Weeknote 8th to 15th February

Highlights from last week

• I was part of the Digital Technology Assurance Board where we approved two submissions but more importantly also helped them to access support. Spend approval isn’t just about approvals, it is about supporting people to do their best work.
• I caught up with some of the UCD leads and the chair of the women’s network
• I met George who has joined us to support service catalogue development work
• I attended a barriers to UCD workshop where we are looking at what action we need to take to support UCD colleagues to do their best work
• I also attended the Product Development Directorate resource management board and discussing where we need to strengthen our UCD resource
• I got the service design maturity tool out to be piloted within product teams
• I’ve been supporting a programme with no user researcher to bring in a contractor. There were many candidates and they needed help to understand what good looks like. For a programme that has never had a user researcher before, support from our user research community is essential to help them navigate the recruitment. It is often better to not have someone in the role than someone who doesn’t meet the competency level.
• I used my network to link people together to provide shadowing and development opportunities.
• I had a day off work all to myself and a really lovely, long but frosty walk where I saw this frozen hedge

What made me think

I spend a lot of time supporting non user centred design colleagues to understand what good looks like, particularly in relation to user research. We need to articulate this much better and think about the language, the barriers and non-inclusive culture that we might be creating by not doing so.

Some of what I will be doing this week

• Time off with my kids — it will be a short week as I am only at work for 2 days
• Product Development directorate design work
• User Research bi weekly community meet up — always a great hour in the week
• Content profession meeting
• Meeting with colleagues to follow up the barriers to UCD work