Fortnightnote 26th January 2024
Weeknotes didn’t happen last week as although I had a train journey to London and back, I had so much other work to catch up on, writing weeknotes had to be put on the back burner. The London journey was to enable me to be at our directorate senior leadership team 2 day big room planning. Being present in the room in terms of your mind, not just physically, is really important for this so I kept my laptop closed and phone away, only dealing with things that really could not wait until after the event. Whilst it meant I had a large backlog of things to deal with on the train home, being focused on big room planning and the conversations and thoughts it generated ensured that the time spent was valuable and productive. I was pretty tired afterwards but equally the time out from the usual work routine also refreshed my thinking on a number of work issues.
These last 2 weeks I have welcomed and onboarded 3 more user researcher colleagues in the digital primary care portfolio and another into our UCD centre of expertise. This has meant that I now have colleagues that can delve into the depth of the user research work that needs doing, that have capacity to think around the issues in detail and can drive (and do) the delivery. Recruitment and onboarding take a lot of time and effort to do well but I am now reaping the rewards of my time invested as it is starting to free me up, take weight off my shoulders and also provide more support to products, services and colleagues than I was able to dedicate.
Other things I have been involved in were getting round a whiteboard with digital services for integrated care colleagues to start to map what we deliver from a patient perspective, chats with a few people who are interested in our inclusive design lead role (closes 4th Feb) and some of our other roles, shortlisting and interview planning and hearing about all the great work that some of our lead user research candidates have done through the first few interviews for these roles. The procurement has again been taking up much of my time but the good news is I attended what I believe to be the final board we need to get approval from and all the documents we needed to produce have been finalised and signed off. I may be able to have a rest from procurement for a few weeks, but don’t worry, those few weeks are now full of recruitment interviews so I won’t be bored.
Highlight of the fortnight was the final show and tell for the (‘not a repository’) User Research Finder alpha. This is a brilliant piece of work by Sam and the team to use AI to enable people to find, share and access the knowledge generated through our user research. It is now in private beta and takes away a lot of the heavy lifting needed to share and find user research, particularly across such a large community. Really excited to have this tool and the potential it brings to surface knowledge, release user research capacity, demonstrate the value of our work but also raise the voice of our research and in particular the voice of the users of our services.
Next week
- Recruitment interviews, recruitment interviews and recruitment interviews
- Pharmacy first UCD
- Reorg process stuff
