More notes
In the 6 weeks since my last weeknote what have I been doing? I have been leading the inclusive design lead recruitment process, meeting some great people who are delivering some fantastic work in this space — wish we had more than one post to fill, but this is where we start, who knows where it can lead us. I have also been wrapping up our lead user researcher recruitment including providing feedback to candidates. Alongside this I have been working out how we can provide development opportunities for colleagues currently in role to move around into different product areas and build on their experience across the organisation. I have worked with workforce and HR colleagues to come up with a pilot on how we do this and we are currently testing this out. If successful we can than use it for other roles.
After the recruitment marathon, I have now been plunged into tender evaluation meaning my ability to discuss some of my work openly is again (rightly) hindered. This is most of the reason why it has been so long between weeknotes. In terms of things I can talk about, over the past 6 weeks I have heard play backs of findings on research into digital primary care accessibility standards, ambient voice discovery and cross cutting mobile first work. I also heard about the impact on one of our product teams of testing their product in our accessibility lab. It was incredible how just testing a product on one of the tools can completely change the team’s perspective. It has enabled the risk to be raised to leadership and approval that we now need to completely change the product.
I attended a dual location face to face Leeds/ London team session for our central product and platforms team. It was great to get around a whiteboard to collaborate, be with the team in the office and once again hear the horror in Tero’s voice about the state of my handwriting on post it notes. There’s been some urgent business planning deadlines that we have had to pull together and conversations about the structure and organisation of UCD in digital primary care. We welcomed Charlotte and Florence to the digital primary care UCD team and am looking forward to welcoming Hannah in the next few weeks. There have been lots of user researchers joining our organisation recently. They are not all here yet, but our herculean recruitment work means that we have filled 40 new vacancies and it is fantastic to see our community thrive. I am excited about welcoming our new colleagues to the organisation and also incredibly proud of current colleagues who have developed through the ranks and achieved promotion as part of this recruitment.
We had a directorate showcase of our work at which Sam presented/ unveiled to the directorate the user research finder tool we have developed using AI. This may still be in private beta, but people were pretty excited by it. We are still researching and testing to ensure that it meets user needs but not only is it a great example of a good use of AI, it also shows the value of research ops and having a central team solving cross-org/ cross- team/ community problems.
The UR leadership community meet up with a packed agenda. This is a space for us to work together to solve joint UR problems across the organisation. Things we covered in this meeting included developing standard 2024/25 objectives for user researchers, hybrid working, internal training for URs and onboarding. Over the past few weeks, I also worked with Tero and Eva to plan and launch the user centred design centre of expertise (COE). We had a dual location and virtual launch that included talks from the exec director of product and platforms who is the COE sponsor and the assistant director of product and UCD.
The COE is about UCD capability of teams and the organisation. We still have our individual communities of practice for design, user research and content but UCD is a mindset and the COE is about supporting teams and non UCD folk in that. As UCD folk we often talk about half the job of being a UCD’er being about convincing people to work in a user centred way . The COE is about working to remove that as a barrier so that our practitioners can do just that, practice and apply their craft to our products and services. This is the eutopian vision and (even if the pessimists amongst us may believe it is a utopian vision) having it as our vision for the future is a good thing to work towards. Big thanks to Mike and Jo for their help and Rich for the very popular stickers!
Other things that I have been doing are being part of a course on service ownership where it was nice to be quoted in the course content and to see our definition and principles of inclusive design also included as part of the training. I spent a day doing my patient rep voluntary work at the final pan programme meeting for cangene canvar held at the institute for cancer research. This was a 5 year programme that I have been part of from the start and it was fantastic to see all the progress it achieved even if it was sad that it was concluding.
The patient rep team I am part of has been so valued by the programme that they are looking at ways to keep us all on for future projects. We will keep in contact irrespective of what happens and I am incredibly proud to have been part of a programme that has integrated patients and lived experience into decision making so well. There has been true co-design, co-production and respect for our input even when we have been critical — and we have challenged many many times, and it has been taken on board. I am still involved in related ongoing work on CanRisk so they can’t quite get rid of the challenge I bring in my patient rep capacity yet!
The sessions during the day reminded me of how incredible and impactful it can be to join data up across the NHS — the researchers that have been using this data are generating insights that will help advance cancer care, help patients and clinicians make decisions and save lives. We also had a good discussion about how more data can actually generate more uncertainty than certainty, what that means for patients and whether knowing about uncertain genomic data can cause more harm that good.
Since my last weeknote I took some leave over half term to spend time with my family and also help my dad pack up the family home. I took more leave a few weeks later when the move actually happened. Whilst the move is the right thing to do and this is the right time to do it, it’s been an emotionally challenging time on a personal level to sell the family home that I grew up in and the place where I watched my mum take her last breath. I purposely took time off whilst it was happening as I knew I would need to look after myself and I am glad I did.
Things I am doing next
- Immersing myself in evaluating tenders
- Matching successful candidates to roles
- Working though development opportunities process we have launched
- Time off with my family
