PI planning and prototyping

A double weeknote starting 25 November 2024.

I didn't do a work weeknote last week, so this post covers the whole 2 week sprint.

PI (Program Increment) planning

I spent 2 days in London at the beginning of the sprint for PI planning. It's the first time I've attended PI planning, in the past I've worked on teams that have done it, but this is the first time I've been invited.

Basically it was an opportunity for all the engineers, delivery managers and architects to get together and plan the next 5 sprints of work. There are multiple teams with cross dependencies, working together on a big program of work.

Overall I thought it was a really well organised and worthwhile event.

My only criticism is that us UCD (user-centered design) folks weren't really invited to plan our work alongside all the technical work. I think basically there is a belief floating around that UCD work should be 3 months ahead of technical delivery, so in theory there should be no immediate dependencies on us.

In practice, I don't think being that far ahead is achievable or even a good idea. It separates UCD too much from delivery and contributes to the idea that UCD can act as a consultancy that dips in and out, rather than a key part of the delivery team.

I like the idea of doing "just enough" UCD work to unblock delivery. But you need someone with enough seniority who knows how much effort is actually required to plan that work in the first place.

Starting a new prototype

I also started to build a new prototype for a team I'm joining.

The service is already in live, and even though at first glance the digital parts of it appear to be following the GOV.UK design system, on closer inspection the design patterns are quite idiosyncratic.

But, I've heard it works well for the task the users are trying to achieve. I'm looking forward to doing some observations of people using it "as is" before jumping to too many conclusions.

We're being asked to add some new features that should enable a more efficient service, and things have been quite strictly scoped, so it'll be interesting to see how much general improvement we can make without upsetting things.

Ideally we can build up trust over a few sprints. Then I'm hoping we'll have an opportunity to link up some disparate bits of work, and turn it into a longer term plan to do some bigger improvements. Looking into how to measure the improvements and how they affect efficiency will be key.

For now, I'm trying to resist the urge to build the prototype with high quality code. So that I can iterate quickly, and avoid getting drawn into fixing the out of scope issues.

Removing Twitter

I've removed mention of Twitter from my homepage. I need to get round to deactivating my account too.

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