Monthnotes October 2023
These are quite late now… but always good to finish what you started…
Challenges this past month:
AI - excitement, or fear?
AI Fest - well over 20 presentations from all the top tech orgs As well as an “AI Summit” Is this all Hype or Reality? I assume we probably don’t have big budgets for AI, or the skills inhouse, or the tools to make use of these new tech developments. Probably we’re about to hit the “Trough of disillusionment”
Covid inquiry – unavoidable and unmissable TV
For those who were involved it was a major part of our personal and professional lives, for months and years we lived and breathed Covid 19. Hearing stories can easily trigger our past experience, both positive and traumatic. Covid Testing was undoubtedly the most complex and stressful project any of our colleagues worked on before. Have colleagues found the time to heal and learn from the lessons?
NHSE Merger
When it first started in 2022 this felt like a purposeful change… bringing health orgs to work more closely with a common purpose. More recently, it has felt like a reorg where people are just numbers in a spreadsheet.
Staff surveys show colleagues are exhausted by change, teams struggling to resource… What does low moral mean for delivery? Do more with less? Or do less more purposefully? Many colleagues are still unsure what they will be working on come next year…
Recruitment
Our User Research profession have started recruiting lots of permies to align with teams in the new structure. Great news!
The challenge is colleagues internally are spending a vast amount of time sifting hundreds of applications, and interviewing dozens of potential candidates and internal staff. It is a tough external market for UX/UCD professionals. For NHSE it is a great chance to solidify our UCD profession on a permanent basis.
We need to get the staffing right though… a good mix of experienced staff, different skill levels… research specialists. Thinking longer term - are the people in the right teams? Teams have immediate needs and dislike change, but retaining staff means we need to have flexibility and development opportunities too
Busy
In the UCD-Ops team, we saw a significant post-summer/September rush.
All teams were kicking off new projects. We had whole new teams starting who needed onboarding support.
A few colleagues away on holiday meant our team were really overwhelmed with requests - explored in a separate post..
My health
Burnout, anxiety, sickness and Covid – twice recently I’ve been completely wiped out and had to take time off to recover.
I’m feeling better now, and Covid is no ####### joke.
Send hope and wishes that things get better for family, friends and colleagues who I know are all going through really incredibly challenging time right now🙏
Project updates
UR repository… “not another repo” project
- Project kickoff – really exciting to finally start with Normally, after many months of waiting for paperwork approvals
- Yes another UR repository discovery – 6 years after our first discovery
- The need for this has never been greater – to see what insights are being generated across the business… as well as being able to find previous work
- As staff come and go, we need to improve our organisational memory… breakdown siloes of knowledge and share our insights (cover image)
- This time we hope to make it stick. It is key to take our teams and colleagues with us on the journey… UR, UCD, Product, Data, Tech… stakeholders, sponsors.
- Align everyone on the opportunity to do this once and do it well.
- Is the outcome a thing we need to build? Or is it a thing we need to buy? Tbc.
- As mentioned lots of excitement around new tech– “AI” / LLMs, e.g. supporting document summary, smarter data retrieval.. but how to do we manage blockers
GP and clinical recruitment:
We’ve been trying to grow our NHS Staff Panel, but it is a Strategic issue impacting multiple teams. There isn’t a simple way to incentivise clinical staff who work in GP surgeries – separately I could write a whole blog on this issue alone…
Citizen Panel:
I started work on plans to migrate large number of panel contats to a new place. It was a good reminder for colleagues that cleaning up database regularly makes it much easier to find participants for research
Sharepoint:
Great work with Caroline Jarrett on refactoring some areas of our internal sharepoint, there really is a lot to consider. Information archicture, content desing best practice, backlog of new areas, archiving historic areas, aligning sharpeoint across disciplines..
UR Lab:
Several more teams booked sessions – enabling important work for NHS App team Tour/demo for 20~ colleagues at UR away day
UR Away Day:
Great to see many colleagues from across the business, and we had some great speakers too. Sadly I didn’t have time to properly catch up, had to bail early due to feeling unwell.
Upcoming – Nov/Dec
- Continue with work on UR Repo. Towards a pilot/Alpha for teams to start using
- Official launch of NHSE Accessibility Lab
- Soft-launch for NHS Citizen Panel (finally!)
- 1-year anniversary of UR Lab… December
- UR Lab – more bookings, tours for stakeholders, SLT and x-gov depts
- Support onboarding for new perm UR-staff
- Knowledge Management - Continue sharepoint IA… Maybe rebuilding our Ethics and Safeguarding modules and training
- Several more adhoc requests that also might become ‘projects’