Quick iteration, big impact
What do you need to make the work, work?
As a team, we recently had the opportunity to work together on a piece of work dedicated to encouraging residents within Essex to self-isolate if they have tested positive, been in contact or live with someone who has tested positive or if they themselves experience symptoms of covid.
Our local test and trace team manage outbreaks within a variety of settings as well as individuals who have been identified by the national test and trace team.
In the middle of a pandemic, everything changes and moves so fast that it’s difficult for the work to keep up.
A few things we found that made the way we work, just work:
- Our stakeholders provided a brief overview of what we needed to achieve and trusted the team to take ownership of it. They had connected us with the right people to source information from, all of which were extremely helpful and forthcoming. It was in turn, our responsibility to respect their schedules and use the time with them effectively — we were sure to provide updates and highlight any blockers via short emails and quick 20–30min calls.
- We work agile! Rather than the typical “I do my piece and then you do yours”, we worked very closely and iterated almost daily as we learned new things. Making use of MS Teams chat was crucial as we could share information and adjust very quickly.
- Follow the whole journey, not just the pieces you control. The role of the webpage that holds self-isolation information is to provide guidance and signpost residents to support available for them throughout their self-isolation period. We spent some time following the resident journey from how they might be made aware of the support information through to how they might make use of those support services so that as a council, we are able to meaningfully signpost residents. There’s really no point sending a resident down a path that isn’t meaningful. When engaging with these services we don’t control we found people who really care about residents and wanted to hear what we had found in order to make changes.
- Working within a multidisciplinary team can be tricky, especially when there are new team members. We have a new role within the team — Sarah is our first interaction designer. It took us some time to figure out what our roles but we found that openly communicating where the overlaps are helped us figure out how best to support each other.
The way we worked throughout this piece had a big impact on:
- Our immediate team — we now have a better understanding of how our professions complement each other.
- Residents — Quick iterations and implementation as well as testing our assumptions meant that we were able to get self-isolation information out to residents quicker.
- The organisation — We’ve found that we can make an impact outside of the immediate services we control.
Read more about it on our team blog. https://servicetransformation.blog.essex.gov.uk/
We’re always looking for new talent to join the team!
https://www.linkedin.com/company/essex-county-council/jobs/
