Weeknote 3, for 22–26 Feb
Things I’m happy about
We’re growing
This week we welcomed a new lead content designer based in Manchester. I’m so happy to have Rose at DfE. For the first time ever, DfE has a Head of Content Design and a Lead Content Designer! That’s a big step forward in developing the profession here. We’re about 18 months behind some of the other professions, but we’ve got lots of great plans.
Our next steps are to recruit our next layer of content designers, and we now have an advert up for 3 Senior Content Designers (G7). Ignore the fact that it only says 1 role, there are 3, and that will be updated soon. These roles are in Early Years, Remote Education and Teacher Services, so all super interesting digital services at different stages of development that are helping teachers and learners. I’d be happy to have an informal chat with anyone interested in these roles.
More collaboration between content design and service design
Sam McLeod, our Lead Service Designer, and her colleague Rachel Rolston were superstars this week at Content Design community. I’d invited them because our community capabilities survey flagged that the relationship between content design and service design is one that needs nurturing.
It was really interesting to see the overlaps in what we do — many times I felt we could replace ‘service’ with ‘content’ and the statements would still be true. And I guess we just need to lean in to that rather than feel we’re stepping on toes or set up barriers.
They talked us through what service design was all about, linked us to a useful Home Office blogpost about service design in the organisation, and ran an interactive workshop with us on how we could all work better together.
Things that I learned
Words and mapping
To use the analogy structure I so fondly remember from school, ‘Content design is to words what service design is to mapping.’ (Therefore, NOT ALL ABOUT!) As we heard from the service designers at our content design community this week, their major pet peeve is when they’re reduced to mapping. I guess the key is never to reduce a whole discipline to one thing.
Things I read that I liked
PublicDigital tweeted an excellent guide on the levers teams can use to effect change in government. It resonated strongly, and was one I shared with the other Heads of Profession and others in Digital Delivery.
Things I’m doing next week
1 Services Week! So much good stuff. Sign up for some things! I can’t do everything, but I’ve reserved Wednesday afternoon’s content design and user research meet-up.
2 Developing the content design pipeline. We’re starting to recruit, which is fabulous, but there’s more to do to start people off at associate level, or through apprenticeships, or even through other routes (customer service? digital comms?)
3The regular cross-government Heads of Content get-together. I love this meeting — lots of fabulous insight from other talented folk.
