#weeknotes 8: sharing experience, show the thing, supporting others

#weeknotes 8 means the fourth week using the what have I learnt and what has inspired me format. This format has made me think harder about what I write about, and it’s been ok on the whole.

What have I learnt this week?

I was invited to the GDS service managers course by Sharon Dale to share my experiences with the group. I’ve done this once before and really enjoyed it, and met some great people as a result. I got a lot out of sharing our story, and the conversation about change, common frustrations, and shared values that happened afterwards. I had some lovely feedback that was really positive and more importantly some really useful feedback on what I could do to make it better. Show the thing seems to be the main theme:

This was hugely helpful (thank you for sharing Sharon Dale)

If I’m invited back I know what I can do to make the session more useful to people. These leads me neatly to:

What’s inspired me this week?

Luka and Anton have produced our first wireframes and the beginnings of our component library. This week we did our first round of user testing of the initial wireframes and the new advice content produced by Sarah and Cass, amd we’ll improve them each sprint. What inspired me was the whole team effort that has resulted in having something ready to test that we can learn from.

This week I worked in our Nottingham office for a couple of days. It’s where our team working on our submit a notification project are based. They’re coming to the end of their alpha phase — and presented a final show and tell to staff in the office. Some of their internal champions have been at user testing over the past couple of weeks and spoke about the impact this had — watching users trying to answer the questions we ask them online, and they spoke passionately about wanting to improve our services based on user need. Our customers matter is one of our four values — and this session really brought that to life.

Spring is (almost) here. Thank goodness.

What have I read this week?

Warren Fauvel wrote this piece Understanding policy better inspired by attending One Team Gov Wales unconference, which I thought was good. I was reminded that I’d also read Beatrice Karol Burks post Forget policy start with people recently. Also a really interesting read.