I wrote a couple of articles in August. They’re part of my ongoing efforts to demystify digital and leadership work.
I wrote an introduction to agile for people who work in charities (or anyone really), for Charity Comms.
I wrote about leadership skills for digital practitioners in the public sector (or anywhere really), for Think Digital. I’m running a tutorial on this topic at UX Cambridge later this week, with Ade Adewunmi.
I was proud to be one of the original signatories to this article about how to hire more women into technology positions. It’s a crowdsourced blog post from over 50 women working in technology curated by Emer Coleman (Technology Engagement at Co-op Digital) and Charlotte Jee (Editor of Techworld).
The article places gender diversity in the context of other inequalities
Take a look at what your current senior leadership team looks like. Do you have a female CTO or CEO? Is your leadership team all white? What about your Board? Most senior women will want to look beyond just the leadership team. They see diversity in the round and look for organisations that are diverse in class, race, LGBT people, ability/disability as well as gender. So it’s not enough to add a token middle class, straight, white woman to your management team.
I like the recommendations because they are focussed on practical action, for example
… actually demonstrate there is no gender pay gap. There are products developing in the market where you can actually dashboard this for your employees. Consider using a product like https://www.sliips.com/ which takes actual (anonymized) payslips to provide absolute transparency around pay. Of course this is even more important in the UK now since it’s the law for companies with staff in excess of 250.
You can read the full article on Techworld.
Ade Adewunmi and I ran a training session for service designers and heads of service design across government. It’s an expanded version of our tutorial on this topic which you can read about here and here. The training was held at GDS on their last day before moving out of Aviation House, which was a nice symmetry for me.
The training covered how to lead people and teams, whether you’re in a formal leadership role or not, by
It’s based on what Ade and I have learned in leadership roles, and we aim to make it as practical as possible.
It’s always fun to deliver this session and I learned some new leadership tips myself. My favourite was equipping your teams with ‘lines to take’ on questions or criticisms you regularly receive during your work e.g. “why should we bother doing research?”. Brilliant idea. I love this because it’s really useful and should empower people to stick up for themselves and their work in situations that can be stressful.
We got some lovely feedback from people who came to the training. Thanks folks!
If you’d like to come to this, we’re running it as a 90 minute tutorial at UX Cambridge in September, or you can hire us to do it for your organisation.
Edit 13/07/17 – The next course is on 4th September. Details are on our website and tickets are available on Eventbrite.
Sarah Jackson of Kestrel Copy and I have developed a training day to help charities and non-profits do excellent digital project management. We ran a pilot of the course in June and we’re planning to run it again in Autumn.
The course covers how to
It was really rewarding to do something in a new sector, and fun to work in collaboration with Sarah. People said they found it useful and gave universally positive feedback. My favourite piece of feedback was
“Really enjoyed it and found it very useful. Met my goal of feeling confident about having to take on quite a bit of large digital projects in future.”
It’s nice to think that the day helped people feel more confident about their jobs, and as a result some charities will have better digital delivery in future.
Ade Adewunmi and I have developed a tutorial about leadership for people working in digital transformation. We’ve done it at General Assembly and Service Design in Government 2017. On Medium, Ade explains the tutorial and about leading teams, and I write about leading organisations.
This work is important to me because leadership skills aren’t something that are often taught, or at least, they weren’t taught to me and the people I know. Leadership skills can seem to “naturally” occur in people in leadership positions, and leaders can hold and extend their power by not explaining how leadership is done. In the area I work in, these positions are held in great number by straight, white, middle class men. Explaining how leadership is done might chip away at the idea that leadership skills are found mostly or even “naturally” (shudder) in those people, and encourage more people to have a go.
In January I had a bit more of a rest. No work. It was brilliant.
In February I started working with a management consultancy to develop a digital proposition and business plan. This has been a really fun project, good to do something more commercial.
In March I ran a tutorial called “The essentials of leadership for service design” at Service Design in Government 2017, with Ade Adewunmi. We’ll write more about that anon. I also started working for the Department for Education to help them develop their digital capability.
In April I continued those two projects. I worked with a software company who wanted to get on GCloud to sell more services to government. And I worked on a training course for charities that will start in June (excited for that!).
I had a rest. No work. It was brilliant.
I spent lots of time at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy working on 3 programmes. Not all at once, thankfully. I’m not sure I can say too much about them here. I led a service design review of the Student Loans Company. As part of this, I did Wardley mapping for the first time. I was underwhelmed. I ran a discovery project to figure out how to get user-focused finance and HR services to 15,000 staff. I was overwhelmed. And when the portfolio team found itself without a manager, I stepped in to help oversee the department’s digital transformation programmes. Phew.
I wrapped up my 6 month contract at UKTI in the first week of February. Lord Maude left the week after.
I’m working part-time at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. I’m lucky to be part of a brilliant team led by Chief Digital Officer Emma Stace. I’m acting as a roving programme director. I’ve been leading 3 discovery projects – one about digital transformation of corporate services, one piece of service design and one piece of Wardley mapping.
I’ve been doing some speaking too. I took a delightful excursion into the world of live art to speak at The Pacitti Company with the amazing artist Gemma Marmalade. We talked about how punk and feminist principles inform the (very different) work we do. Or ‘our practice’, as they say in the art world. I did my talk about feminism, punk rock and public services at People Before Pixels. I loved this meet up and it’s going to become a regular date in my diary. I spoke about digital transformation at Think Cloud for Digital Government in London and took a trip up to Manchester to talk about local government digital and procurement at Think Cloud For Local Government.
To do all that stuff, I spend a lot of time looking at screens. To balance this out in my spare time, I’ve unsubscribed from Netflix and Amazon Prime. It’s made me so happy. I read books again! Next up is the new Nicola Barker novel, The Cauliflower. A new novel by my favourite writer, at the exact moment I’ve started reading again. It doesn’t get better than that.
I’ve been doing the final third of my contract at UK Trade and Investment. My team’s recent blog posts explain what we’ve been doing better than I can.
Digital service for UK businesses that want to export – Talking to Businesses and Researching Export
Services for staff – Finding People in UKTI
Source: UKTI Digital Trade Blog
We ended 2015 by briefing Lord Maude, Minister of State for Trade and Investment, on the digital service for exporters project. He said it was ‘exactly what [he] was looking for’. But more importantly, the users we’ve been testing with say the same.
