Weeknote, w/c 24 February 2025

This week started, or really last week ended, with a short trip to Paris to see Ingrid Caven (who is 87!) perform with Albert Serra’s band, Les Molforts. The show was literally (actually literally, not figuratively) jaw dropping and the crowd was nearly as fascinating. One week later and I’m still trying to process what we saw.

In work land, the theme of the week was strategy and planning (NB: not the same thing). This was happening at a variety of levels – individual teams, function leadership, the whole NHS App programme. Lots of “where do we go from here?”, lots of “how do we make these pieces fit together?”

After last week’s relaxed pace and ample time for thinking, this week week was a full throttle sprint. Several times I had to decide to not do things I had previously said I would do, or reschedule things for a little further out in the future.

I worked with EL on objectives for next year and this topic came up, i.e. “How do we make sure you have enough time to do the things that are important without burning out?” There are quite a few projects I’d like to pursue but they can’t all be done at once, so I’m trying to figure out what a good sequence would be. I sometimes talk about the need to take stakeholders along for the journey so that everyone both understands the process and feels like they are invested in it. Right now I’m trying to work out how to do that to and for myself, which is a little bit of a head trip.

All of that connects with the UCD Ops workshop I mentioned last week. This past week we extended the initial workshop to collect ideas about how to improve in the areas where things were less well developed. The work this team does is one of the ways we can shape the type and quality of the work done in the programme as a whole. Much of this is, by nature, indirect (describing how to work rather than doing the work) but still very powerful. One topic that we’re pondering in that space is how to best document, and then work with, the myriad design ideas that emerge during the course of delivering services. When a team has an outcome they are working to deliver, it is normal for them to have more ideas than they can pursue in the time available. Further, it is also common for some of those ideas to be bigger than the area they are tasked with addressing. What if those ideas were a seed of something more radical that could provide direction across a wide swathe of our work? Throwing these ideas away is wasteful.

We are then left with the question of how to document these ideas so that we might discuss, prioritise, and maybe act on them later. My current best guess is that we’d want something like a hypothesis backlog (where each idea has an if, then, because, we’ll know we’re right when… format). I think of this as trying to provide a view of what opportunities exist so that teams and programme leadership can jointly decide on how to improve the overall project, rather than each team remaining forever fixated on their pre-defined area of enquiry. This format can serve to connect our user research repository to our delivery backlogs, and it can provide a common tool for design, product, and engineering to work together better.

In something of a happy accident, on Thursday the App’s service design huddle came to more or less the same conclusion as one way to better empower service designers to do the meta-work of joining together all of the product team work. This would help with the ever-so-typical service design problem of “lots of these ideas don’t fit neatly within team boundaries, so who is going to deal with them?”

Speaking of meta-work, the largest individual project that I’m close to right now is looking into the information architecture of the NHS App. This week brought the end of a round of discovery. The teams working on this have developed so much knowledge about where problems exist and what causes them. They’ve also been digging into the options for a technical architecture that would help us circumvent some of the limitations of how we access data from GPIT suppliers. I’m really excited about where we can go from here.

The week ended with a Dough Hands edition of Pizza Club (imagine a book club, where the books are pizza joints). Very good, but the Spurstowe was mobbed.

Some internet things from the week:

• 18F on archive.org and on preserved.org.uk. Holding aside my feelings about the state of the US government for now, shuttering 18F under the banner of efficiency seems ridiculous. As the team point out in their open letter, they were “doing exactly the type of work that DOGE claims to want”, i.e. working to make government services more effective while costing less money. From what I’ve read, their work was also cost-recoverable (the financial cost of their work was born by the departments they worked with who, in theory, would have to spend that money anyway), making the efficiency claim even more obnoxious. Heartbreaking, callous destruction.
• Digital prevention services design history. I want one.
• Why fixing government tech is a nightmare (but not impossible). A very excellent breakdown of why technology and digital services are hard to do in government. This should probably be required reading for anyone who is new to the sector.
• Gov.uk publishing design guide. Fascinating addendum to the design system that covers specific approaches to page design for gov.uk. The NHS App has its own design system (sort of) and this feels like a useful reference approach for how to build on top of a core org-wide design system.
• New deal for GPs will fix the front door of the NHS. This was a major topic in my circles this week. There is a lot more to say about the specifics, which I’ll come back to at some point.
• WikiTok. I quite enjoy this.
• No hello. This is correct. My complete repulsion to getting messages that just say “Hi Mike” is something FT trolls me about.
• Fox’s new scorebug graphic design, and our innate resistance to change. I really do not like American Football, but this is a great bit of graphic design critique.