On Friday, I returned to the office after three weeks of vacation. The day before, I missed an all-org offsite that I had only heard good things about.
The late, un-recorded highlight of the day was a virtual shout-out from President Biden’s digital team, encouraging us to keep up the excellent work. With some apparent cherry blossom references, I found plenty of emojis all over Slack in the morning after while unpacking their meaning and retracing the context.
I found various posters of our Diversity Equity Inclusion (DEI) working group in the office. They had been going back and forth on the content and design in the past weeks, so it was good to see those up. The working group includes people from all parts of the organisation and all disciplines, including communications, people, and delivery. While I don’t have the time to get involved much, I support their efforts and keep nudging them to collect data and track key indicators. I’m happy to share my former colleagues’ ‘How to run an employee demographics survey‘ post broadly and frequently.
Picking things up where I haven’t left them
In my absence, my colleagues pushed a few things ahead. I very much enjoy and appreciate not being seen as a bottleneck or irreplaceable manager on all kinds of tasks and decisions.
Charlotte and Sonja continued working on all-new level descriptions for designers and user researchers in my absence. Their iterations and progressions are sounds, and we should have the level descriptions finalised shortly.
In the meantime, the interview process for our first-ever senior content designer position reached its final stage. So, I heard everyone’s feedback and made a hiring decision based on that. If things go well in the offering process, the successful candidate could start in a few weeks, and we will be able to build out our user-centred design discipline for further specialist skills and experience.
Kannika and I caught up on all things Federal government digital strategy. She and others led interviews with lighthouse projects, and I got to hear their findings. In the coming weeks, I will advise on and participate in new learning cluster meetings.
Preparing for a little in-house video production, Stephanie and I discussed and sketched possible narratives for a short film on our ways of working. Talking about user-centred, iterative, evidence-based approaches can quickly turn theoretical, dogmatic and abstract. We picked examples that make those adjectives tangible, relatable and memorable.
What’s next
On Monday, we will have our second ‘design system for Germany’s working sessions. Colleagues from other digital public sector units will travel from Hamburg and Munich to join us for a deep-diving workshop.