Weeknote #2–19th-30th July

Time is definitely flying in the new role, so much so that I didn’t manage to make the space for a weeknote at the end of week two. But that’s okay. So this is a bonus double-bill.

Doings

Housing

The majority of the last two weeks has been spent getting our housing discovery up and running with the team. We continued the kick-off that we started in my first week, moving on from the team-forming/getting-to-know-each-other parts, to focus on things like:

• The scope of our discovery — which will examine two priority areas (services for council leaseholders, and homelessness/housing inclusion services), to identify where there are issues that are valuable, viable and feasible for us to address.
• A ‘definition of done’ for our work — I’ve found this really useful in the past, to understand how much discovery is ‘enough’, and avoid the scope creeping too much. It was great discussing this as a team, and I plan to come back to it each week, to make sure our activities are targeting all the points we mentioned.
• Breaking out our initial tasks to get started — I’m performing a bit of a Delivery Manager role on this discovery too, so have been facilitating our planning. We’re lucky to have four super-talented researchers working on the discovery, which has made it really enjoyable to plan out. We’re starting with some ad-hoc shadowing of Greenwich’s housing inclusion services in the Service Centre in Woolwich, before lining up more focussed interviews with council leaseholders, and frontline staff. I’m looking forward doing some of this myself, and supporting the researchers with notetaking etc, to build up my domain knowledge — research is a team sport, after all.

Council Tax

Housing services aside, I’ve been working with Darinka and Alex on some research into RBG’s council tax services. Darinka had done a huge amount of work to map out the existing processes through interviews with staff, and reframe them in the form of services as the end-user/resident would describe them. I joined just as we were getting to the “now what?” stage. We spent a couple of sessions sifting through the findings, and created some criteria to prioritise the various problem statements Darinka identified. Most of these were criteria that would help us assess where in the service we’d have the most impact, but some also looked at wider effecst, such as the potential for solutions to be reused as components or patterns elsewhere in RBG.

Recruitment

I’ve also been sifting applications for some of our current vacancies as they come in. It’s the final weekend to apply, if you’re a Product Manager, Content Designer or Senior Business Analyst looking for a new challenge (applications close 3rd Aug).

Learnings

Even away from the discovery, I’ve been trying to soak up as much knowledge as I can:

• Our lovely customer services colleagues gave us an introduction to the Service Centre, which acts as the first port of call for many resident-facing services. Listening in to a few calls highlighted a couple of things. Firstly, the range of queries frontline staff deal with is huge. The staff I spent time with were incredibly knowledgeable, able to jump from registry services, to council tax, to blue badge applications each time they picked up the phone. Secondly, there are definitely some product and technology improvements that can lift some of the burden on these hard-working staff. One call I listened to was a resident chasing up their blue badge application. The enquiry was resolved swiftly, as it turned out the badge had been posted out the day before — but it would have been great for the resident and staff alike, if we could have updated them on progress without them needing to call up. It’s a very specific example, so I’m looking forward to making sense of the any patterns as they emerge of the next few weeks of the housing discovery
• Some of the lovely folks from FutureGov kindly offered their time to talk us through some of their housing service design work at Hackney. The team were incredible generous with their knowledge and told a very compelling story about the problems their research found, and the interventions they designed. I left the session feeling very inspired about the impact we can have on housing at Greenwich, if we do things right. Big lessons were around the importance of working hand-in-hand with the folks the deliver the service (something that we’ve already talked a lot about at Greenwich), and the importance of thinking beyond just technology (prototyping new forms of conversations and in-person assessments, for example).
• I also caught up with an old colleague of mine, who now works at the Local Digital Collaboration Unit at MHCLG. It was great learning more about how they’re supporting the sector, and some of the structures that support collaboration on service design projects between different local authorities.

Reflections

• The joys of community — Alex, our other new Senior PM joined us last week. It’s already been brilliant to work alongside someone else in the discipline, particularly to bounce around ideas about how to approach the Council Tax discovery. It’s been a little while since I’ve worked somewhere with other PMs, so it feels very energising to have the beginnings of a community. Lots more to do here, particularly starting to think about what our ideal community of practice looks like, and how to make it a reality.
• Keeping the right pace — On the housing discovery, I’ve been itching to get stuck into the detail of research and workshops with staff. I’m having to remind myself to slow down and balance this with all the other activities that are necessary to set us up to succeed, like getting the comms and stakeholder engagement side of things right.

What I’m reading

As a throwback to my days working on the Universal Credit service, I’ve been reading David Freud’s “Clashing agendas: Inside the welfare trap”. Lord Freud was Minister for Welfare reform between 2010 and 2016. It’s gives a great insight into the behind-the-scenes politics (interesting to me as lots of it was before my time working on the project), as well as some reflections on helping major projects like this succeed in government.

One passage, about how to communicate the policy concept of a “couple” in the design of the original, outsourced service made me smile ruefully — it was a source of constant pain to content designers during the time I worked there:

• “What does it mean to ‘be a couple’?” I asked. “We put information tags next to anything that people might want more information on, so they can just check.” “Yes, but this one is pretty vague — about living together like a couple.” “That’s because it’s not a phrase defined in law. It’s based on hundreds of pages of case law which are impossible to summarise.”