Five takeaways from NHS Digital’s Digital Delivery Centre

06/10/2017 by Lisa Jeffery Leave a Comment

Whiteboards on show at NHS Digital — Emma – works out loud at the Digital Delivery Centre

NHS Digital is transforming health and care services in a fast-changing digital age. You can read more about this on their blog http://transformation.blog.nhs.uk as they ‘work out loud’.

NHS Digital delivers national IT, systems and infrastructure from its Digital Delivery Centre in Leeds – a working space that clearly speaks to its values. A visit to the Digital Delivery Centre this week provided insights into these values and what makes teams work well. Here are five top takeaways.

1. Collaboration is enabled

When you enter the space, it is striking how open it is and how people are enabled to collaborate. Teams that need to collaborate co-locate whenever possible and there are breakout spaces where people can work together. There is a reliance on guidelines and standards, so having the right people in the space and enabling them to connect is essential.

2. Agile working works

Teams work in an agile way. This means they build products/systems/software rapidly in short ‘sprints’, releasing developments as soon as possible so that they can be tested and developed further. It is important to ‘fail fast’ so that teams can quickly exclude anything that doesn’t work well. Crucially, ensuring people who are empowered to act can come together to make decisions leads to more efficient ways of working.

3. Openness makes things better

There are large whiteboards in the space for working out loud. This allows teams to hold stand ups (instead of longer sit down meetings). It also means it is easy to understand what everyone is working on. People gather around the boards sharing knowledge and experience while collaborating on the problem in hand. Dashboards are also visible so everyone can see progress.

4. Cross-disciplinary teams deliver

Teams are structured around expertise for the work that needs to be done. This includes a Spotify tribe/squad type model for cross-disciplinary teams. Cross-team working is key to effective collaboration and ensures systems and services are joined up.

5. Focusing on user needs is fundamental

User research and co-designing with users is vital because teams must know that they are delivering the right things with minimum waste. Visible on the walls and whiteboards are detailed personas. These reveal insights into people who use the services and makes clear their needs. Designing using prototypes to get early feedback and working with real people ensures user needs are met.

There is much any team can learn from these ways of working.

Thanks to Emma Harvey, head of product at NHS Digital, for hosting a tour for our group from the University of Leeds.

Four lessons from Leeds Poverty Truth Commission

21/05/2017 by Lisa Jeffery Leave a Comment

Leeds Poverty Truth Commission launched in 2014 to explore the question: ‘What if people who have directly faced poverty were involved in decisions about poverty?’

I first got involved with Leeds Poverty Truth in 2016 as one of 20 or so business and civic commissioners. Being a commissioner with Leeds Poverty Truth is a year-long journey that involves monthly meet ups and various other interactions with testifying commissioners who have lived experience of poverty. Sometimes the full Commission meets. Sometimes we meet in small groups or we meet spontaneously as individuals. Most meet ups take place at Ebor Court in Leeds, followed by lunch. But meet ups have taken place everywhere from Leeds Civic Hall and Leeds City Council Chamber to the offices of Victoria shopping centre and Leeds Business Improvement District. Other times there have been exploratory visits to places such as the Real Junk Food Project supermarket and LS14 Trust community cafe.

Being a commissioner is not only about meeting with others in places in and around the city. It is also about the changes that happen in and around us as individuals. When we started on this journey there was an emphasis on listening. And, in one of our first meet ups we learnt about four levels of listening: downloading, factual, empathic and generative, as defined by Otto Scharmer. Listening is important because the degree to which we listen is proportional to the changes that can happen. Here, some of us learnt that we sometimes don’t listen as well as we could.

Each year the Commission presents its findings and the findings of the 2016-17 commission will be presented this autumn. Individuals and organisations will then seek to embed the learning into their practice. Ahead of this, I have been reflecting on my own learning to date. Here are my top four takeaways…

1. Relationships are key to positive outcomes

Having spent time getting to know everyone, my first takeaway is about the importance of relationships. Notably, how relationships require trust and how trust builds over time. One time we did an exercise called Mapping Leeds which involves commissioners pairing up to explore the city through each other’s eyes. As we walked we talked about what we saw and how it made us feel. We noted our sense of place and any real or perceived boundaries. And we discussed our observations together as group. The key learning was about the importance of empathy and recognising that relationships can change ourselves and our cities.

2. There is a place for structure and spontaneity

The journey of being a commissioner is structured into four stages: engagement, exploration, experimentation and embedding. Engagement sets the scene and tunes your senses for what follows. For example, we shared stories, poetry and visual art created by testifying commissioners. We set out a shared vision to collaborate and unite to explore solutions to poverty, locally. Exploration involves various exercises so that we can get to know one another and the issues. For example, we met with the DWP to share experiences and discuss services. We are now at the experimentation stage. This is about spontaneously testing things and failing fast in ways that we can build on. We have not yet reached the embedding stage but this will be essential to delivering positive outcomes.

3. Everyone is an expert with wisdom to share

Everyone involved with Leeds Poverty Truth has learning to offer, everyone is an expert. There is wisdom to share, everywhere. Sharing our stories, thoughts and our journey has brought us all closer together on a very human level.

A few favourite quotes heard during my time with the Commission include:

“We can do big things in a small way”
“Not everything starts with action, sometimes it starts with thoughts and ideas”
“It’s like a pyramid and people don’t know what’s going on at the bottom of the pyramid. One person cannot see it all…”
“People give a face to the facts”

From conversations between commissioners the following themes emerged:

Poverty is no longer a thing you can keep quiet about

Transactional to transformational

Economy of hopelessness

Individually tailored responses

Confidence building

Humanising

And from these themes we have gone on to test several experiments.

4. It is powerful to prototype the future, together

My favourite stage so far is the experimental stage. We are now collaborating to prototype the future, together. Earlier in the process we created a ‘living systems’ map of Leeds to explore what makes strong communities. This led us to understand that experiments must be flexible. They must happen in the right place. We learnt that fear separates and that institutions need to be more mobile. How communication can be a blocker and one-to-one communication is powerful. We learnt that communication is a two-way process, that it is often the ‘receiver’ of the communication who really communicates…

LPTC experiments — Potential future experiments

We are now working on three experiments: a jobs app, a vehicle to share stories, and a service design experiment. Other experiments being considered (pictured above) include college food banks, various ‘junk food’ type services, and co-creating communications using ways of working inspired by Leeds GovJam, as recently experienced by members ofLeeds Poverty Truth. We do not yet know how these experiments will turn out, but they are already making us think, feel and act differently when it comes to the complex issue of poverty.

The lessons learnt and relationships developed at Leeds Poverty Truth will extend way beyond this blog and the term of this year’s Commission. So, I highly recommend being a commissioner if you get chance. There are also other ways to get involved to help the movement.

Find out more about Leeds Poverty Truth Commission

Five lessons learnt from working in digital

28/04/2017 by Lisa Jeffery Leave a Comment

Today I was invited to speak to students at the University of Leeds during Leeds Digital Festival. The purpose was to share some learning, experiences and challenges of working in digital and to offer some tips. So, I shared five things that I wish I’d known more about when starting out in the hope that it might help others. I share them again here with the same aim…

Working in digital — thinking beyond the tech (photo from Leeds GovJam)

1. Don’t assume people know what digital is…

The ace Janet Hughes from Doteveryone recently published an excellent article called ‘Helping Leaders Understand Digital’. In it is this quote from their user research: ‘The challenge for me is knowing what it is…’

This quote illustrates a key point of working in digital — that understanding what digital really is and why it matters is crucial.

I touched on this point in the Charity Social Media Toolkit, saying “‘digital’ is not so much about technology as it is about a networked mindset…” This networked mindset means a more open way of working, network thinking, and a whole host of other things aside from the technology.

This point matters because without understanding how digital changes everything, we can easily fall into traps. Traps of silo digital working. Traps of digitising what already exists, rather than opening our minds to the possibilities that digital affords and re-imaging what could exist…

2. Be social and build your network

There’s a saying that ‘your network is your net worth’. It’s also the title of a book by the famous entrepreneur Porter Gale. This relates back to lesson number one because in a networked world we need network thinking.

Writer and social age explorer Julian Stodd published a book called the ‘Social Leadership Handbook’. It is about the skills and mindset that is needed by leaders in the social age. These days, organisations of all stripes are realising the value of the networks and connections that employees can tap into and share at work.

In the digital social age, success is linked to social capital, to communities, and to sharing what you know. So, use digital to enhance the physical. For example, digital can help you to develop side projects outside of work. Side projects can enable you to develop new skills and connect to new networks. I have several side projects and jamming is one that I discovered via social media.

A jam for anyone who has never heard of one before is like a music jam — where people create things together that they could not create alone. But in this context, it is about innovation and collaboration around problem solving. Jams are organised using digital tools like Trello, Basecamp and Google docs — tools that can help anyone connect, collaborate and work in the open.

3. Keep learning, working out loud

The world of learning is being disrupted by digital. There are online courses (MOOCs). There are learning communities developing all over the world. There’s social media. There’s online streaming of debates, discussions and conferences that you may not otherwise be able to access. Digital changes the game all the time. There will be new tools. New techniques. New trends. It is important to keep learning.

The awesome John Stepper wrote an influential book called ‘Working Out Loud’ about learning and how sharing your work in the open makes it better. It’s about building skills and collaborating. It’s about building capacity in organisations. Dion Hinchcliffe is a Chief Strategy Officer and has said that working out loud is perhaps the most fundamental digital workplace skill.

An example of working out loud is blogging and free publishing tools like Medium allow anyone to write and connect their ideas with those of others.

4. Start with needs, not digital

Digital is a tool, an enabler, and it can do lots of things. But, it’s important to recognise that it’s people that drive digital and digital change, not technology.

This means you should not start with digital solutions as a given when approaching problems. It means you should always put people first, start with their needs, and get physical to explore the bigger picture beyond digital.

If you are creating a digital thing, an app, a website, it is good to approach it as if it were a service. Think of the whole experience that people have before and after they use that thing. Use the tools and techniques of service design and design thinking. Research what people need, talk to them, watch them, spend time with them to understand how they interact with digital things.

If you do not put people first and start with their needs, you can easily make the wrong thing and waste a lot of time and money.

5. Digital change is about people

Some people talk of digital change and some talk about ‘digital transformation’, but this term can lead to confusion.

The term ‘digital transformation’ is defined by Wikipedia as “the changes associated with the application of digital technology in all aspects of human society.”

The key word for me here is human. At the heart of digital change is organisational and culture change — and this stuff is hard. Indeed, in my experience, digital is often the easy bit — it’s people who are more challenging.

Thinking beyond technology to what digital is about, an open, collaborative networked mindset, is key to unlocking its potential.

When change is hard, keep going and always use data and research when proposing changes.

Change can take time so be patient. Basecamps are there for good reason when you are climbing Mount Everest 😉

…

Here’s a link to the slides

Why I volunteer at Leeds GovJam

10/06/2016 by Lisa Jeffery 2 Comments

It’s been a week since Leeds GovJam, part of Global GovJam, the 48-hour collaboration event designed to kick-start innovation through providing solutions to public sector challenges. That’s more than enough time to get back to ‘normal’, the everyday, and to reflect on what was learned this year. I’ve been volunteering for Leeds GovJam and Leeds Service Jam since 2014, helping local hosts run these remarkable events.

Being a jam helper has helped me learn loads about service design, design thinking and how small acts of creativity can create bigger change over time. So, what did I learn at Leeds GovJam 2016?

Here are some things from Leeds GovJam that stuck with me this time around…

Leeds GovJam poster — Leeds GovJam 2016 poster

Dealing with ambiguity is a great thing to do. Each year the Jam launches with a secret theme upon which Jammers base their solutions to challenges facing the public sector. This year the theme involved an animation of circles. You can check it out here in the Global GovJam Secret Theme 2016 video. When dealing with ambiguity, it’s good to get going, as it says in the video, by ‘learning by doing’, ‘doing not talking’.
Creating time and a safe space for fun matters. This is about building a bedrock of trust to do awesome things. In Leeds, we played rock-paper-scissors, and it was ace.
It totally makes sense to think of the Jam as like a music jam, especially jazz, because improvisation and flow are key to unlocking its magic, bringing out the best in individuals and teams.
‘Make prototypes not presentations’ is an important mantra for jamming. Only by making it real, showing the thing, and testing and interacting with something can you get a proper sense of what works, and what doesn’t work.
Being empathic and human-centred is at the heart of this stuff. Jams are great for learning how to start with people, their lives and needs, and how to wrap services around users. This means involving people early on and adopting a cycle of continual improvement, testing things, breaking things, and refining things over time.
Despite loving digital stuff, there is something revitalising about real people working together in real life, making real things. Co-creating and trying out and new things, together, IRL.
Jams do weird things with time and energy. Seriously, if you could bottle the spirit of the Jam it would be transformational for many organisations. Jams compress way more work into 48-hours than the standard 9-5 working week. Thing is, for many people, the spirit of the Jam is distinct from everyday life. This is part of GovJam’s appeal but it also highlights the challenges of embedding cultures of creativity and innovation in many organisations.
With UK Jams in Birmingham and Leeds held this year during Volunteers Week, it’s worth noting that Global GovJam is run by volunteers on very little budget, which speaks volumes about the power of the Jam to create change.
Volunteering at the Jam is an amazing experience from which you will get much more than you give. You learn new skills and techniques to take back to everyday life and work, and it’s great for meeting new people. To get involved check out the Global GovJam and Global Service Jam websites for Jams happening near you – or start one yourself.
Last but not least, jamming is great for learning more about yourself and about what it takes to work successfully together with others.

In 2016 the Global GovJam ran in 32 cities and Leeds was home to the Global GovJam HQ team who make this thing happen annually around the word. So, big THANKS to you guys and to Jammers everywhere. Keep going! #YouAreTheJam

Check out Leeds GovJam 2016 photos

And the Global #GGovJam story on Twitter

Leeds Service Jam: like jazz but different

04/03/2015 by Lisa Jeffery Leave a Comment

Last weekend I had a blast volunteering at Leeds Service Jam, held at the brilliant ODI Leeds. Leeds Service Jam is a part of Global Service Jam, an annual collaboration event that connects thousands of folk through the web and a common purpose.

How does service jam work?

So, what is the purpose and how does it work? Well, it goes a little something like this: the global theme is kept secret until each jam starts. As the theme is revealed at jams in different time zones it creates a wave of activity around the world – see #GSJam. You then have 48 hours to problem-solve through service design (i.e. to make something useful and human-centred). Jam principles highlight stuff like learning by doing and making prototypes, not presentations. As a result, service jams are great for anyone wanting to explore subjects like design thinking, creativity and teamwork.

The introductory video announcing the global theme was shown in Leeds on the Friday night before kickoff. The theme was a process diagram for how to create an origami fortune teller thing. Jammers started scratching their heads and we held the first of several Skype sessions to see how our jam ‘twin’ Copenhagen was progressing. We pulled out the Post-its, sharpened our Sharpies and started sharing ideas. Four teams were formed and Leeds Service Jam began…

An incredible amount of work in just 48 hours

Fuelled by coffee, cake and cracking tunes, the collaboration and co-creation continued over Saturday and Sunday. There was a great spirit of teamwork. Everyone had different backgrounds and skills and everyone helped each other out. Problems were defined, enabling each team’s service to be better designed. Teams were encouraged to ‘get out of the building’, to test concepts and get feedback. Ideas became prototypes that were tested, iterated, refined. As the weekend drew to a close, jammers uploaded stacks of stuff to the Global Service Jam website and did a show and tell. Really, an incredible amount of work was done in just 48 hours…

Post-its and project planning for Leeds Service Jam 2015 — Post-its and planning

A safe space to try out new things

People spend good money on books and classes to learn about service design, creativity and innovation, but jams give you real life experience of all these things and a whole lot more. It’s like jazz but different.

Despite working to a tight deadline, jams are playful, a safe space to try out new things. People have fun. They dress up and get down to music. They have a laugh, sharing and improvising. They may even get involved in a jam meme. Jams are also not-for-profit. Organisers are all volunteers and people freely give up their weekends to take part. This creates an infectious energy and a sense of purpose and connectedness, which is something to think about as networks and collaboration become ever more important to the way we all work and live.

So big thanks to Leeds host, Matt Edgar, and everyone who made this happen!

Check out Leeds Service Jam photos