Weeknote 14: highs and lows

Week ending 24/03/23

Some notable ups and downs this week, mostly around stakeholder management.

What went well?

• We presented our roadmap for 2023/24 to our colleagues across NHS.UK and our public-facing roadmap went live
• Mark’s great blog post about our work to speed-up the scale and pace of transformation across the NHS website by developing content types finally went live. This was actually last week, but I didn’t get round to weeknoting then
• In the office on Tuesday again for sprint planning. I much prefer doing this in person, we always have useful team discussions and is especially helpful for the work we’re doing around women’s health
• We held our first Show & Tell with women’s health stakeholders on Thursday and were able to do a walk through of the prototype we’ve been working towards for some time. We’ve been experimenting with various methods of collaborative and open working and we also used this as an opportunity to see what was working and what wasn’t. So far, so good
• I had an idea to help with some stakeholder management which I quietly thought was a stroke of absolute genius. One day I’ll be able to talk about it and share my strategic wizardry. Until then, the world will just have to wait.

What went less well?

• While busy congratulating myself for having a single good idea, something else stakeholder-related went awry despite my best efforts. It’s salvagable but it absolutely could have been handled far better. This is likely to be a focus of my coming week
• I got a bit too involved in some discussions about resourcing the team. This is really a delivery and profession-specific conversation and while I was motivated by the right reasons (supporting the team) I should probably have stayed in my lane a bit more

Coming up next week

• Planning some usability testing and research goals for our women’s health work
• Supporting multiple requests for things that need to be in place for April
• Spending some time reviewing SEO suggestions to help with our women’s health work
• Expecting to be filling gaps for others due to lots of key people taking leave.