Weeknote 9th December 2022

This week my time was focussed quite a bit in the UCD ops space. I had the pleasure of welcoming Sam our new senior product manager into the team and spend some a couple of days in our Canary Wharf office meeting face to face with both he and the team. Whilst I was there, I co-facilitated a UCD maturity review with Tom, Ellen and Tanja. The team had specifically asked for it to be face-to-face, something that we hadn’t done before simply because we developed the model during covid. I forgot how draining facilitating for a day was but also forgot how uplifting it is. Working directly with teams, hearing about their work, facilitating thinking and action and essentially spending time with the users of our (UCD ops) products are the things that keep me focussed on the value of our work and keeps me going during the hard times.

Also this week I met with Tero and Kathryn and the primary care team about user journeys, procurement colleagues about a new commission, with Chiara and with UCD leadership across the transformation directorate. We had the product delivery directorate all hands which was taken over to be an end of year celebration. We spent the best part of an hour thanking people, giving shout outs to people for great work and talking about everything we have achieved over the past year. It was an hour of positivity which was really welcomed by everyone. These things can get forgotten when you are under pressure and navigating difficult unchartered waters, but they are even more important at this time as it what gets you through. I was also delighted to see the UCD ops team receive a ‘Going the extra mile’ award for the work they did to deliver our UR lab.

Being in the London office was also opportunity to see lots of people that I hadn’t seen in person in a long while both in the office but also at a directorate leadership meal in the evening. It also made me think about the visibility of our work and how that has changed. We ran the maturity workshop in a break out area of the office (all the large meeting rooms were booked up) and had the framework mapped out on a wall. So many people walked by and looked at it including Exec Directors and the CEO who stopped to talk to us about the work we were doing. It created conversations about the maturity work and its value.

It has been years since we had anything about our work on the walls. We have moved offices in both Leeds and London so our office walls are all now completely blank. We used to have specific areas where we worked, where we held stand ups, had our sprint boards, our research wall, the ‘intro to UCD ometer’ where we measured how many people had been through the training. Where is all this now that we are hybrid? Where is the visibility of what we are all working on? How much are we all missing in terms of connection and communication by it being absent? How does this impact our work? What do we need to do differently now to remedy that?

Next week

• Mentoring session with a mentee
• Org design engagement session
• Meetings with other ALBs about our UCD maturity review
• Women’s network end of year celebration
• Wrapping things up for the Christmas break