Categories
Writing

Confessions of a reindeer impersonator

So another festive season is nearly over and millions of us will dust down our gym kit and try to remember where the healthy food is found in the supermarket.

Friends and family disperse back to their homes (if they’ve been able to and wanted to travel) and the vast majority of us, several pounds lighter in the pocket and several pounds heavier around the waistline will trudge bleary eyed through the winter darkness back to the reality of life during a global pandemic.

There are more than a few people out there who will already be counting down the weeks and months until we can do it all over again. I’ve got no problem with those who love Christmas and everything that goes with it.

Despite the rather depressing introduction to this piece, I’m no Scrooge. I get genuine pleasure from catching up with friends and family and giving well thought out gifts.

But I’m not one of those people who just can’t wait until the tinsel goes back up. The weeks and weeks filled with shitty adverts, the same old music playing on a loop as we queue up waiting to pay for items that people on our televisions have told us to buy – it just isn’t my cup of tea.

Reasons not to be cheerful

You’re probably thinking that some childhood event may have triggered my disdain towards this time of year, but you’d be wrong.

Firstly, my beloved nanna died on Christmas Day in 2014, and since then I’ve felt that none of the commercial or religious aspects of Christmas really mean a great deal to me. I spent that Christmas morning switching between sobbing and trying to cook a beef wellington from scratch.

I’ve never been a religious person and I have no need or desire for ‘stuff’. I see Christmas more of a winter festival of thanks and reflection. I just want to hide away and keep warm.

Seeing family and friends and being healthy and happy are much more important to me than buying heaps of stuff we just don’t need.

But well before that particular Christmas, there was something else which may have influenced my thinking.

You see, for a few months in 1998, it really was Christmas everyday for me.

Tourism college

I left school in May 1997 and decided to continue my education by studying a BTEC National Diploma in Travel and Tourism. I had a misguided assumption that a career in this industry would bring me fortune whilst enabling me see the world for free.

Initially, my dreams were shot down in flames after undertaking some work experience in a local luxury travel agency. The most exciting it got was making mugs of tea for the staff and putting stickers on brochures for holidays I thought I’d never be able to afford.

Then, much to my delight, my college arranged for all the students to spend a summer working at various holiday resorts.

Things were looking up.

Or not, as it turned out.

Sweet Scottish summer

After a 9 hour coach journey, I found myself in the Scottish Highlands. I was to spend the summer of 1998 at Santa Claus Land.

Yes, you did read that correctly. Santa Claus Land was a  children’s theme park which opened all year round.

Part of the decaying Aviemore Mountain Resort, the place was an utter mishmash.

Highlights included:

  • a dinosaur ride
  • an amusement arcade (including one of those old 90s virtual reality simulators)
  • a go kart track
  • a crazy golf course
  • a petting zoo
  • various props from an old episode of It’s A Knockout dotted around randomly

It needed a lick (well, a lake) of paint and most of the attractions probably wouldn’t get past the health and safety police these days.

On arrival I was allocated a cramped room in a dismal staff hostel. My roommate for the next few months was a perma-stoned kitchen porter from Glasgow called Donald. I often felt like I needed a fog light attaching to my arse when negotiating the small room, such was the hash-induced haze. He was actually quite good company when he wasn’t comatose underneath his grubby duvet, but it was hardly the sun soaked Spanish villa I had anticipated when I signed up for tourism college.

I worked as a Kids Club Co-ordinator and my main duties involved:

  • organising games of rounders and football
  • face painting sessions
  • putting up with being bitten, kicked in the shins and punched in the bollocks

I also had to take my turn dressing up as the various park characters. Think what Disneyland would be like if it was taken over by Haven Holidays, and you’re along the right lines.

An image showing sketches of the Santa Claus Land characters
An image showing sketches of the Santa Claus Land characters

I can remember some details about a few of these:

Santa Claus

The head honcho in Christmasville. We had to wear a big fake Santa head and sit on a throne whilst someone else read stories to the little horrors – it was so hot and boring, we often dozed off hidden by the mask. A gentle nudge from the storyteller signified that snooze time was over.

Polar Postie

A polar bear dressed as a postal worker. Obviously.

Bertha Bigfoot

An enormous white fluffy monster which was probably supposed to be a Yeti (I understand there’s a difference – please correct me in the comments below cryptozoology fans) but I don’t think they couldn’t think of a good enough name.

Rudy Reindeer

A reindeer who had the biggest, heaviest false reindeer head you can possibly imagine.

Avid Merrion Christmas and a whiplashed New Year

After one rather hectic day dressed up as Rudy Reindeer and wearing his massive furry bonce, I retired to my narcotic-infused fleapit and woke up the next morning unable to move, let alone get out of bed.

I eventually managed to crawl to the local GP. Not many people can say they’ve been given whiplash by a reindeer, but I certainly can.

I spent the next week in a neck brace. With my ginger curly hair, I was surely the inspiration for the Leigh Francis character, Avid Merrion.

Be careful what you wish for

Gradually, Santa Claus Land sucked every last bit of Christmas spirit from me.

Christmas music played all day, every day but over a terrible tinny PA system. The park was falling to bits and some of the staff could hardly look after themselves, let alone a bunch of kids.

It really wasn’t the sort of place you’d actually like to spend any time in at Christmas. It’s now been bulldozed to make way for a redeveloped Aviemore resort. In some ways that makes me sad, but it was long overdue.

I made some great friends in Aviemore and I’ll always remember that summer. I grew up a hell of a lot, it prepared me in many ways for adulthood and it made me realise that travel and tourism wasn’t all infinity pools and cocktails.

Most importantly though, when I hear someone say they wish it could be Christmas everyday, I can tell them from my own painful experience that they really shouldn’t.

Categories
Weeknotes

Review of the 2019 work year

I had some time off over Christmas, and I saw a flurry of posts from people talking about their work year. At the time, I didn’t really feel like writing a review of my previous year.

There’d been so much going on, I just wanted to clear my head and spend some time with my family.

But I’ve been back at work for a couple of weeks now, and it seems like a good time to reflect on 2019 and look at what the future holds.

Strap yourselves in – it’s been quite a ride.

January to July

In January last year, I’d just moved into a new role – Senior Content Designer for the DWP Design System team. But as quickly as it started, for various reasons the team was placed on hold.

Not one to sit on my hands, when Simon Wilson reached out to see if I fancied helping him out on a service he’d just joined, I bit his hand off.

This was actually the service I’d recently left, but a change in direction for the service and the opportunity to work with Si on a daily basis meant I was going to learn a lot, and have a bit of fun at the same time.

I expected a challenge, but it was hard. And I mean really hard.

I can’t and won’t go into details, but we were essentially trying to design a new service with users (staff, citizens and 3rd parties) at the heart, but from within what was traditionally a delivery-focussed digital development team.

Most of the team weren’t really used to working with so many designers. They had already built some digital products for the previous incarnation of the service and for other similar services without any real design input.

There were multiple stakeholder engagement challenges, team relationships and trust needed either re-building or building from scratch.

As well as trying to land the message that we were designing a service and not just a digital product, there were conflicting views on what we should and shouldn’t build – whether we were to use some of what we already had or if we should have been ‘building’ anything at all.

There were weeks when it seemed like the designers and user researchers were having a competition as to who could fry their brains the most.

I’ve written about some of the qualities and attributes you need to work as a Content Designer here – thick skin and patience are a couple that spring to mind. But 2019 really tested my patience and resolve.

But you know what? We did a good job. We did the right things. We made the right calls. And we rebuilt some trust in, and knowledge of the design process, too.

We had a laugh, too. If my 2019 work year was turned into a movie, it’d be an action thriller starring Nic Cage. Or Nick Cave, depending on who you speak to.

August

I crawled into the last week of July desperate for a break and some rest, but August was glorious.

I left the office on 1 August, deleted Slack from my phone and the next day I pointed our car towards France, and drove.

4 nights in eastern France, 7 nights in Switzerland, 3 nights in the Loire valley and a final 7 days in south Brittany.

It was so nice to spend so much time with my young family and my batteries were well and truly topped up.

I was so active and ate so healthily I actually lost weight on holiday. Absolute scenes.

I came back feeling great.

September to November

I dived straight in to sharing my thoughts when I returned to work and even started to write week notes.

I’d given everything I had before my holiday to make sure we’d done the right thing for our users and I kept up my enthusiasm for a good few days. But it soon became clear that I needed a clean break. It seemed like the right time.

I’d been made aware there was an opportunity to help support the Content Designers in our Health Digital Transformation Service a little bit more, so I asked to do that for a couple of days each week.

Everyone involved in helping me do that was so supportive, and I was so grateful for the opportunity to dip my toe into something new.

In the time I had, I put a few things in place to help the team communicate a little better over multiple sites, and made some recommendations on how best to structure the team in the future.

I did this for a couple of months, and had been talking about an opportunity to spend more time there. But then I got the great news that our Design System team had been given the green light again.

Having waited for this role for 10 months, I now had a dilemma. Deep down, I know my strengths lie in operations – fixing the basics, introducing tools and processes to make things better for other people, and looking at things a little more strategically than you get chance to in a service team. But I also enjoyed supporting the great team in Health.

When it came to it, I knew I had to take up the Design System role – it was more ‘me’. So at the end of November I moved back into the team.

December

You wait a while for a new role, then much like buses, 2 turn up at the same time.

Mel Cannon, our Head of Content Design, had been speaking to the community for a few months about creating a couple of new Lead Content Designer roles within the team. These roles would sit on the design senior leadership team and support Mel with some of our strategic and operational work.

It seemed like a good fit, so I went for it.

I only went and got one.

I’d spent some of the final weeks of December helping to plan our winter DWP Content Design community meet-up. I’d also been planning a day dedicated to kicking off some strategic planning around some of the key challenges that our Content Designers face in their daily work.

I’d have been gutted not to be able to continue that work, so I’m really pleased to say from 24 February I’ll move into a new role as ContentOps and Community Lead.

Looking further into 2020

What does ContentOps and Community Lead actually mean? Good question.

I’ll be writing a lot more on here about my work, so in my first few days I’ll write a post exploring in more detail what ContentOps is, what it actually means for DWP Digital and how I’ll be supporting our amazing community to do their best work.

In the meantime, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks helping to put some building blocks in place for the Design System team and I’ll be writing about that soon.

That work does cross over into ContentOps in some ways, but it needs and deserves more than just me dipping in and out, so we’re hoping to advertise the soon-to-be vacant Senior Content Designer role on the Design System team in the next few weeks – I’ll share the vacancy as and when it arrives.

Thank you

There’s no way I would’ve got through 2019 intact let alone ending it on such a high, without the help and support of my family, friends and colleagues.

I won’t run the risk of leaving someone off or embarrassing anyone by naming people, but you know who you are. So many brilliant, talented dedicated public servants I’m so lucky to have worked with.

Our work here can be so rewarding, but we’re honest in saying it’s also really hard. Don’t let this put you off – if you love a challenge and want to join us, I’d love to talk to you more about what we do and what I’ll be doing soon to help support our Content Designers.

2019 was a pretty wild ride. I’m hoping 2020 is just as exciting and challenging.

I’m definitely ready for it.

Categories
Weeknotes

Weeknote for week ending 30 August 2019

I’ve been at DWP Digital for almost 18 months now, but haven’t felt comfortable about blogging about my work.

That’s mainly because I’ve been finding my feet, I didn’t think I had the time and I’ve not been sure about how much I can actually say.

But now the time is right. I can talk about the approaches I’m taking to my work, without going into too many of the sensitive details of the subject matter.

And I’m making the time to do it. Starting right now.

Tuesday

This was my first day back in the office after almost 4 weeks of not being here. A 3 week holiday and a hot and sunny bank holiday were just what the Dr ordered.

I felt refreshed, re-energised and ready to take on new challenges.

It started as the usual day back from a holiday – checking emails and Slack. There was a daily stand up with some of the team dialled in remotely from Harrogate and I handed out biscuits from France and talked a lot about my holiday adventures.

The team have been busy since I’ve been away, and the pilot service I’m working on is progressing well. But there was one email thread which did initially deflate me. Something I’d been working on for a good few months with our helpful and knowledgable embedded policy SME, had been pulled from use at the last minute. I’d finished the first version of it just before I went on leave and it felt like it was in a good place, and was looking forward to iterating it based on user-research.

But some key people hadn’t seen it, and confirmation of their views on the direction of it hadn’t found their way to me. I do understand the concerns with it, and I do share some of them myself. But there’s that thing about work done with the information you have at the time, and it was a hard piece of work. I’d needed to balance minimum policy and legal requirements, with the basic principles of content design – keep it simple, using plain English.

I did find it was a little frustrating that I wasn’t there to explain my design decisions in more detail, and work with the senior stakeholders and the team to find a solution together.

There were some positives to take away, though. The content team rallied around and dealt with it quickly and professionally, and there’s now an opportunity to make sure our assurance processes include all of the right people at the right time. It’s also nice to know for future reference that senior stakeholders really do want to make our content as user-centred and friendly as possible.

I went home happy.

Wednesday

Ceremonies day. The day started with review and retro. It was great to see the work everyone has been putting in to ensure the service is truly user-centred.

During one playback, it was clear that there’s still work to do to make sure the research, thinking, and ideas exploration parts of the design process are valued, and that designers and developers are working together as closely as possible. A product that had previously been deployed to users as an MVP had been iterated by our developers in a couple of days without any design input.

It was done with best intentions – they wanted to make it more user-friendly, which is great to hear. They’d put a lot of effort in and were pleased with what they’d done. But it means the designers are now playing catch up, and some changes that were required following some previous user-research hadn’t been captured.

It’s nobody’s fault – annual leave and a couple of team changes meant it’d fallen through the gaps. These things happen. It’s not a disaster by any means, but it’s a reminder that like in any relationship, the bond between design and development needs constant attention.

Retro was really positive – it’s good to hear so many people enjoying their work.

Show and tell was really enjoyable – it was brilliant to hear an overview from our fantastic user researcher, Jo, and some of our front line staff about the findings from the pilot so far. Everyone is doing such a good job.

We finished off with sprint planning. A solid 2 weeks to follow, with some tickets to pick up on some letters I need to work on, and some planned user research to focus on content. Top stuff.

Thursday

A bit of a bitty day.

After stand up I had a catch up over coffee with a couple of people about a project I’ve been waiting to hear news on, which was followed by our weekly (and always good natured) ‘Town Hall’ meeting. This gives an opportunity to hear what our 3 feature teams and wider support teams have been up to. It’s also an opportunity to greet new starters and get the lowdown from our leaders on what’s happening at a strategic level.

Smashed out another 550 metres (20 lengths) in the pool over lunch, but had my first experience of pool rage. Someone in the fast lane wasn’t stopping for anyone. We all want a good swim, but there’s no need to be so rude. 700m the day before and 550m on Tuesday – I’m enjoying this breaking up my day and giving me time to relax and think.

In the afternoon had a good session with the design team (Jo, Mikey and Sam in the room, and Izzy dialled in through Slack). We agreed a way to tackle some fixes to the work the developers had shown us on Wednesday, and planned some more user research on it which we’d love to get them involved in. We also had a laugh – a really good laugh, and this is really important in a team. Certainly for me.

I ended the day with a positive chat with Dan, our senior leader, who’s kindly given me an opportunity to spend a couple of days each week working in the DWP health transformation team. I’m pleased I’ll be able to give the people I line manage more of my time, as well as a development opportunity for myself.

Left a bit earlier than usual to take my eldest to his swimming lesson. He’s just moved up groups, but didn’t look out of place. He’s lightning quick!

Friday

Over to Harrogate to see how the team are getting on over there. It’s been over a month since I last visited, and I’d forgotten how relaxing the scenic train journey is through Lower Wharfedale.

The pilot service here is in full swing now. It was great to see a physical board has been set up by the team here, to track the progress of people who are taking part in the pilot service. There’s also a great new ‘learnings board’ with cards full of information of things we can learn from to iterate the service.

Had a call after lunch to talk about the discussion guide for the research we’re doing next week in Pontefract. We’re testing a letter and an information booklet. Jo has done a brilliant job preparing for it – never underestimate the value of a great user researcher. Looking forward to a meaty day of learning.

In summary

It’s been a decent few days back. A few things to chew over, but looking forward to a full week next week, starting with a visit to our Manchester hub to spend a day with our wonderful Content Design community, user research in Pontefract on Tuesday, and a drive over to Blackpool on Wednesday to spend some time with the content designers there, learning about what they’re working on.

But now it’s the weekend and time to relax. Have a good one, whatever you’re up to.

Categories
Content Design

Should we apply content design principles to job titles?

I was taking a lunchtime swim last week. I was the only person in the pool. It was quiet, calm and it gave me time to think as I trundled up and down each 25m length.

This popped into my head, and as part of my fresh start I thought it was a good one to get into my blog.

One of the most useful blog posts I read after I started at DWP was this one about naming things by @BeksVB.

And it got me thinking – if we really want agile delivery teams to be truly user-centred, do we need to think about renaming some of the job titles in the team?

Not that a job title means much to some people, but I think it does help pin some kind of responsibility and direction to the people in those roles.

The one that got me thinking to start with was the role of the Product Owner (PO) or Product Manager (PM).

I’ll say to start with I’m fortunate to work on a service where our POs fight for the user. They’re also accessibility and service standard champions. But I’ve also seen situations where that isn’t the case.

Working on a government service, I’d argue that the PO doesn’t ‘own’ the product, the users do. In fact, that could be the case for some services outside of government.

So what do we call them?

My intention is to open this up to a workshop with the DWP Content Design community, but I’d had some thoughts on the role of the Product Owner or Product Manager.

Are they more of a Product Custodian? Or even a Service Custodian, if they’re responsible for an end-to-end service and not just a product.

Custodian, from the Oxford English dictionary:

A person who has responsibility for taking care of or protecting something.

Obviously, there are other words that could be used instead, but it feels to me this change sets out a clearer responsibility to make sure a service or product meets user needs, rather than a remit to make design or development decisions without considering user needs.

I think there’s a lot to chew on, here, so rather than have a go myself I’ll take it to the community and write a follow-up with what we find.

In the meantime, I’d be interested to hear people’s thoughts in the comments below.

Categories
Weeknotes

A fresh start

A change is as good as a rest, so the saying goes. But I find a decent rest will do the job just as well.

I’m back in work after a relaxing 3 week break driving around Europe with the family, and I’m feeling pretty good about things.

Though I have decided to make a few changes, to follow the resting bit.

The first one was to delete Slack from my phone. I got rid of it before I went away, but I won’t be putting it back on. I’d been using it like another social media platform, and found myself absentmindedly checking it at all hours of the day. Work now starts when I arrive and leave the office – not on the train, or when I’m getting ready to leave the house, or when I’m supposed to be getting the kids ready for bed.

Work-life balance. It’s important, and I need to remember that. Always.

The other thing I’m changing, is, well, this. Blogging.

I’ve not written about my work, mainly because I wasn’t sure what I could say, but also because I thought I was too busy to do it. But it’s all about finding the time. And the time will be found, and I hope people find it useful.

My first weeknote will follow on Friday, so stay tuned.