Weeknote 15th to 23rd February

Some of the things I was involved in this week

• Worked with the product development directorate design leadership to continue to deliver our strategy to be service led
• Attended the UCD team financial review, looking at the shape of the budget as we get towards year end and projections for the year to come
• Attended the user research profession meet up which included a talk by our implementation and business change colleagues about their customer relations management tool and how that might support user researchers to link in with health and care organisations. Nancy and Amy also talked to us about the links they have been making with seldom listened to communities to enable us to do more inclusive research
• Attended the GP practice migrations show and tell, hearing about the work they doing to test the accessibility of guidance for practices.
• I helped a team working on an internal NHS Digital product for colleagues to set up to work in a user centred way
• Took part the follow up to the barriers to UCD work where Clara facilitated us to get to actionable next steps to help our community, some of which will be particularly helpful for some of the issues raised in meetings this week. You can read more about the work that Clara and Sonia are doing with us here https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dAqglXGTuYjadNg8RkNFtOFqfNgm2jbzGjZwEU3C_Eg/edit
• I baked chocolate and marshmallow poo emoji biscuits with my kids and really enjoyed eating some of them (this recipe but minus gelatine and coconut oil Liam Charles’s Chocolate Marshmallow Biscuits | The Great British Bake Off)

What made me think

I had some conversations with colleagues about their work demands and the amount of capacity within their team to do it. One of the phrases I try to keep in my head is what am I saying no to by saying yes to something? Am I working on the highest priority thing? If I am asked to do something else, how does that impact the other work I have?

What happens if you keep saying yes to things and keep delivering things at an unsustainable limit of your capacity, with no down time? The work won’t stop coming, people will see that you keep doing it and it sets the expectation that that is how you work. It is sometimes only when we say no that people hear the capacity issues that we have been telling them about.

In a time when we are delivering and maintaining essential services during a national emergency, how can we make sure that people feel they have permission to say no if saying yes also means saying yes to things like potential burn out, illness or not being there for your family or friends?

How can we make sure that people know that saying no to more work when you are already struggling, does not mean you are letting your colleagues down but instead also helps colleagues to say no when things are unsustainable for them?

We keep being told we are heroes for the work we have been doing. This is a hard image to live up to. Heroes have superpowers and are invincible. We are not invincible; we break and we don’t regenerate to fight again.

Some of the things I plan to do next week

• Catch up with UCD colleagues in the data service directorate
• Start work to prepare for onboarding our service design partner to one of our new discovery areas
• Leading the coronavirus user centred design community of practice meet up — this is for all people working on coronavirus services, irrespective of organisation.
• Research operations planning for the year ahead
• Write the blog post I planned to write this week but didn’t manage to get the thinking time to do