Weeknotes 12th January 2024
Back to work after a 2 week break and any January blues were quickly swept away by the news that, as promised in my last set of notes, our Inclusive Design Lead role finally was out for recruitment. You can read all about the role here https://jobs.digital.nhs.uk/vacancies/3046/inclusive-design-lead.html .
This permanent role is a commitment and investment by the organisation to inclusive design and accessibility. It is an incredible opportunity to influence the equity of digital health products and services that help keep people well and ultimately save lives.
At the end of this week, we also launched our senior user researcher recruitment. You can find more about the roles by following this link https://jobs.digital.nhs.uk/vacancies/3041/senior-user-researchers--multiple-opportunities-across-nhs-england-including-part-time.html
If you are thinking about applying to any of these roles, there is some advice in my previous weeknotes that you might find useful. You can find it here https://rochellelgold.medium.com/just-notes-35ab20039176
The lead user researcher application process closes this weekend and I have had a few queries about the roles and set up for user research in our organisation and what it is like to work in the team. Technically because of sheer scale, there isn’t an org wide user research team as such, it is a community. We have a community of over 100 user researchers working here (it was approx. 130 last time I looked) made up of a mix of permanent and contractor colleagues. Generally, user researchers are embedded in and part of multidisciplinary teams within portfolios and the lead user researcher works across one of those portfolios. Senior user researchers lead a team of user researchers working across a number of product teams and also conduct user research, often on tricker, more contentious or higher profile areas. Everyone contributes to our community of practice, we all learn from each other and each have something valuable to contribute but leads have specific responsibilities for leading specific aspects of practice for the community (e.g. ethics, specific methodologies or tools etc).
This week has really been all about procurement, people (recruitment) and (business) planning. I have been working with colleagues to articulate what outcomes we will be working towards in our portfolio over the next few months. I have also been feeling like a bit of a matchmaker in the process of people moving to and getting to know their new areas as part of the reorganisation and recruitment.
I can’t talk much about the procurement publicly but you honestly wouldn’t want me to as it amounts to reading many many detailed documents and iterating them again and again and again and getting it all approved by many many boards. It might be a good tool to bore you to sleep but wouldn’t make for very good weeknotes.
This week I also met with Ellen and Sam to discuss next steps for our inclusive design work, worked with Tom on a urgent issue that had occurred and met with colleagues about architecture and product decision making within our portfolio.
A particular highlight of my week was welcoming Sarah into our user research community. She is the first person to land from our recent external recruitment and we also got to meet face to face in the office too. Having not been in the office for a few weeks, the days I spent there this week have done their job in rejuvenation and connection with colleagues, including our CIO and his leadership team. Office time also enabled me to progress a number of things through just chatting to someone at their desk, including a couple of very small things that seem to take a lot longer to resolve when you try to do it virtually.
As you can see, this week, I also got back to writing a weeknote (rather than a fortnight note, monthnote or just a note), the first one since April last year. Can’t promise this to be a permanent weekly occurrence but they are useful to help ensure I reflect each week so my aim is to write them as frequently as I can.
Some of the things I will be doing next week
- Planning for new people joining our team/s
- 2 day planning session with SLT in our London office
- Service design session with digital primary care colleagues
- Welcome some more colleagues moving into digital primary care from other portfolio areas
- Planning for senior UR application sift and interviews
