Weekote 20: outputs

Week ending 08/09/23

It’s been almost exactly three months since my last weeknote. Oops.

Hard to summarise all the work our teams have done during that period, but I’ll have quick go:

• Launched a new area for women’s health on NHS.UK along with some new content for a condition called Adenomyosis. This was the result of a commitment made in the Women’s Health Strategy for England
• Finished some work to define content types for contraception and vaccinations and published a few new vaccine topics
• Transformed more than 60 topics so that they better meet the needs of our users with actionable health advice and are aligned to our accessibility, usability and design standards
• Started a new discovery into long term conditions to see if it might be possible to consider this group of topics as a content type.

Back to his past week then.

What went well

• Got some good news about a someone who used to work with us returning to NHS England, and our teams, later this sprint
• Finished our team discussions about what to put forward for the NHS.UK roadmap for the next quarter (Oct-Dec). This is the third time we’ve been through the new planning process this year and it is definitely getting easier
• Got some answers to some questions I had about the flu vaccination campaign and feel a bit more familiar with all the teams working across our directorate in this area
• Ran a presentation with my colleague Camille to give an introduction to our work to the campaigns team, a few of whom may be joining us in October
• Started to feel like we are making some (small) progress on discussions around how our health advice and guidance content might support the Primary Care Recovery Plan
• Got some last minute approvals through on Friday for a complicated but essential bit of work that some of the team have been doing. Big sigh of relief.

What went less well

• I’m spending an increasing amount of time fielding requests/demands on our teams’ time, often for things I’d describe as outputs rather than clearly defined problems to solve or things that have evidence of need. I hear a lot of promising words from our senior leadership about moving us to an outcomes-focussed organisation, but right now it feels like the requests to ‘just deliver the thing we want’ are growing and our ability to resist seems harder and harder
• As a result of the above, I think I’m in danger of not giving the team enough support for some of the good things we really want to be doing. Will be doing my best to get my head back into some of our feature work this week.

What’s coming up this week

• Another day in the office. Trying to be in once a week now
• Intro meeting with a new service designer
• Working through some delivery plans with Ed and making final tweaks to our roadmap
• More primary care and cross-org flu vaccination campaign planning
• Catch up with contraception policy colleagues
• Check in with our multimedia team to learn more about a discovery they’ve been doing into user needs for video content.