on a new piece of work
- An intro call with Laura, our organisation’s new chair
- A walking meeting through the snowy woods near our house
What was hard?
- Struggling to strike a balance between shared team accountability and giving individuals the space to make things their own
- Knowing how much to expect from colleagues suddenly pitched back into home-schooling (it seems like a much bigger ask of parents than before)
What are you looking forward to next week?
- Welcoming a new colleague who is joining NHS Digital on secondment
Originally published at http://blog.mattedgar.com on January 10, 2021.
What inspired me this week?
- This brilliant video featuring some of my NHS Digital colleagues…
- Tero’s post on Apolitical: Design is the strategy
- More workshops with colleagues from Primary Care. This week it felt as if the team got into their stride, and found a good way of structuring conversations about a knotty challenge that we’ve collectively been set by leaders in the national NHS organisations.
- Peter, our team’s new delivery manager, made suggestions to reshape our Trello board and change the fortnightly cycle of meetings. …
What leadership teamwork did I see?
- On Tusday, senior leaders from 3 NHS organisations came together to kick off an intensve period of work on a knotty service transformation problem. I felt the first workshop went well, with everyone agreeing how we wanted to work together.
- On Thursday, team members reacted rapidly to turn things around when the second workshop didn’t go to plan. Lessons were learned and I hope the experience of failing fast will set us up well for 4 more sessions together over the next 2 weeks.
How did I uphold the NHS Constitution?
The NHS pledges…
What connections did I make?
- An introductory call with Fran, a new director in NHS Digital’s Data Services area
- Peter joined the user-centred design team as associate delivery manager. I’m looking forward to having some help as a team to focus on our objectives and work in a more agile way
What feedback did I give?
- It’s not often that I make this point, but on one important service, I highlighted a risk of too many designers and not enough developers. …
Back to weeknoting after a hiatus when my time was consumed with other things. Thanks to Rachel for the nudge I needed to get back into the habit.
What inspired me this week?
- All the stuff that happened while I was on leave the week before! I took a whole week off, confident in the knowledge that our team objectives would keep moving ahead in my absence. It’s great to work with a team that shares a sense of purpose and has the capability to just get on with things.
- Dean’s follow-up blog post ‘Building a diverse design team… a…
A double edition covering the 2 weeks since I got back from holiday…
What inspired me this fortnight?
- Getting back from 2 weeks’ holiday and seeing how the team had moved things on while I was away.
- The Product Development show and tell, in which two of our user-centred design graduates showed their team’s work on admin interfaces for cancer screening. I was impressed by the way they had tested both with experienced administrators and with trainees, to come up with something that’s easy to learn, and to use over and over again.
- Our Digital Services Delivery practice leads meeting…
What inspired me this week?
- 97 people joining our Product Development show and tell on Teams. I think that’s a record! There were great presentations about the coronavirus content toolkit, and a change to the NHS App to improve the user experience when there are temporary glitches in connecting to GP systems.
- Catching up with Katy, who leads design and research at the Home Office. She shared something she’s been working on, which looks really promising and which I might be able to mirror in my organisation.
How did I uphold the NHS Constitution?
- I gave feedback on some great…
A four-day working week after a long weekend on the lovely Northumbrian coast.
What inspired me this week?
- Happiness is watching a flock of user-centred design professionals from multiple delivery teams swarming over a Miro board in a community workshop. I concluded early in my time at NHS Digital that having teams talk to each other was the foundation of everything. That’s proving to be even more the case in the current crisis.
- I joined a couple of Zoom presentations for the opening of the RCA design graduate show. …
Matt Edgar
Associate director of design and user research, and digital profession lead @NHSDigital. Views my own. https://blog.mattedgar.com/
