Right in the middle of a retiring of a big external platform and moving it over, slice by slice into separate company owned products and APIs (and a few off the shelf things mixed in too!)
I think there’s plenty of sensible advice about getting a technical person with experience and expertise to help make the right decision. Between doing it yourself, building a platform with various tools stitched together to finding ways of getting what you need from existing suppliers and other tooling.
Something I would also suggest is to be really clear right now on how you currently work, how your existing platform works and the problems it’s causing or at least the opportunities you feel you’re missing out on.
To do this suggest getting a “discovery” team together and doing some service design and analysis to map out your user flows, business and tech. The as-is. and laying against that all the pain points and missed opportunities.
Then using the same team to help you craft how it should work. The to-be vision.
Then using that to-be vision and the insight and expertise you’ve developed to help you decide how best to get to that to-be vision. As cheaply and sustainably as possible.
Part of the organisation I’m helping out. There’s a vast difference between the parts where that discovery work was done (and done with clear purpose) and the bits that haven’t been done. And the endless delay and struggle they’ve had.
But is the user story format the best way to get those common pain points or behaviours out front and centre?
It’s important to know what they are. But the format you use to describe them can change a lot in how you even understand people and what’s going wrong.
And the why is so important in knowing why someone’s dropping out of a journey, not clicking a thing etc
I legitimately don't understand how this is a controversial take. Am I just supposed to guess why it was put there? Is it normal to tell other people to open pull requests to explain why you did something? Seriously, how are they supposed to know?
I’ve recently resigned and will be looking for something new in the new year.
My reasons are:
- done this for a while. Being on COVID projects gave me a taste of different but similar
- was surrounded by talented and some not so talented contractors making silly money whilst I was the only permanent employee making probably half. That wasn’t different but the noise got louder in my head. Why not you? Was the question in my head as I rapidly rose to lead a team of 14
- remote work. One of the things holding me back was worrying (unnecessarily) about having to go to strange places to do contract work. But my role did that already before COVID and since COVID so much more opportunity to do things remote means the size of the pond is bigger
- A colleague did it. Someone I mentor. And they grew and got stretched so much by new contexts in new projects. It reminded me of that feeling i got from the COVID projects. Purpose and being stretched to learn new stuff
The vaccination rollout programme is very much NHS. Vaccination is something the NHS does. So that shouldn’t be surprising.
Believe Cummings point was that The Department of Health wasn’t in control as it is in terms of test and trace. So NHS + Cabinet office (and not DHSC’s normal red tape, funding models) = success.
However, I think “sources” in the vaccination task force have said Cummings is full of it.
Administering each vaccine seems to be 100% NHS. While it is quite likely that Cummings is full of it, he did specifically mention that the vaccine task force works outside of the Department of Health.
“That is why we had to take the vaccine process out of the Department of Health.”
Cummings is a self-serving apparatchik with an eye to his future reputation so of course he’s trying to claim he was involved in the one successful program initiated by the government. I’m not sure why you give his claims any credence given his proven lies elsewhere.
I’m no fan of his and ad hominem arguments don’t help anyone. Considering the lack of transparency across the whole vaccine programme, I think the fact he made the point several times without being called out (in a committee hearing designed to call out any BS) is quite pertinent.
He lied to the public, repeatedly, in a very obvious way. He was also in that segment being fed softball questions by Aaron Bell, Conservative MP which were probably arranged in advance.
I therefore don't in any way trust his self-assessment of his own department's work and the 'vaccine task force' he set up, which incidentally hired some of his associates, who were paid very well, for example the PR firm:
A director of the public relations firm paid £670,000 to advise the head of the UK government's coronavirus vaccine task force is a longstanding business associate of Dominic Cummings.
Gosh, that article is incredibly revealing of some serious cronyism going on. It does also, however, confirm that the task force was operating outside of the DoH as per the original point.
If you trust what he says about who did what. If you don't, it could mean it operated outside the DoH but actually did very little in the procurement process.
Having redesigned a hospital's recruitment process to use Facebook advertising for the more "blue collar" type jobs (porters, support workers, estates type jobs as well as nurses) I can really see this working.
We got ridiculous traction in the local area. We were reaching people who had never really thought of a career at their local hospital. But a hospital isn't just doctors.
Often with Facebook we didn't actually directly hit the candidate either. People's mum, uncle, brother or friend would find the advert and pass it on.
Facebook is already successful in recruitment. Only makes sense they really target this market and provide the business tools to do it
I come from a blue collar background, and have a large blue collar network on Facebook. I regularly see people posting about jobs, sharing that they are looking for jobs, etc. It will often be in just a generic post along the lines of "x construction is looking for laborers, $20 an hour call #" then reshared a hundred times.
I think a formalized and well designed way of doing this could work and a have a large benefit.
There are a few human-computer interaction conference proceedings that I would recommend.
CHI is the biggest and most prestigious, but also most general. It will include a lot of irrelevant papers too. UIST is smaller and focuses on novel interactions. CSCW is about collaboration. IUI is about intelligent user interfaces. VLHCC publishes work on developer tools from a human perspective.
The easiest way to find these papers is through scholar.google.com. Just search for what topic you want, and it will try to find relevant research papers.
CHI, UIST, CSCW, and TEI are my personal favorite academic conferences for interactive media related design. (The paper posted by GP was published at CHI)
I think there’s plenty of sensible advice about getting a technical person with experience and expertise to help make the right decision. Between doing it yourself, building a platform with various tools stitched together to finding ways of getting what you need from existing suppliers and other tooling.
Something I would also suggest is to be really clear right now on how you currently work, how your existing platform works and the problems it’s causing or at least the opportunities you feel you’re missing out on.
To do this suggest getting a “discovery” team together and doing some service design and analysis to map out your user flows, business and tech. The as-is. and laying against that all the pain points and missed opportunities.
Then using the same team to help you craft how it should work. The to-be vision.
Then using that to-be vision and the insight and expertise you’ve developed to help you decide how best to get to that to-be vision. As cheaply and sustainably as possible.
Part of the organisation I’m helping out. There’s a vast difference between the parts where that discovery work was done (and done with clear purpose) and the bits that haven’t been done. And the endless delay and struggle they’ve had.