Marlene took this snap when I welcomed our 5 new starters on Tuesday.
We had 3 user researchers and 2 content designers join us this week. It’s the largest cohort since spring 2024, when we welcomed 4 people in a single month.
They will work across a range of service areas – from skilled immigration to justice services, and from agentic agency to the centre of legal drafting. It’s exciting that we can grow our user research and content design sub-disciplines so much this year.
Especially for content design, there is constant demand in the organisation. And we found it difficult to hire people. That is why the role has been open for about 6 months. As the work is there, we will continue working with a senior freelance designer. It’s similar with user research. We continue with a freelancer to cover the amount of work in the area.
I will welcome the entire cohort of over a dozen new colleagues in 2 of their 10 introduction sessions. Next week, I will co-run the discipline introduction; the following week, the one on accessibility.
Helping with all things Service Standard
Among other things, I completed several tasks related to the Service Standard this week.
We met with 2 units from the digital ministry, including the current policy officer for the Service Standard and colleagues working on service-quality-related tools. It was helpful to sync and compare overlapping efforts. We will resume that in the coming weeks.
In a smaller group, we ran a retrospective on last week’s successful 2-day service design introduction training. As the feedback was terrific, there is little immediate action. Still, the pacing and framing at the beginning are areas for improvement. The opening was new and needs refinement. The message needs to be clearer: We need to design services consciously and purposefully, and the Service Standard legitimises this.
The training might run once per quarter from now on. We aim for late November for the next edition and will update the new training page shortly. Sabrina, Linda and I also started discussing running the ‘Service mapping for practitioners’ that I co-developed with Clara Greo in 2019. We ran it 4 times before the pandemic, but not since. I reviewed its agenda and slides this week and am interested in giving it another run.
Running product and service reviews
Reviews were another big topic this week.
On Wednesday morning, I ran our now 7th product review session. We started with the format in late May. It lasts about 50 minutes and focuses on one specific offering we are about to launch. We looked at the advanced court claim service to recover money, which now includes a structured claim statement with evidence users can attach.
At first, the feedback from some other teams has been a bit mixed. We didn’t communicate the purpose and structure well enough. Teams didn’t know exactly what to expect, what to prepare, or what it was good for. We got that mostly right now. The feedback from all recent sessions has been positive. It’s a conversational format, and it doesn’t require preparation from teams. We mostly ask questions as we look at the offering together. The team can decide to take notes. There are no follow-ups from our side. The format aligns with our delivery principle 11, which states that ‘Each team is responsible for quality, security, risks, operating models, and accessibility’. Teams are responsible, yet we are accountable, and therefore check in with them on the development itself on a semi-regular basis. The format is complementary to the various other formats we have with programme areas at a more strategic and operational level.
This week, I also helped my colleague Fabian coordinate the upcoming peer reviews against the Service Standard. There are 2 scheduled for this month, which makes it a busy month. One is external; one is internal. I am looking forward to supporting these, meeting the teams and learning about their work.
We also commissioned an external usability test for our ‘starting a business’ service.
Preparing for our next local meetup
On Sunday evening, I made progress on the poster for our next meetup. The date somehow comes faster than expected.
We will host it at CityLAB Berlin on Wednesday, 9 September.
The topic of the meetup will be ‘digital sovereignty’, a topic we have had on our list since at least the beginning of the year.
For the design of the poster and announcement graphics, I tried to integrate 2 concepts: cloud computing and freedom. I found that in a dithered, fluffy cloud. I worked with a Creative Commons licensed image from Unsplash and ran it through Dither It! It’s a free web tool I used to apply 90s-era image-processing techniques to reduce colour range and image size.
Whenever I start working on the next poster, I start from a blank page. I never have an idea where things will end up. It remains an exploration with its ups and downs and dead ends.
For the invite, I wrote the following description:
European governments have created great external dependencies in their digital infrastructure. Much of public digital infrastructure depends on foreign components, platforms, and systems. With increasing urgency, civic activists, journalists and security experts have warned about potential dire consequences.
In recent years, cities, states and even countries have responded by investing in their digital sovereignty. They cut decade-long IT contracts, open source code, and look for more agile suppliers to make their tech stack more modular.”
We will have 3 speakers: Powen Shiah from the Sovereign Tech Fund, my Digital Service colleague Anke Obendiek, and Lisa Steigerthal, who was previously leading the digital government strategy for the State of Berlin.
Within a few days, we reached over 60 sign-ups, suggesting this might be a popular topic. I am looking forward to it.
What’s next
On Monday and Tuesday, I will participate in a leadership offsite. We do these twice a year now – see weeknote #167 and weeknote #194. I still have some pre-reads to do until then.
On Wednesday, our meetup on digital sovereignty already takes place.
Most of Friday, I have reserved for finishing my section of our Edinburgh conference talk. I put down a dry run with the design week for our weekly on 17 September.
I also hope to finish our blog post on our organisational values in practice. There is one contribution missing. Five sections are completed, and I also wrote the intro and outro. It’s now 1,640 words. I want it out by mid-September.