Working across 2 teams

What I've been up to on RAVS core and RAVS plus.

Work

I think I've mentioned before, but I'm supporting 2 teams in my new contract. RAVS (record a vaccination service) is made up of the core team and the plus team. It's stretching me, mostly in a good way. I feel like I have a lot on my plate, but I'd much rather be busy than not.

Core team

Core team are focused on supporting the live (well, beta) service. It has a growing user base with more expansions planned. This week it reached the milestone of recording 4 million vaccinations!

Autumn/winter is a busy time for RAVS, so any major upgrades need to be finished in the summer months. The team are mostly focused on performance right now. With a big user expansion happening, everyone is keen that the service runs smoothly when vaccinations increase later in the year.

So far, I feel like I've had less time to make a positive impact on core. I've been working on a fiddly little change that is intended to highlight when users are recording a vaccination that might have different payment arrangements. In some scenarios, we're using the new interruption panel component.

Because I've been distracted by multiple things, it's taken longer than I'd hoped to get the change to a point when it's ready for review. But, it's ready now to chat through with our user researcher to see how we might do some usability testing on it.

I'm trying to remind myself that I'm still learning about the service. I know a lot more about the user journeys than I did even a few days ago, including edge cases like how users can record vaccinations when patients don't have an NHS number.

Plus team

The plus team is focusing on expanding the service for certain user groups. They are about to launch a private beta with users in maternity settings, with the aim of helping them to track the vaccination eligibility of the pregnant people that they are providing care for.

After a busy week focusing on the plus team last week, I've taken a little step back this week. Still, I had some time to look at some future improvements, like the ability to create clinics. Clinics are vaccinations sessions that patients can attend by booking in advance, or by just turning up.

Joining up both parts of the service

Both teams had a little space to do some forward planning this week. I noticed that there were a few overlaps coming up, including...

  • adding clinics
  • testing accessibility
  • reviewing information architecture (IA)

I'm in a good position to help the teams join up these plans. I think there's a desire to ensure neither team is dependant on each other. We don't want to delay delivery of anything, whilst waiting for the other team to catch-up.

But I think it's also important to make sure we're both heading in the same direction. So that the service feels like one joined-up thing to the people who are using it.

So far, if I'm honest, I can't quite see how a feature like clinics will work unless both teams work on it together.

Luckily there are a lot of smart people working across RAVS, so I'm looking forward to seeing how we solve these problems together.

Accessibility testing

I started to do some light accessibility testing on plus. I'm just using a few basic tests for now, including...

I found a handful of issues to review with the team next week. There is much more testing I could do, but this seemed like a sensible start.

A few nights away

I'm spending a couple of nights in a caravan down Gower this weekend. Hopefully going for a paddleboard later.

A beach side path through ferns towards a caravan site. Rolling fields and hills in the distance.

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