I had only 3 working days this week, but it felt like a whole working week \u2013 just compressed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On Tuesday, we reviewed progress against our organisational objectives as part of our OKR process. The extended leadership team looked at the 3 objectives set, and the 3 different owners reflected on how well we had made progress against the attached key results after 5 months into the year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With some delay, we also put up a summarising poster \u2013 one at every level of our office. It contains a reference to the page on our internal network. Having the poster up and visible to everyone increases awareness of people. Hopefully, it makes them check once a while the intranet page whenever it\u2019s relevant and linked to their work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In a blog post at the beginning of the year<\/a>, we talked about the importance of good and clear internal communication. This is another example of it. If we don\u2019t have clarity internally, we won\u2019t be doing things with clarity and won\u2019t be able to communicate effectively to the outside either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With some delays, I managed to finish the Service Standard blog post. And I have ignored my own advice while writing it. My final draft is 1,800 words and exactly what I would have rejected when I was the editor of the Design in Government<\/a> and Services in Government<\/a> blog. Then, I would have worked with the authors, asked them to trim it, and got it to no more than 1,200 words. Now, it\u2019s in the capable hands of editor Lutz, and I don\u2019t envy him for his task. It\u2019s a comprehensive summary of what happened in the past 3 years, what we do now and what we plan to do next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Linked to the blog post, I spent additional time formatting the Service Standard self-reports of our 2 tax teams. For that, I looked at the page templates of the reports on GOV.UK<\/a> and DTA\u2019s assessment documentation<\/a>. Based on that input, I put together a simple structure, which will need some lightweight development work if we want to publish them on our organisation\u2019s transparency page<\/a> shortly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A few more blog posts are in the making, one at a time. The articles for last season\u2019s Service Gazette issue are the most pressing, though. We have about a week to finish the edition and send it to the printer for getting it produced in Scotland for Creative Bureaucracy Festival in mid-June. Katrin and I need to complete the cover story, and several texts need final editing and page design. I will publish some articles via Medium.com throughout the coming days. Having a deadline again gets us going.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lisa, Sonja and I had a user research catch-up. It\u2019s Sonja\u2019s second week, and she started planning a research offsite with the designers in the coming weeks. We want to understand the status quo of research across all projects and see the needs and capabilities. We plan to take a long afternoon with everyone conducting user research at Digital Service. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Knowing there are user researchers in the German public sector, at least at Dataport, a local and state government-owned IT supplier, and the Federal Printing Office, I contacted them for an exchange. They immediately added one more person to the conversation \u2013 which gets us to 5 user researchers in the German public sector. We can take this as a sign of progress. A couple of years ago, having any internal user research capability seemed unthinkable. In the coming weeks, we plan an exchange format to discuss:<\/p>\n\n\n\n On Wednesday afternoon, I welcomed digital transformation colleagues from Caritas, the most significant German catholic charity, for an exchange on how to get things started, create momentum and make things happen in a Federated structure with a little mandate. Our Chief of Staff Sonja joined and shared how things at Digital Service from the bottom up and externally with a fellowship programme that led to fast results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While travelling to Switzerland for a break, I met Raul Krauthausen on the train. It was Global Accessibility Awareness Day<\/a> and the most tangible awareness education: He is a wheelchair user and actively blogging and reporting about the many issues he and many others face when using public transport, especially when trying to travel independently and spontaneously.<\/p>\n\n\n\nGetting things ready for publication<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Sharing some more how we do things<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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