{"id":1064,"date":"2023-03-12T21:01:25","date_gmt":"2023-03-12T20:01:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/verwaltungsgestaltung.de\/notizen\/?p=1064"},"modified":"2023-03-26T17:27:34","modified_gmt":"2023-03-26T15:27:34","slug":"week-45-at-the-digital-service-notes-for-6-10-march-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/verwaltungsgestaltung.de\/notizen\/2023\/03\/12\/week-45-at-the-digital-service-notes-for-6-10-march-2023\/","title":{"rendered":"Week #45 at the Digital Service: Notes for 6\u201310 March 2023"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Wednesday was International Women\u2019s Day. In Berlin, it has been a public holiday since 2019. The day before, DigitalService hosted a Women Who Code meetup<\/a> on our office\u2019s mezzanine floor. My colleague Frede, a software engineer, spoke at the event about her work and approach at Digital Service. Daphne designed a sticker sheet for the evening and the upcoming Girls\u2019 Day<\/a> in April.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the process of the design of the sheet, we wrote different versions of the sentence. In German, it now says: \u201cDiverse teams for digital public services that truly work for everyone in the country.\u201d It\u2019s phrased as an aspiration and belief rather than an achievement or as-is state. Because we still have quite some work to do. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The starting point of a greater diversity and inclusion effort is generating data about the current state of diversity in our organisation. A few weeks ago, my former GDS colleagues Clara Greo, Harry Vos, Adam Robertson and Martin Lugton wrote a blog post on how to run an employee demographics survey<\/a>. Their text contains a lot of compressed knowledge and practical advice. It includes these points: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Understand why you are doing this work. Write down your aims, interrogate them and be transparent about them<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Collecting data is meaningless if it doesn\u2019t lead to action and change. Find out why and fix it\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Currently, we don\u2019t have the capacity to start this work and act on results effectively, I reckon. But with the arrival of new colleagues in the People team in a few months, I am expecting that to change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Discussing how we do things<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In the last 2 weeks, I spent more time in sprint review sessions. At DigitalService, we have weekly project updates on Wednesday mornings, in which 1 or 2 teams give a quick update on their work and progress. Given our number of teams, it takes several weeks to see anything from that team again. Everyone in a project team and their shareholders attend sprint reviews, but someone from another team rarely does due to a lack of awareness, priority or time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my Nokia days, we used to have them sprint reviews with plenty of demo time in an open kitchen space. People in that area might observe what a team recently did while brewing their tea. Follow-up conversations with team members followed occasionally. With many teams running their sprint review remotely or hybrid, the discoverability in a similar fashion is limited. Repopulating the organisational event calendar and encouraging people to join other teams\u2019 sprint reviews might be a start. In the meantime, I have some sprint reviews to attend in the coming weeks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Is every team\u2019s sprint review session entirely open to everyone in your organisation? And also easily discoverable and accessible?

If not, why not?<\/p>— Martin Jordan ? ? @martinjordan@mastodon.social (@Martin_Jordan) March 10, 2023<\/a><\/blockquote>