Governance
Happy January, I’m leaning into the winter and kind of loving it. We’ve been real blessed with sunshine lately, and sitting in a park with cold air, warm sun, and green all around is one of London’s greatest pleasures.
This week
Setting up of the new team structure as we start to re-plan milestones, activities and dependencies
Lots of content building, drafting high-level summaries of the 10 and counting journeys that have been designed to upskill new joiners
Connecting with BAU teams to understand where services differ in the new vs old world (from a very speculative/futurist design lens)
Experimenting with craft cola recipes
Learning how to build a custom agent to analyse health data. (I’ve been sucked into the wearable ring hype.)
Making teams navigable, and not just deliverable
As a hybrid design-consultant, I often find myself deep in delivery and execution, although one of my goals this year was to develop my strategy skills. This project has been the ideal place to learn, through a web of dependencies from data, governance, product, experience, yet something I’ve observed was that delivery doesn’t stop, even when strategy hasn’t found its place.
The messy reality is that we’re all trying to achieve milestones and stay green, but it leaves little brainpower to address challenges like unclear scope, disconnected ways of working… to the little things, like messy file sharing. Housekeeping is the first level of strategy.
Whilst reinventing the wheel isn’t always a popular opinion (especially under complex, regulated environments like this one), I’ve learnt to focus on the small things: giving artefacts a second purpose (e.g. navigation tools), writing recommendations that show trade-offs (i.e. not limiting), reminding principles to ground decisions (i.e. Safe, Simple).
Looking ahead
Next week is all about tightening the narrative as much as handing over, so that our new team members can take this work forward: hopefully with a clearer scope, better cadence, and tidier file folders.
Bookmarks
Bring Clarity to Complex Services (Without Service Mapping), Ayesha Moarif
What I No Longer Believe About Design Leadership, Rachel Kobetz
Let’s talk about systems design thinking, Sarah Tan Li
What’s Requirements Management All About?, Karl Wiegers
