Week 37: A million
Our service, NHS Record a vaccination, reached a milestone in January of 1 million vaccinations recorded. I designed a mission patch sticker to celebrate.
We’ve come a long way since our pilot last year, and it is great to have completed our first winter vaccination campaign.
It’s a proud moment for our digital team, and we’ve worked hard continually iterating and improving the service – with plenty more still to do.
We should also acknowledge that the vaccinations only happen because of the the work of all the NHS staff and volunteers in vaccination teams across the country. They’re not just using our digital service, but managing all the people, locations, logistics and equipment needed to run all the clinics. It’s a huge effort.
Plus a big thanks to everyone who gets their vaccinations. It’s not just an issue of personal health, but a altruistic social act too – getting vaccinated helps protect us all.
Team days
We had another of our monthly 2 day team get togethers this week, in Leeds. We’ve really found this to be a good rhythm, and the in-person days have definitely helped the team bond.
The days aren’t overly planned. Anyone can suggest a session that might benefit from the whole team being together. The rest of the time is unstructured, and people will go off into smaller groups.
Me and the other designers spent a good few hours collaborating on a bunch of quickfire design iterations based on our last round of user research. Somehow, crowding round a laptop screen and trying out ideas until we’re all happy feels way faster than doing it remotely over a video call.
We had a team retro, and one of the many positve post-its on the wall was that as a team we could now have ‘productive disagreement’. I didn’t write it but I agree entirely, and it’s a great sign of team maturity.
Inner critic
My colleague Georgina Watts has written a great blog post called How to silence your inner critic enough to write publicly, based on a session she facilitated at UKGovCamp.
I attended this session and really enjoyed it. It was fascinating to hear the different strategies people employed to get over the fear of publishing - and heartening to see that there were many people who didn’t yet write publicly, but wanted to.
Even though I’ve been doing these notes for 37 weeks now, it’s still with a little trepidation that I start writing each Friday. Thankfully, the weeknotes format is quite forgiving, and I can remind myself that there’s no need to articulate some amazing insight each week. At least I hope not.
Links
- We had a team session about testing, which introduced me to the concept of the test pyramid and the the test diamond, and a healthy debate ensued about the best approach for us.
- How to create and deliver strategies in digital government from Mili Malde is a deep dive into the strategy of an area of the Department for Education that I previously worked in, where we had the challenge of policy and digital being developed in parallel – and not always in sync. Mili helped steer the ship out of choppy waters.
Hosting a birthday party for my soon-to-be 9 year old daughter this weekend. There will be craft and cake.