It was a bit of a rocky start to the new year. I got sick just 2 days into the week and only returned slowly on Friday.
During the week, ’my’ Design Perspectives podcast was published. It’s a conversation with professors Philipp Thesen and Birgit Mager recorded in November. In probably too long monologues, I talk about our work, why it’s important and how we are making progress in redesigning public services.
I didn’t manage to listen to it in full. I am still not good at listening to my own ramblings. Some people responded positively to it on LinkedIn. I am grateful for the opportunity to talk about what we do.
Matching people and tasks
How does staffing work? That’s been a question lingering for a while. People across the organisation, including people from the user-centred design discipline, wish to understand it better. And so do I.
For years, I have been describing staffing like a play of Tetris getting closer to level 9. You quickly have to make the most sensible matches with insufficient information – even though a better match could be possible right after making one.
As we work towards new projects, we want to make the staffing process, including how we make decisions, more transparent and easier to understand for everyone. Especially smaller pieces of work with tighter budgets, and hence, fewer people can be a challenge to staff. If, for example, there is only a budget for a tiny team of 2, the profiles, experiences and skills have to match even more precisely.
It’s necessary to overlook people’s titles and current roles. Instead, we must consider their full past. If a transformation manager has been a product manager in the past, that’s good to know. If a person we hired as a user researcher has worked as a strategic service designer before, we need to consider that in staffing decisions.
We discussed staffing in our team delivery sessions this week. We also very briefly touched on it in a new book club session about Simon Birkenhead’s ‘Managing People’.
Working towards reopening working student role
With some funding for our justice services work secured for the coming 2 years, I hope we can reopen the user research ops role. It’s a part-time role at the student level. We pulled it in early December as unlocking the programme budget was suddenly shaky. With some luck, we should be able to reopen and advertise it in the coming days.
In December, I started listing open user-centred design jobs in the German public sector on the landing page of Verwaltungsgestaltung.
Scheduled with optimism in December, I ran a 90-minute workshop with 3 talent acquisition colleagues. We looked at how we can finally make discipline pages on our website happen. That are dedicated pages for each delivery discipline: design and user research, product management, software engineering, and transformation management. They are supposed to tell what each discipline does and thereby address various needs of both applicants and ministerial collaborators new to digital teams and their work. I mentioned the idea for the first time almost exactly 2 years ago – in weeknote 36. For various reasons, we haven’t materialised since then.
Now, we rebooted the work, zoomed out and gathered the various things we know these 2 user groups want to find out. We collected, clustered and prioritised the content. Our next activity will involve colleagues who started at Digital Service in the past 6 months to complete the picture. We want to know what things they would have liked to know before joining the organisation. Then, we will work on a fresh content draft – starting with user-centred design. I hope we can create something in hidden beta by the end of the quarter.
What’s next
There is plenty to do.
There are various things left on my to-do list from 2024.
Within the coming week, I must start writing a blog post on combining law-making and service development quality assurance. It’s a blog post that has been lingering for almost 12 months. It has not been a pressing priority. That has changed as we get closer to our Demo Day and the pre-election period warms up. So, there are some things we want to highlight.
I also hope to see our international community update, which we penned in December, to be published finally. It got stuck in departmental press office review pipelines.
Our user researchers have a half-day onsite on Wednesday. I will join for as long as possible and give a little impulse talk.