Week 39: OK Arrrr
I’ve been trying to understand OKRs this week. I knew what the letters stood for – objectives and key results – but barely more than that.
Our leadership are keen to have OKRs for each team, and I’ve been asked to set personal OKRs too. They’re meant to be aspirational and ambitious, I believe, so it’ll take a bit of thought.
If you have any ideas, let me know.
Not recording a vaccination
We did some timeboxed design exploration this week about how we could better let users record when someone is not given a vaccination.
Whenever we come to this topic it opens up a bit of an existential can of worms, as our service is called Record a vaccination, and the scope of recording non-vaccinations could be quite wide.
Non-vaccinations covers anything including non-attendance at a booked appointment, a walk-in patient who has to be turned away for some reason, or someone changing their mind at the last minute.
We have heard some valid reasons for recording this though, including to schedule follow-up actions, to opt patients out from vaccination invitations, or for analysis.
As with many things in the NHS, the question becomes more about where is the best place to record the information, and what happens with the data?
Hopefully our design sketches can at least help to prompt some of this wider conversation.
Admin interfaces
I’ve been designing up a basic admin interface for our service.
This is something we’ve long acknowledged we need. In common with many digital services I’ve worked on, some of the issues that get raised with our support team currently have to be escalated up to someone who can directly fix them in the database. Not ideal, for many reasons.
Admin interfaces require some investment in design and development time, but can pay off longer term.
We’ve finally got some bandwidth to tackle this, so it’s a question of working out what the most common support tasks are, and going from there.
Products vs services
In our vaccinations digital all hands this week there was a diagram which showed a split between product teams and service teams. It confused me at first, although I now understand that the service teams are mostly smaller cross-cutting teams looking at opportunities to join digital stuff up.
I’ve long held the view that in digital the words ‘product’ and ‘service’ have become interchangeable in most contexts. As a linguistics graduate, I think about connotation more than denotation.
In the non-digital word, products imply physical things you buy once and keep, like mops, and services things that are are intangible and might require ongoing payment, like window cleaning.
Digital smushes these together, and who can say whether Netflix or GOV.UK is a product or a service. Kinda both?
Words are hard.
Links
- Mike Gallagher has started weeknotes, with w/c 17 February 2025. It’s a strong opening post too.
- Via Mike, The Gulf Between Design and Engineering is great. Killer quote: “The design handover, this supposedly magic moment where design has finished and engineering begins, is the root cause of many of the collaboration problems that product teams have.” Yep.
- How we use OKRs on GOV.UK from Steve Messer has some practical advice on OKRs.
- NHS dm+d browser is a confusingly named but useful service that has a searchable list of medicines, medical devices and ingredients and all their various codes.
Taking the kids to see Trash! at Sadler’s Wells at the weekend. Looks fun.