Weeknotes S01 E03 & 04

View of activities conducted in sprint 2

I had some good time off over the past 2 weeks so I’ve combined week notes. As a team, we’re really getting into a good groove and we’re having fun getting stuck in.

Over the past two weeks we’ve been busy with:

• We ran our first engagement sessions with the interest group and it went extremely well. We used a combination of teams, sli.do and open conversation to gather information about how families find information and resources related to special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). We’re looking forward to the next time we meet!
• Together we wrote hypothesis statements based on what we’ve learned so far. The goal is to see where we could start to test things and where we need to learn more. As a multidisciplinary team, we’re all learning different things or related things from different perspectives so it was interesting to see what others are learning. We then took the hypothesis statements and worked in pairs to share 5 with the group. Kay and I spent time grouping them and as a team, we priorities them on Friday afternoon. We’ll take these forward this week.

Kay shared two formats for writing hypothesis statements. The first: if (the idea you to test) + Then (what problem you want to address) + Because (rationale for why that change might happen). The second: What (the thing you learned) + So what (What the significance is) + Now what (What do you want to do about this).

• We’ve started mapping the experiences of families we have been able to speak to. We’re doing this so we can spot patterns and pull out opportunities to improve the Local Offer.
• Continuing to schedule as many interviews with families as we can given that it's the school holidays.
• So much has been done around the UX audit and content related analysis. This has given the team a view of what already exists, how it’s being used and how much work might need to go into content going forward.

Biggest challenges at the moment:

• With school holidays well underway, it’s been difficult to get time with families and professionals within the education space. It’s something we were made aware of at the start of the work and we also understand that it’s been a tough year for everyone in this space so it’s a well-deserved break. We’ve scheduled as many sessions as we can

Things that give us extra ‘go’:

• We do regular share sessions. By extending our standups, we use that extra time if anyone has anything they’d like to share with the team. It’s a quick, easy and safe space to get share and get feedback.

Coming up this week:

• We’re working on our first show & tell :)
• Buckinghamshire Council is chatting to us so we can learn from their experience of improving their Local Offer.