The unit of delivery is the team
‘Ello.
This is our first weeknote about working on the alpha phase of Extract. It’s a regular, weekly communication of what we’ve done, what we’re thinking about, ideas, decisions, scrappy thoughts, and stories about our work designing and testing Extract. It’s also how we can remember what we’ve done. Written for us, but shared with you.
This week’s note comes from the people on the team working at Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG). In future weeks, we’ll feature work from the Incubator for AI (i.AI) too.
We’ve written about Extract and where it came from on the MHCLG Digital blog, if you’re not familiar with it. But since you’re here, we’ll presume you know what it’s about.
So, what did we get up to this week?
Forming as a unit
As a wise man once said (and another man once drew), ‘the unit of delivery is the team’. This week we kicked off the alpha, held our first planning session, and started looking at risky assumptions. New people joining the team has meant we can get started, so we’ve focused on forming as a unit.
Guiding principles
In the kick-off, Steve shared some principles to guide us through the alpha. The alpha phase is an opportunity to try out different solutions to the problem you’ve identified, finding out what works for users (and what doesn’t). To help create variety, we’ll start small, learn fast and iterate towards the design that meets users’ needs.
We looked at the principles from Lean UX too, as the alpha phase is all about velocity of learning, not velocity of delivery. The Lean UX principles are:
- Moving from doubt to certainty
- Outcomes, not output
- Removing waste
- Shared understanding
- No rock stars, gurus, or ninjas
- Permission to fail
Progress is better than perfection
After the kick-off, Jenny and Chanelle lead our first planning session. As we’re still waiting for key roles to join the team, the purpose was to get started on preparatory tasks and start planning ahead for testing with local planning authorities down the line.
It was also an opportunity to test out a basic delivery model and change aspects of it now (rather than waiting for a retro). We refined how we do estimation, and we thought about how best to frame the units of work. Instead of trying to craft the perfect delivery model on paper, we dived right in and gave it a go. Progress is better than perfection.
Steve and Gordon also chatted about how we might best keep i.AI’s progress aligned with MHCLG’s sprints. As i.AI’s work is experimental, rooted in the practices of continuous improvement, estimations don’t work too well. They’re going to use hill charts to show progress instead.
Mapping out what we know…and what we don’t know
On Friday, Fabia lead a workshop to map out our assumptions about Extract, joined by Hannah (our new frontend developer), Jenny, and Steve.
Calling out your assumptions is an essential part of any test & learn approach. Testing our assumptions allows us to find out whether we’re right or wrong, creating a feedback loop. If we’re wrong, we can change our minds, change the designs and ensure the solution we deliver works for users. If we’re right, we crack on.
Fabia asked some questions which helped us list out everything we thought we knew:
- Who are the users?
- Who won’t be a user?
- How technical are they?
- What are their current methods [for extracting data from documents]?
- How do they edit shapes on a map?
- What technologies are they using?
- What are the inputs?
- What are the outputs?
- Why are they using it?
- What happens after?
We wrote up what we know so far, from speaking to local planning authorities. Then we placed those on a scale of known to unknown: which facts we’re confident in, which assumptions we need more evidence to rely on.
There’s some more work to do on that next week, and once we’ve onboarded a user researcher, we’ll start prioritising what we need to learn first and form a research plan.
On to the next one
All in all, a pretty good first week. The best way to build up steam is to light the stove, and sooner rather than later we’ll be chugging along.
Subscribe to the feed if you’d like to follow along, or check back here next week.
Ciao!