A few positives

A double weeknote starting 24 March 2025.

I didn't manage to fit weeknotes in last weekend because I was at my cousin's wedding on Saturday, so these notes cover 2 weeks.

Things are still a bit up and down

These past few week have been a bit up and down in work. We are still dealing with the fallout of splitting the team in two. In a way, it felt a little bit like onboarding into a new team, or doing an inception.

So it's probably not a good idea to expect normal work progress to happen during that phase of work, but it's still frustrating considering the momentum we had earlier in the year.

I feel a bit like I am making a nuisance of myself by bothering all the BAs (business analysts) with questions about ways of working, rather than getting my head down into core interaction design work. Think I need to strike a balance between longer term culture change, that will enable future UCD (user-centered design) work to run more smoothly, and just delivering the things I've been brought in to do.

Not sure if this is a universal thing, or just me, but I find ambiguity around ways of working much more stressful than rushing to get a prototype ready for users. I suppose it's because it's out of my control and much more difficult to influence?

More user research planned

Good news is we have our next onsite user research session booked in for early May. So that will give us something to focus on, and a chance to pull together the various strands and ideas we've been thinking about the past few weeks.

The next program increment (PI) planning day is going to happen pretty quickly after that, and there is going to be pressure on us again to show what work is ready to move into a technical build phase.

Reflecting on the positives

It feels like PI planning is coming too soon, but I'm trying to look for the positives that should enable us to be more prepared than we were back in February…

  • we've had more space to design some of the edge case scenarios (like error states)
  • we're working more closely with the tech teams and we have been invited to their stand-ups and sprint reviews
  • we've got access to one of the dev environments so we should be able to start doing QA (quality assurance) reviews from a UCD perspective
  • we've managed to highlight some of the blockers we are facing, that are outside of our direct control, and some of the delivery managers, service owners and policy people are looking into these for us
  • we are working more closely with more stakeholders and are having more focused conversations
  • we are being included in conversations about new work on the horizon, so we have the opportunity to shape the work before it lands on in our laps
  • we've had agreement on a few pages and flows so I've been able to start prototyping again
  • I've been invited to PI planning without having to ask

Contract issues

I had an unexpected day off this week. There was a slight delay in signing off my contract paperwork so I had to pause until it was sorted.

It was quite nice to be honest, and it gave me a chance to do some garden DIY and enjoy the nice weather. Thankfully it was sorted very quickly. I think I would've panicked a bit if it had lasted a few days.

Still, this is the first real contract issue I've had in 2 years, so I can't complain!

Bookmarks

Thanks to the folks on the Cymru Digidol Slack Community for suggesting some of these resources.