So nearly irregular, still just regular
School of Good Services Sprint
We decided to spend the last couple of weeks of the year focusing down on the School of Good Services, and just getting our house in order. We made a priority list based on the time we had.
Sprints only work when you protect your time. I’d always tell clients this, but it is so hard when you do have some other commitments on so we didn’t quite manage 4 full days. So we were kind to ourselves and extended it into the New Year.
Our main priorities are to;
- Clean up and respond to feedback on our existing courses. There’s some lovely feedback and then there’s some tweaks we can make. These include adding some training activities with dummy content for people to work with rather than their own case studies. Making some of the activities simpler for training purposes. Pre-course videos to reduce the pressure of content delivery on the day and give more breathing space, which will also help getting past basics into more depth on areas of what we’re covering. And a tricky balance of clarity on who the courses are for based on experience, which is hard as experience is quite a subjective thing. Lot’s to do, grateful for feedback and good to wrap it up into a re-design. It’s important for both of us.
- Develop out the final materials for a new course on leadership
- Move off Eventbrite. We used it when the school was small but it’s not fit for purpose now. Having some good dedicated time allowed us to crack revised platform choices for sales to onboarding. Making a more streamlined purchase process for our users, and savings all round on fees. Eventbrite really have gone for a marketing to your event participants at scale feature set but it will cost you and we just don’t need this functionality
- Clean up the website and course sales content
Lots of other bits to do but feels good to be getting on top of this at the end of the year.
Other work
With that, I did have other calls in for work taking place early next year and ticking over some film planning.
In January I’m running a communications hack for a ministerial department, developing materials to present to influence senior decision makers on public service and test and learn approaches, aka prototyping. We worked out a decent agenda together for the session so that felt good.
The main other thing I had to finish off was a proposed flow for a digital experience to record in-browser samples as the one source of truth everyone involved in the project can comment on. I find this is often the real crux of a designer’s job, offering up ideas and the how, so conversations can take place to ask more questions and come to a consensus on how something can work. I held back from detailing out UI but did write a content document to go alongside it so we could interrogate the flow in much more detail.
Film planning went on as usual, trying to book schools to do filming in. Difficult times doing this at Christmas whilst the head teachers just want to make sure the Christmas concerts go ahead ha.
Future plans
We’ve been chatting to architects, about barns and future plans which is really exciting for our future food/experience space. Much more on this to come, but plans are afoot. So some evenings spent making notes on early feasibility studies.
Still renovating the main house. But we have wardrobe progress.
Built an MDF end to the wardrobe. We are now ‘in’. So it’s edging, front facade and doors now. This has been a real labour of DIY love. And a purchase of many new tools.
Read
Steve Messer’s Boring Magic principles of AI
The stack to come, Benjamin Bratton’s Stack
Pat McFadden’s Speech on Reform of the state has to deliver for people. The speech was much better than salient headlines on Government being like a start up. (No it’s not, no the £100m isn’t going to fix it, no we don’t need services to be like Spotify) but.. I did feel optimistic about test and learn being touted as an approach and generally, permission for people to try things, to develop things over time. I’ve banged on about this for nearly 20 years now, how design, the essence of it as test and learn can help us design and build better services, and really, better working conditions as people stopping pretending that we have the answers before we start the experimenting and testing.
A timely blog following the speech: What is Test and Learn from Public Digital
Listened to
Rod Stewart, Atlantic Crossing. A good friend Lucy Stewart bought me some records for my birthday back in August.
Moved
Back to walking, and been cycling locally, so movement is happening. Just resting foot a tad more.
