Weeknotes 17 May 2024
Theme of the week: patterns and flows
Because I work on the intranet at Royal Greenwich, a lot of my work concerns council processes. Specifically, how to make it easy for staff to get them right, ideally first time.
And because behind every process is (usually) a policy or procedure, I’ve recently been working a lot with colleagues who write these documents for the council, within my own team (Digital) and elsewhere (HR and Finance).
My work with these colleagues has mostly looked like…
- Helping them make our policies and procedures easier to read and understand. For example, looking at how they are structured, the kind of language they’re written in, and how we can more quickly and easily get them to meet staff needs. This often seems to involve looking for patterns — things we can replicate to help staff use these documents more easily.
- Thinking about the wider staff journey around this information. For example, how will staff find it? How can we encourage them to read it, or at least make it more difficult for them not to read it? And what will they need to do next once they have read it? This had left me thinking a lot about flows — viewing this content not as a stand-alone resource but as part of a bigger journey where we have more chances to help staff get things right (but also more chances for things to go wrong).
For example, this week we published some new content about our recruitment process. This was based on our recruitment and selection procedure, but repurposed the information into a step-by-step flow. This should make it easier for staff to follow this process correctly.
Both patterns and flows are also very relevant to work the other half of the intranet team is doing, on transactions and forms. Although there are only 4 of us in the team (2 content designers, 1 product designer and a product manager) we always seem to learn a lot from each other and push forward each other’s work.
Other things this week
- Our lead and senior content designers started a regular get-together to talk about how we can best support the rest of our team. This was really supportive and motivating.
- I helped a new content designer write her probation objectives, and it made me think about making more time for my own learning and development (hence this rare weeknote!)
- On Tuesday I held an informal meet-up for content designers and UX writings in Kings Cross, London. I run this with 4 other content folks from the local gov, corporate and charity worlds — it’s super friendly, very supportive and the standard of content geek chat is extremely high. The next content meet-up is on 18 June so please join and share if this is your thing.
What I’m learning from
I recently finished Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows. I’m really curious about systems thinking and enjoyed this introduction a lot.
I feel like it’s made me think in new ways about the roles of information in a large, complex information like a council, but I can’t quite articulate how yet.
It has also given me even more respect for service designers than I already had.
Next week in one (quite long) sentence
Working with Digital colleagues on some new content about mobile phones, laptops and tablets, and preparing for some new work with Finance colleagues to help staff follow our financial processes.
