Ways of working
✅ Jo Roach’s post Organisational design and working in cross-functional teams is superb. Anyone who is working to improve efficiency and effectiveness by shifting colleagues into teams and out of ‘departments’ or ‘directorates’ should save and share this. Point to note: “Organising people into cross-functional teams can have the unintended consequence of destabilising senior leaders who find discomfort in distributed power.” Useful point: remind leaders how their expertise adds value to a new structure. Great to have benefits and challenges in one well-explained, succinct post.
🏴 Our approach to Welsh language content and testing by content designer Nia Campbell is a must-read for anyone delivering multi-language public services. Nia explains how – as they move towards public beta – her Modernising Lasting Powers of Attorney team has been working on incorporating Welsh language content and testing it to ensure it meets the needs of Welsh speakers. We used to talk a lot about why content designers need to be involved early on, and arguably so do translators. Notable challenges: ensuring translations are accurate and not super formal, maintaining consistency between English and Welsh versions, and managing updates in both languages simultaneously. Language is so intricate and nuanced. Hats off to translators and content designers and subject matter experts who are trio-editing to meet user needs and not relying solely on Google Translate.
📍 Love the way the UK’s Prison and Probation Service has created this mini site to show all the services it delivers in prisons. Good breakdown of goals and outcomes, plus useful infographics to show which stages each service covers from moving into prison to the sentence being served. Frankie Roberto has been doing something similar: a map of the government digital services teachers might use, from considering teaching through to retirement. His intention? For teams to better understand where their service fits within a wider digital landscape, and also to see where there might be opportunities to better join services up.
👍🏿 Bookmark and revisit: product expert Matt Jukes has collated a bunch of useful stuff on roadmaps including How to create them, by Roman Pichle; A 10 box template, by John Cutler, and Why you need a ‘never’ segment as well as ‘now’, ‘next’ and ‘later’, by John Chadfield. The latter reminded me of PD’s Matt’s post on the same topic.
⏰ Matt Webb, inventor of the famous AI clock (Kickstarter here) created this handy framework that lets organisations explore if and how AI might help them. The ‘strategic pathfinding’ approach is particularly useful for organisations that are medium sized, technical, but not ‘tech’ companies.
👀 Finally, our friends Content Design London are releasing a new edition of their seminal book next month. |