Meetups and mentoring: Weeknotes s02e08

Chris T
Web of Weeknotes
Published in
3 min readSep 11, 2018

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3 Sep 18–7 Sep 18

Things that happened this week

Went to a DWP meetup

My buddy Chris and the indomitable Simon Wilson invited me and Michael Owen up to a DWP design examples meetup, where DWP designers get together and share examples of similar work.

We went to talk about the work that we (well, mostly Mike) have done on the Home Office Design System. We talked frankly about some of the mistakes we made and the amount of effort required to continually keep people engaged but also about how it’s made design easier and quicker.

Interestingly, DWP recently started advertising for staff for their own design systems team which I think is a great move. Why do departments need their own design systems team when there’s a GDS one, you might ask? For me, the main thing is designing at scale is a problem that individual departments need to take responsibility for. A design system is as much about the culture and practices of an organisation, as much as about the actual guidance itself and therefore having a team to shape this is a great move. Also, like the Home Office, DWP spends an enormous amount of its time designing systems for staff, which the GDS guidance does not focus on (that’s not a criticism of the team by the way — they’re a lovely bunch, it’s just not their focus or remit at the moment). It’s up to government departments to take on the responsibility of making internal services as good as the effort we put onto public facing ones and I think this will help that.

We made some decisions about alphas for our decision making project

For our decision making project we spent some time narrowing down our list of potential alphas. Mr Bootle returning from his leave was a good opportunity to reflect and check our thinking and the team spent some time in pairs reviewing and revising the proposed ideas and associated hypotheses.

Feels now that we have a good list and an idea of where to start. Next week we’re going to do an end of discovery show and tell and get started. Exciting!

Went on some mentoring training

We have an amazing internship programme in the Home Office and are just about to take on this years cohort (which I believe is the largest so far).

As part of this, we also provide some mentoring training for people who take on interns within their delivery teams. This was really well attended and I liked how it gave a background on how our internships are structured, how to give feedback and how mentors can plan their placements to ensure interns get the most out of their time with us. It’s not talked about enough, but I like how the focus is always on the intern learning, not about what we as an organisation get out of it.

Other things

This was a weird thing that happened whilst waiting for the train to the DWP Leeds meetup.

It’s nice to have things to look forward to so me and my wife booked a holiday to Greece for October. I think our pale skin and bad reaction to extreme heat will welcome the more reasonable climate expected at that time of the year.

Seem to be on a bit of a nostalgia kick recently and have been rewatching old movies. Throughout the last couple of weeks (mostly because I was overnight for work a lot) I saw Predator, Terminator, Robocop, Total Recall and attempted to watch Commando again but it’s not stood the test of time well and is quite frankly a bit rubbish.

I also started the Digital Transformation at Scale book which so far has been a pleasant, swift read.

More next week!

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