12. December 24th 2021

Happy Christmas Eve all🎄 These weeknotes are going to be very short, but I didn’t want to fall at the last hurdle of the year and not post anything.

I’m currently writing this weeknotes, tucked up in my sick bed with COVID for the second time in 9 months, a very unexpected and disappointing end to the year, isolating alone until December 30th ☹️ But I’m grateful for my health and that I’ve been able to have two vaccines, as I know I could be feeling much worse than I do right now!

Anyway, a quick recap of my shorter 2 weeks.

Work

We’re continuing to make good progress with our project work, it’s exciting to see the service coming together week on week. We still have some things to find out, gaps in service understanding and user needs. But working in agile means that we can quickly adapt and alter the goals of each sprint so we can continue to work at pace, building the areas of the service we do know well, while we research less understood areas — which is great.

This week we won a really exciting piece of work with Depart of Leveling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC), previously known as MHCLG. This bit of work has come off the back of a project we did with MHCLG on the planning reforms earlier this year. This bit of work was my first full length project at dxw, and it’s exciting to see how well received the work was, and the further project opportunities it’s offered. We were very proud of the work we produced during the project with MHCLG, but all agreed we’d just scratched the surface of potential, and by doing more work together we could produce real impact. So it’s great to see that’s happening.

Meetings

We had our third show and tell with BEIS last week. We had a bigger turn out than the last show and tell, and had some great questions at the end. We’ve made some great progress with user recruitment this week, so had a useful discussion at the end of the show and tell about how to move forward with this.

We also had a research session with BEIS analysts. We’re still trying to uncover and understand the gradual needs of the data sets and data upload, so we can ensure we’re designing the service to meet analysts needs. This was a really useful session, and like many sessions — left us with yet more questions, but we uncovered some useful information and helped us better define our questions for other service users.

People

I had two really great catch ups with Marianne this last week. She was originally on this project part time alongside me, but has slowly moved off onto another piece of work. So it’s nice to catch up with her about the project and get some outside view on it. Lots of the work involved in a Beta is very new to me, so it’s nice to have a sounding board to check my thinking with.

Beyond the role

I’ve been under the weather for a little now, so I’ve not been doing too much recently. But I’ve had two really great training sessions with Samaritans this last fortnights, I can definitely feel more confidence growing in how I handle calls.

What I’m reading — My main COVID symptom right now is a splitting headache, so I’ve not been able to read anything this week. But hoping it’ll ease in the next few days and I can pick up some of the book I’ve had on the go for a while now.

What I’m listening to — I’ve been very much enjoying my Spotify wrapped this week.

What I’m thinking about — I’m thinking about how grateful I am for my health, that thought I’m really not well right now. I would be much worse without it. But also at the same time frustrated and sad that I’ll be missing all of the festive fun haha. Thankfully, I am out of isolation for NYE. So can celebrate the end of 2021 and hope for a better, brighter 2022.✨

I hope you all have a magical Christmas, and a beautiful NYE surrounded by loved ones. See you all in January.

I’m going back to bed now👋