Chris Fleming – Page 2 – Product, policy, data, capability

10 things policy can learn from product

Richmond House

Six months ago I made a career pivot from policy making to product management. The roles require a similar mix of empathy and politics, so I feel I’ve taken to it reasonably well. Alongside a deep understanding of Internet-enabled technologies, a notable difference is how much and how effectively product management makes use of specific tools and methodologies to solve problems.

So here are ten techniques I would bring into a policy team if I went back. If any of the terms don’t make sense, Ben Stevens from the Home Office has posted a handy glossary.

Work in sprints. Choose a time period of 1 or 2 weeks to help give structure to the team’s work. Get everyone together at the start of the sprint and agree the things you are going to focus on completing in that time, remembering that new tasks will come in too. This is called sprint planning.
Hold ‘stand-ups’ over the course of the sprint, and ‘retrospectives’, and ‘show and tells’ at the end of it. Don’t be spooked by the language. These are just meetings, so not exactly an alien concept to policy makers. There’s no need for me to repeat better guidance elsewhere on this, except to endorse how useful they are as an ensemble.
Get a wall. Every team needs a wall. I managed a major house renovation last year and even had a wall (this is not a joke). At its simplest this is expressing a task on a Post-It note, fixing it to a nice flat surface that people can gather around, and moving the tasks through columns labelled ‘doing next’, ‘doing now’, and ‘done’. Do this, and then feel the energy and sense of achievement coursing through the team as they deposit card after card in the done column at each stand-up.
Create genuinely multidisciplinary teams. I spent some time shadowing my mentor who works on NHS.UK Alpha a few weeks ago. It’s a full-blown agile team, replete with product manager, delivery manger, content writers, designers, and developers. Having such expertise around a table enabled them to do magical things, like designing the key features of a GP look-up service, in record time. My experience of policy is usually hierarchical group of something akin to project managers. Other experts tend to be in a box somewhere, wheeled out for special occasions. It also now seems amazing to me that design thinking in policy is still seen as the cutting edge while it’s de rigeur in digital.
Make it someone’s explicit responsibility to knit the team. The mantra goes, “the unit of delivery is the team”, and commensurate effort is placed in getting that team working brilliantly together. My experience working in policy teams is that if they are working great, then great. But if they are not, the response is usually a shrug and sporadic suggestions for ‘more social events’. Digital methodology encourages constant communication between the team using stand-ups. It celebrates successes through show+tells, and does a thorough job of learning from failures through retrospectives. The result is a team completely aligned around an objective, with everyone feeling they are part of something important, and fantastic pace of delivery. Tasks fall to the team not individuals. This reduces risk of single point of failure.
Separate responsibility for day-to-day delivery with big picture and vision. In digital there are overlapping and complementary roles called product manager and delivery manager. The former focusses on macro issues: vision, roadmap, stakeholder management. The other focusses on micro issues: unblocking the obstacles the team faces day-to-day, and doing the team coaching I describe above. This structure recognises something important about our minds being poor at doing two things at the same time. It’s very effective.
Try out some new collaborative tools. Digital teams more naturally have their fingers on the pulse of internet-enabled tools to facilitate team communication, prioritisation, or collaboration. I know IT systems can create barriers to this; but in an age where everyone has a smart phone it’s not hard to find workarounds. If you had to pick any, for me it is Slack. There’s a bit of a backlash against Slack at the moment (Slacklash?), but frankly I’m still at the crest of the wave of appreciation that sees how much more efficient than email is at enabling team interaction.
Prioritise properly. Product recognises you can’t do everything, so have a plethora of techniques for deciding what comes next. Do a few things well rather than lots of things mediocrely, and be rigorous in your approach to choosing which those things should be.
Clap more. Digital teams religiously clap their teammate’s or others’ presentations. This is not only courteous, but sends the presenter away with those few extra endorphins that make it all seem worth it.
Be agile. Note the small ‘a’. My simplest interpretation of this is understanding that for almost everything, your first answer could well be wrong. Doing something and then testing it is better than trying to get it perfect first time. As long as it is labelled as such, it is fine to say something is a prototype or early version and will be iterated, improved, or even binned.

None of these suggestions are especially complicated. But they can be tough to implement in teams unfamiliar with the language and culture. Digital teams should help with this where they can, as forming good habits should not solely be the preserve of digital. They should be for everyone.

I’d be delighted to give my novice advice to any policy makers, so do get in touch if it would help. Hat tips to Lisa, Matt, and Kylie for product coaching, andBenji for delivery management advice.

An agile intranet

We designed our intranet to be continuously improved, and over recent weeks have been doing just that. Since the intranet’s launch last year we have gathered data and done extensive research to deepen our insights into our users’ behaviour. This is enabling us to flex our product to meet our users’ changing needs – in line with digital best practice.

In our most recent development sprint, we focussed on the homepage. The intranet homepage is the first thing most people in the department see when they log on in the morning, so it’s not surprising that 99.9% of user journeys begin there. That’s not true of all websites – GOV.UK pages are often reached via a search engine – but our default makes the homepage a prime piece of digital real estate. It deserves excellent design and only the most important content or features.

From looking at site traffic we could see the content users visited most over the past year. For instance: guidance on performance management, expenses claims, booking video conferencing, and a few specific forms. Over the last month or so, content about the DH2020 change programme has also been very popular.

This data informed our qualitative research. We interviewed twenty-one individuals, asking them about their use of the intranet. We also observed them using the homepage to try and perform particular tasks. As well as interviews, we ran card sorting exercises and a co-design workshop where users drew sketches of their ideal homepages, or voted on features they liked from other government intranets. The range of ideas generated ranged from the pragmatic to the extravagant. But the discussion was invaluable in helping our suppliers understand the needs of DH staff. Over two weeks our experts translated those insights into some of the changes you can now see:

Bringing in common design patterns by integrating the menu, search and login into the header to help users find them
Developing prominent areas for links to popular services and pages; these are customisable by our content team so can change as needs change
Introducing a campaign box to highlight the most important ‘need-to-know’ information of the moment
Increasing the number of news stories further down the page; as the large number of users felt the stories dropped off the homepage too quickly
Retaining a clean design that users responded to well, but binning the bits that users did not need or want anymore

Communicating via Slack across several UK locations, the team deployed the changes early last Tuesday morning. Thanks to the brilliant work of the developers we encountered almost no bugs, and by the time we got into the office some fantastic feedback had started to come in.

Launching is the start of a process, not the end. We’re moving straight into more user testing, including those using assistive technologies, to ensure our changes are performing as we want.

An ‘agile intranet’ is something the department should be proud of. Internal services and tools are rarely built in this way. It has only been possible for us to effect improvements to this product quickly, cheaply, and securely thanks to our predecessors. They left us a site built on open source software, to open standards, with no contract lock-in, and with the precedent set for relentless focus on user needs. Long may that continue.

Originally posted to Digital Health Blog.

How to do user research on a shoestring

User research is the bedrock of digital transformation, and without it we have no hope of developing great products and services. Ideally your team has a dedicated user researcher, you can access laboratory facilities when you want, and you have a whole range of tools and techniques at your disposal. When the Department of Health first redeveloped its intranet last year, the new site was built on extensive user research.

We are now undertaking further development to ensure the intranet continuously improves, but are more resource constrained than for last year’s overhaul. Over the last couple of weeks I have discovered that lack of budget needn’t be a blocker. Using so-called guerilla techniques, you can get invaluable insights on a shoestring budget.

We have been thinking about how to meet our primary goal for the intranet, that users can find everything they need and access the services they want. Unpacking this requires us to understand: what the most popular information or services are, how easy they are to find, and whether the content meets the specific need. Following a recommendation from a developer on our project I’ve been reading Undercover UX, a guide to user experience design on a budget. That, along with expert advice and help from the team, gave us enough to get started.

Brainstorm. First we sat down as a team to write out as many needs as we could think of, thinking as broadly as possible. This exercise needn’t take long, and required no more than sticky notes, pens and a wall. As employees of the department, the team are all users too.
Validate and prioritise. Next we cross-referenced our hypothesised needs against search data and site traffic. Some interesting patterns were revealed, for instance the way the term ‘hospitality’ drops out of search data as spending controls were brought in, or that many users use in-site search to try and find BBC News. Some of the needs were sufficiently well-understood to be specific, like finding the wifi password for the building, while others were vague and will require more work. For instance searches for ‘performance management’ are very frequent but do not reveal precisely what information is sought. You can view our list of around twenty top needs here. I’d be a little surprised if they were radically different to every other intranet in the world, but if you disagree let me know.
Set up a “pop-up” user research lab. We then conducted a series of 1-1 interviews with users, while an observer took notes. To set up the lab, we found a space in the office, developed a script around a few key tasks that we wanted to observe the users performing, and recorded the sessions using Quicktime screen record which is installed as standard on a Mac. It’s the first time I’ve done this, and watching a user try to complete a task only to hear them exclaim of a page “I just have no idea what this is telling me” is both chastening and highly motivating.

Over the course of a morning we got conclusive evidence on content that was or wasn’t meeting needs, as well as insights into users’ search and navigation habits.

I realise the process described above is not perfect, but it is important not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. When users are on your doorstep, there really is no excuse not to understand their needs.

Originally published on the Department of Health digital team’s blog.

Continually improving our intranet

No digital product is ever perfect or finished. Even a site that is 90% cheaper than its predecessor, and boasts a user satisfaction reaching post-launch heights of 80%. My challenge as the new product manager for the Department of Health’s intranet is to build on that daunting baseline, and carry on the great work of my predecessor, Kylie Mulholland. Revisiting the lessons learned from the intranet’s first development seemed a good place to start.

Over the summer we ran a discovery phase to understand how people were responding to the new site. We found that overall, users much preferred the new product to what came before. However, they would still like to find things more easily through either search or navigation, particularly the things that help them do their job. These findings were borne out by analytics data: video conferencing arrangements consistently appear among the site’s top search queries. The discovery also revealed unmet needs on the editorial side, where content owners and editors wanted a more streamlined publication process.

Last week we brought together a multidisciplinary agile team to begin a new period of development. We work in several organisations and multiple locations; Whitehall, Old Street, and as far as Atlanta, Georgia, so online tools like Slack, Basecamp, and Talky are helping to keep us connected with each other and our users.

Stubborn on vision; flexible on details

Our first step was to draft a set of high level goals for this phase of development, which support our overall vision of making the DH intranet the best in government. As ever, we welcome feedback.

Users can find everything they need and access the services they want
The intranet is accurate and trusted
The intranet is easy and quick to update
The intranet encourages user engagement
The intranet meets the Digital by Default Service Standard

Borrowing a method from the Government Digital Service, we then built a prototype roadmap. This exercise forced us to think about what we would have to learn or prove if we wanted to achieve our goals. For instance, to show that “users can find everything they need”, we need to first find out what users are looking for, and then show, using data, that our improvements actually do help users find those things more easily.

We also identified and prioritised the big themes emerging from the discovery and mapped them against a rough timeline of development sprints. These included search and navigation, events, content management, and sign-in.

Finally, we used the roadmap to map out: our users, the wider ‘system of systems’ that support the intranet, our most important stakeholders, our assumptions, and any dependencies. This helped surface challenging questions early on. Our prototype roadmap is on display in Richmond House and will help us communicate to stakeholders what we are doing, why, and broadly when.

Our first sprint

Before we get going on new features, the team are first reviewing and cleaning the code base, fixing bugs along the way, and by the end of the week we’ll have it back in GitHub. Making things open makes them better and from next week any organisation can take our code and ideas and start to build their own intranet sites, according to their own users’ needs.

I’ve learned a lot in my first weeks in product management. It has not taken long to experience the tension between user needs (what evidence suggests end users of the product want to see) and business needs (what other stakeholders would like their users to see). This forces you to ask some pretty fundamental and philosophical questions about the real purpose of the ‘thing’. I’ve also learnt that getting the right policy, process, and governance around the product may be at least as important as the product itself. Finally, I’ve sensed that many digital folk think that intranets are the devil’s work! It’s our job to prove them wrong.

Originally published on the Department of Health digital team’s blog.